The Heart of a Dog and Other Stories

by Mikhail Bulgakov, Kathleen Cook-Horujy (Translator), Avril Pyman (Translator)

Contains the following stories:
- Notes Off the Cuff
- Diaboliad
- The Fateful Eggs
- The Heart of a Dog

Genres: Fiction

310 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1990

About the author

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov (Russian: Михаил Булгаков) was a Russian writer, medical doctor, and playwright. His novel The Master and Margarita , published posthumously, has been called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.

He also wrote the novel The White Guard and the plays Ivan Vasilievich, Flight (also called The Run ), and The Days of the Turbins . He wrote mostly about the horrors of the Russian Civil War and about the fate of Russian intellectuals and officers of the Tsarist Army caught up in revolution and Civil War.

Some of his works ( Flight , all his works between the years 1922 and 1926, and others) were banned by the Soviet government, and personally by Joseph Stalin, after it was decided by them that they "glorified emigration and White generals". On the other hand, Stalin loved The Days of the Turbins (also called The Turbin Brothers ) very much and reportedly saw it at least 15 times.

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

“What am I crying for, when I’ve got some wine?”

I love me some Bulgakov. The Master & Margarita is one of my all-time favorite novels and his other works I've encountered over the years are moving and funny in a way that defies usual conventions of love and humor (two things too many keep both apart and at arm's length).
I read The Heart of a Dog many years ago and always remember it as being of the same caliber as Buglakov's other major works, but sadly, on a re-read, it is only mildly amusing. I'm not sure if it is due to a stiff, clunky translation or maybe Older Me is more jaded and more hard-to-get.
Whatever the case, Dog and the other selections here are mediocre at best. There are a few funny moments, especially in the title piece, but overall I cannot recommend, at the very least, this version.

[Friedrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some decades ago, probably in the late eighties when glasnost was the watchword in the Kremlin, I received a revelation of the impossible soviet novelist and playwright, Mikhail Bulgakov. He might cringe at that term, "soviet novelist," because he once communicated to Stalin himself that he found it quite impossible to write "communist" plays, but I'll stick to my classification on the assumption that "soviet" does not necessarily mean "communist." But he was born in the 1890's in Kyiv (does that make him Ukrainian?--I don't know), and he came to Moscow around 1921, with the Russian Civil War still an open wound. In the Thirties, he pleaded with Stalin to allow him to emigrate, which Stalin refused, but Stalin apparently admired some of his plays and allowed Bulgakov to remain employed in the Moscow Art Theatre, and he permitted Bulgakov's play, "Days of the Turbins" (a dramatization of his novel, The White Guard), to remain in repertoire. Otherwise, Bulgakov labored in vain. None of his novels were permitted to be published in the USSR during his lifetime, but it could be that The Master and Margarita was smuggled out to be published in the West--I'm not sure. Bulgakov died in 1940.

Certainly, The Master and Margarita is Bulgakov's most famous work, and it should be on everyone's Must Read list. This one is a collection of novellas, or to use one of Bulgakov's favorite words, feuilletons. This particular volume was published in Moscow in 1990 by Raduga Publishers, and of course it is translated from Russian to English. As far as I can tell, the translation is well done. It includes the novella, "Notes Off the Cuff," which is the correct English idiom, I think. I have another volume of his novellas published in the USA in which the same story title is strangely translated as "Notes On the Cuff," but I can't say more about it than that.

So, how does one describe Bulgakov's writing? I described him above as an "impossible" soviet novelist. I use that term because he shamelessly satirizes the soviet regime (under Stalin, remember, famous for the gulags), and he is unabashedly critical of it. Many of his works, most notably The Master and Margarita and the novellas in this volume, are of magical realism. Yes, magical realism before magical realism was a thing. If you love Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, you will love Bulgakov. He wrote another book, The Life of Monsieur de Moliere, which is of course a biography of Moliere, but it is much more than that. Bulgakov identifies with Moliere as a satirical playwright like himself, living under while satirizing a totalitarian regime (in Moliere's case, of course, Louis XIV). I very strongly recommend it too. I think you will see Bulgakov living and writing just behind the page.

[Justin Osborn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful short stories in the classic cautionary sci-fi tradition (although what's amazing is that Bulgakov predates most the authors in that genre). Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog are absolute favorites.

Another cool part about this book is it's the only part of my novel collection that was printed in the Soviet Union.

[Thomas Butler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun little book, not all Russian literature is about clawing anxiety and self hatred

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Notes off the Cuff" is a dramatized series of memories of being a hungry (literally) writer in the hinterlands in the post-civil-war Soviet Union, and life in Moscow at the time after moving there, going from job to job.

"Diabolid" is a Kafkaesqe satire of the Soviet bureacracy of the era, with supervisors and supervisors of supervisors who are incompetent, lazy, and cruel. To make matters worse, unknown to the protagonist, his sadistic supervisor has a twin working in the same department, and the protagonist has a double causing trouble. The factory can't make payroll and pays its workers in matches. The matches are not good ones. His friend in the same apartment building got paid in cheap wine. He gets fired by the new boss, or was the office moved without anyone telling him?

"Heart of a Dog" is a satire of life in the early Soviet Union. A distinguished medical professor and surgeon lives elegantly in his apartment, in constant confrontation with a loutish housing committee. The professor, in an experiment, grafts part of the brain and the scrotum of a fresh cadaver onto a stray dog. To everyone's surprise, the dog transforms into a man, and to the discomfort of the professor, the man is a complete boor, a lazy, drunk, backstabbing thief with an intense hatred of cats. Naturally, he gets a government job with animal control.

[Karina · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Notes Off the Cuff" and "Diaboliad" seemed to me to suffer from a lack of coherency, but that may have been due to a poor translation or my undeveloped knowledge of Russian bureaucracy in the 1920s. "The Fateful Eggs" and "The Heart of a Dog," however, are brilliant, the first about the discovery of a "ray of life" and the other about a dog transformed into a man by a surgical procedure. These pieces are classic science fiction, drawing on many of the same themes we see in that genre today. At the same time, dismal as their plots seem, they have an air of satirical humor which is missing from early English-language science fiction and makes them far superior.