A stray dog becoming a bureaucrat is somehow the least absurd part.
Heart of a Dog
A surgeon gives a Moscow stray a human body, then finds his experiment has become an enthusiastic Soviet functionary.
113g
Weighs the same as Top Ramen + Bandana
- Ultralight
- Carries You Away
- Fiction
Mikhail Bulgakov wrote Heart of a Dog in 1925, and the Soviets found it so dangerous it wasn't published in his own country until 1987, decades after his death. In 1920s Moscow, a brilliant, eccentric scientist implants a human pituitary gland into a stray dog, turning him into a vulgar, drunken, communist bureaucrat. It is a wild, hilarious, and deeply cynical farce about human nature and the hubris of trying to force evolution. 100 pages of pure, chaotic energy that reads like a sprint.
Field notes
Bulgakov had trained as a physician, and his grotesque experiment drew on a genuine scientific craze. In the 1920s, surgeons were transplanting animal glands into humans in pursuit of rejuvenation, while Soviet geneticists debated whether human nature could be improved. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were promising to create a New Soviet Man through revolutionary social transformation. Bulgakov brought these ambitions together in Professor Preobrazhensky's operating room. The satire cuts in two directions: the scientist believes he can remake nature, while the revolutionaries believe they can remake society. Neither has much patience for the inconvenient creature produced by the experiment.