Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $11.31 You Save: $2.69 (19%) Availability: Usually ships in 1 to 3 months Buy Used: from $1.11 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Heart of a Dog
Book Review: Heart of a Russian
Summary: 5 Stars
Grab onto this novel with two fists, and hold on tight. "Heart of a Dog" is a biting satire, at once mocking Russian medicine, the next the Bolshevik party. This novel is a perfect primer into the mind of Bulgakov, making his masterpeice, "Master and Margarita," all the better. If you have any interest in satire, or absurd humor, "Heart of a Dog," is a gem.Book Review: I would think it loses a lot in translation...
Summary: 5 Stars
...or maybe, it's just the social difference. But this wonderful, biting, angry satire is really not... that... funny. Or rather, it is, but in a way that laughing at yourself can be. Not hillarious, not easy, not light, but with full realization of the horror that is going on. To begin with, Sharik the Dog is a wonderful, delightful animal. A real stray, the best of them--ready to serve and protect out of gratitude. Having been beaten, scalded, starved... imagine his joy when a nice-looking older gentleman takes him in, feeds him, bandages his scalded side. The poor thing is absolutely gratified. And really, just like Prof. Preobrazhensky says, Sharik is a very, very good dog.
So how does a very, very good dog turns into an absolute horror of a human? Whoever said that Sharikov the man is semi-developed is just wrong--he is fully developed, and herein lies the nightmare. He walks. Talks. Apparently induces a young woman to have sex with him, having promised her marriage and lied that the surgical scar on his forehead is left from the Civil War. He works in the Oblava (the office dealing with the catching, killing and using as fur of the stray cats), but not so much out of necessity, rather because it answers his heart of a dog.
Unfortunately, his hatred of cats is the only thing left from the adorable stray (who thought that he was unusually handsome and his granmother must have sinned with a Newfoundland). In all else, from his ridiculous, uneducated choice of a name, to the way he talks, to the lack of manners, to the Communist literature he reads, to his statements that the only way to solve the current situation is to "divide everything between those who have and those who have not"--in all of it, he is a quintessential proletariat man (the brain that was put into the dog came from a former alcoholic and prison inmate, Klim Chugunkin). The popular slogan of that era was Lenin's (I think) phrase that under the Soviet rule, a "kitchenmaid will rule the country". Well, it took us some seventy years to realize that a kitchenmaid shouldn't rule anything but a kitchen... Bulgakov saw it much earlier. His Sharikov is a terrifying portrait of what a member of lumpen-proletariat--a man without sense or education, common and base--becomes when he comes into relative power (at least over cats). To Russians, the image of Sharikov cannot be all that funny--after all, the inception of their state--their country, their life, their dark past--was intertwined inextricably with people like the late Klim Chugunkin (the last name means "wrought-iron"), aka P.P. Sharikov.
The other characters in the book--the old Professor Preobrazhensky and the galant, gentlemanly young Dr. Bormental--are both of a disappearing bread. After the Revolution, People with Preobrazhensky's sensibilities came face to face with the necessity to leave their country. Preobrazhensky, however, a distinguished man of science, an experimental biologist, highly respected--is pretending that it is possible to have the life he had had prior to the Revolution. He has a cook and a maid, and an apartment of seven rooms (a considerable luxury)--all of which he needs: he operates in one, sees patients in another, sleeps in the third one, etc, etc. Already early in the book, he is facing an encroachment upon his property: the Building Committee is finding it "inequitable" that one man can take up seven whole rooms! In the book, Preobrazhensky simply throws them out ("I don't care how many rooms Isadora Duncan has! She can eat in the bedroom and slaughter rabbits in the dining-room!"): he has connections, he can afford to do so. Would he be able to do so in real life? God knows. It seems that Preobrazhensky's experiment strips him of all his comfort by bringing him face-to-face with the Revolution--he can no longer hide from seeing who has the power in his country: its personification is right there, at his very table, stinking of dead cats. By the end of the book, it is almost transparent that the Professor will leave Russia. As to Dr. Bormental, so steeped in the notions of honor, respect, decency--men like him were often doomed, in the great purges that had happened already and were to come in the 1930s.
The book ends well--for the time being. The effects of the operation are reversed, and when Sharikov's friends, the House Committee, bring by the police, claiming that Preobrazhensky had murdered Sharikov, the Professor is able to produce him, still walking on hind legs, but already barely talking. The book concludes with Sharik the Dog thinking about how lucky he is to have found such a benefactor. I think that to fully appreciate the book, one must understand the bitterness with which its humor is suffused. It is funny, of course, but it is not light, by any means. Rather, it is poignant and sad.
Book Review: Just a few clarifying points
Summary: 5 Stars
From a native Russian speaker, just a few remarks which hopefully will help you understand the book better:1. Professor Preobrazhensky is modeled on professor Pavlov (of the salivating dogs fame), who himself is well known for a few remarks such as "for the kind of experiment the Communists are conducting on Russia I wouldn't sacrifice even a frog" and "a revolution is not an excuse for being 20 minutes late for work" (to a lab assistant who got caught in street shooting).
2. The book lashes out - VIOLENTLY - at working class, at lumpenproletariat (and in Soviet Russia these two terms were dangerously close for much of the 20th century). Please remember that when you're reading about Sharikov - the caricature of a heavily-drinking, crude Soviet worker (if you've ever spent time in small industrial towns in Russia, you'll be able to understand this book easily)
3. Sharik is a cliche nickname for dogs in Russia (something like Spot). Sharikov is akin to a dog taking the last name Spotter for himself.
4. Polygraph Polygraphovich sounds as ridiculous in English as it does in Russian :)
Some of my anglophone friends had problems with this 1925 book. Just trying to be helpful...
Book Review: Macabre Polemic Falls Short
Summary: 4 Stars
Mikhail Bulgakov scores points for bravery in this scalding, Soviet-era diatribe against totalitarian idealism. Comparing the synthetic Russian comrade--a hybrid of human bits and 20th century experimentation--with a lowly cur from the sidewalks of Moscow makes a vivid statement. That is, especially when the author risks the gulag for writing it. This, plus the inventiveness of the story, elevates Heart of the Dog above the quotidian.
But I found this piece rife with problems, starting with the first-person perspective of Sharik, a dog whose thoughts dwell on the base side of canine pleasures: tearing the life out of a cat or "torturing a grouse head." And this proclivity is mirrored in the humanity around him. Running amok in a climate where "Neither man nor animal can be influenced by anything but suggestion," everything outside the furniture, bones, knives and glass jars is an automaton and savage in Bulgakov's communist nightmare.
I had a laugh here and there, and there's a glimmer of hope, however sarcastic, offered in "the Heavenly Kingdom," but right through its cruel ending, the book has a misanthropic feel to it, and readers looking for a high-spirited roast might look elsewhere. It's not the gore and violence itself, because better writers--Dostoevsky immediately comes to mind--have demonstrated that genuine humor and darkness can coexist with devastating effect. Instead, it's the insanity of the situation combined with Bulgakov's cynicism, a combination that demotes Heart of a Dog from an outpouring of living, breathing characters to a mere statement.
A powerful one, to be sure, but one that rings hollow to me.
Book Review: Open to many interpretations ...
Summary: 5 Stars
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) endured the difficult experience of having to live under the pressure of censorship, but has nonetheless left some interesting books that allow us to know what he thought about the process that has taking place in the newborn Soviet Russia. "Heart of a dog" is one of those books. It was written by Bulgakov in 1925, but it wasn`t published in Soviet Russia until 1987, due to the fact that it can easily be interpreted as a critical satire regarding the URSS.
"Heart of a dog" is the story of a stray dog, Sharik, that hasn`t led an easy life. He lives in the streets of Moscow, and eats what he can, when he can. However, one day a doctor gives him food and takes him to his home. Sharik believes that his fate has changed, but he doesn`t know that the doctor has rather strange intentions...
The doctor wants to perform an experiment on Sharik, in order to learn what would happen if some human organs were transplanted to a dog. The doctor performs the operation, implanting in Sharik the pituitary gland and the testicles of a dead criminal. Against all odds, Sharik survives the operation, and from that moment on begins an extraordinary transformation, that makes him more and more human.
But what kind of human is he?. Sharik can talk, and asks everybody to call him first "Mr. Sharikov", and afterwards "Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov". He also walks like a human being, and somehow resembles one... But can he think, or does he merely repeat what he hears, specially Marx`s teachings?. Has the doctor`s experiment ruined a perfectly good dog, making him a perfectly despicable "human" being that threatens to denounce counterrevolutionaries and chases cats?.
I don`t want to tell you more about this book: you really should read it yourself. It isn`t long, but it is quite interesting. What is more important, it is open to many interpretations, and you can always find your own. Some people believe that for Bulgakov Sharik represented the failure of those who try to create new beings (exactly what was supposedly being done at that time in the URSS, with the "soviet man"). Others highlight the glimpses of Soviet society that "Heart of a dog" allows us to have, and think that the aim of the author was to give the reader at least an idea of what it was like to live in the URSS at that time...
These few possible interpretations don't exclude others, so read this book and find them!!. Obviously, I highly recommend "Heart of a dog"...
Belen Alcat