Book Reviews

HEART OF A DOG

by Mikhail Bulgakov

Written in Moscow in early 1925, Bulgakov's absurd satire Heart of a Dog was suppressed in Russia after its initial publication until 1987. The story concerns an elderly professor of medicine (Bulgakov himself was a physician) named Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky and his attempts at "rejuvenation" ... which seem to be a sort of primitive method for increased sexual appetite, an early Viagra. It's vague, however, since the majority of the novel is narrated from the prospective of Sharik, a mongrel dog the professor discovers wandering the wintery streets of Moscow.

Sharik comes to live in the professor's spacious seven-room apartment, fattening up and generally living the high life. He's not sure why, but he does his best to live up to his new master's expectations, despite a few mishaps and mischief-- he is, after all, still a street dog. Suddenly, everything changes when the professor's assistant, Dr. Bormenthal, arrives with fresh body parts from a recently deceased human corpse. The dog is drugged, and a chapter of grisly medical operation replaces his testes and certain brain glands with human parts. Here the narration shifts, and diary entries describe Sharik's marvelously rapid transformation into Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, a vile little man whose only ambition is to throttle cats for the Soviet government.

Except for a few readers well-versed in Russian history and social politics, the satire will come across bluntly and with spurts of strange contradiction. What does it mean that Sharik cannot overcome his past as a dog? Why does Professor Preobrazhensky advocate positive reinforcement as opposed to tyrannical discipline, only to reverse his position at the end? What are the deeper meanings of the fights between the professor and the newly appointed housing committee of proletariat bureaucrats?

Seems like a weighty list of questions, to be sure, but this book is still a joy for its humor and the madcap action of its plot. Imagine Frankenstein, only instead of a lumbering brute, the monster turns out to be a childish and vulgar slob who curses and urinates and tries to get it on with the cook. The political meanings may be lost on modern American readers, but the medical satire cuts through in quite a timely manner. Consider this lament by the professor:

Tell me, please, why it is necessary to manufacture ... artificially when any peasant woman can produce them at any time? ... Doctor, the human race takes care of this by itself, and every year, in the course of its evolution, it creates dozens of outstanding geniuses who adorn the earth, stubbornly selecting them out of the mass of scum ... my discovery, may it be damned ... isn't worth a rap ... Theoretically it is interesting, yes. The physiologists will be ecstatic. Moscow will go wild. But practically? Whom do we see before us?

A strain of elitism certainly taints the professor's arguments, but consider the meaning when applied to cloning-- what if we cloned a human, and he turned out to be an asshole? Aren't we perfectly capable of creating assholes the old-fashioned way? Doesn't the same go for geniuses? Why, he asks, eliminate sex from the equation? After all, as Sharik certainly demonstrates in the novel, sex is fun enough to be worth a whole lot of trouble.

I won't ruin the end-- the book is only 120 pages after all; you can discover the conclusion yourself in an afternoon-- but suffice to say that science once again only makes discoveries which complicate and degrade the value of life, and which would best be reversed before the whole world goes rabid. B --Chris J. Magyar