Heart of a Dog

by Mikhail Bulgakov

And now I howl and howl, but what’s the good of howling? What harm did I do him? Would the People’s Economic Soviet get any poorer if I rooted in the garbage heap? The greedy brute!

I’ve tasted everything, but I’ve made peace with my fate, and if I’m whining now, it’s only because of the pain and the cold—because my spirit hasn’t yet gone out of my body. . . . A dog is hard to kill, his spirit clings to life.

I am sorry for her, so sorry! But I’m even sorrier for myself. I’m not saying this out of selfishness, but because our conditions really don’t compare.

Sharik is somebody round, plump, silly, a son of aristocratic parents who gobbles oatmeal, and he is shaggy, lanky, tattered, skinny as a rail, a homeless mutt. But thanks for a kind word, anyway.

No, it is the eyes I’m talking about. When you look at the eyes, you can’t mistake a man, from near or far. Oh, the eyes are an important thing. Like a barometer. You can see everything in them—the man whose soul is dry as dust, the man who’ll never kick you in the ribs with the tip of his boot, and the man who is afraid of everything himself.

“He who does not hurry manages to get everywhere,” the host explained sententiously. “Of course, if I began to skip around from meeting to meeting and sing all day like a nightingale instead of doing my own work, I would never manage to get anywhere.”

I’m a handsome devil. Am I perhaps an unknown canine prince—incognito, the dog wondered, gazing at the shaggy coffee-colored dog with a well-pleased muzzle wandering about in the depths of the mirrors.

he began to realize how much a collar meant in life. There was fierce envy in the eyes of all the dogs he met.

Oh, no, why lie to yourself, you’ll never leave here, you’ll never go back to freedom, the dog spoke to himself in anguish, sniffling. I am a gentleman’s dog, an intellectual creature, I’ve tasted a better life. And what is freedom, anyway? Nothing, a puff of smoke, a mirage, a fiction . . . A sick dream of those wretched democrats . . .

“All those rules you keep to, always on parade,” he said. “Napkin here, tie there, and ‘pardon me,’ and ‘please,’ and ‘merci’—but for the real thing, it isn’t there. Torturing your own selves, just like in Tsarist times.”

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.

The whole horror, you see, is that his heart is no longer a dog’s heart, but a human one. And the vilest you could find!”