[admin]

Mikhail Bulgakov's absurdist parable of the Russian Revolution.
A world-famous Moscow professor-rich, successful, and violently envied by his neighbors-befriends a stray dog and resolves to achieve a daring scientific "first" by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead man. But the results are wholly unexpected: a distinctly and worryingly human animal is on the loose, and the professor's hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance.
As in The Master and Margarita, the masterpiece he completed shortly before his death, Mikhail Bulgakov's early novel, written in 1925, combines outrageously grotesque ideas with a narrative of deadpan naturalism. The Heart of a Dog can be read as an absurd and wonderfully comic story; it can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.
Customer Review: Enjoyed it
I read this book in one setting on an airplane. It's pretty short and the story moves along well. It'a an interesting allegory of how the Soviets turned Russian society upside-down. While the subject of communism seems dated, anti- and pseudo-intellectualism are certainly relevant themes today. There are plenty of funny bits. The translator seems to have done a good job. The English isn't as rich as Pevear and Volokhonsky pull off, but it never seemed stilted or unnatural to me. Anyway I enjoyed it.
Customer Review: The Soul of a Political Satirist
Tentatively, this is the story of the after-effects of the transplantation of the Brain,Pituitary and testes from a man to a dog. The dog becomes a crass foul mouthed ingrate (but the parts were taken from a criminal...so take that Stephen King). In reality it is a roman a clef of the expect (by Bulgakov) failure of the Bolshevics to create a "New Soviet Man". For the creation of the new man is still done with the same old faulty parts. Stalin was purported to say that the only way to create the new "Soviet Man" was to get rid of all the old ones (which he made a great try at, killing maybe 40 million or so over thirty years). Keeping in mind that Bulgakov, was born and educated under the Tsar and lived through WWI and then the Civil War, he understood who and what Russians were. They were a half-civilized, illiterate and superstitious people who had to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the sixteenth century and into the twentieth. But who says you can't have fun along the way!


More...