Dog Hearted: Essays on Our Fierce and Familiar Companions

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The whole horror of the situation is that he now has a human heart, not a dog's heart. And about the rottenest heart in all creation!"

The only part of this that doesn't work is the ‘dry blizzard witch’, clearly a little personification in the original Russian which just seems confusing in this translation. Otherwise it reads OK, and as it was done in 2007 it should at least benefit from more recent scholarship than the other two I looked at. Vintage publish the Michael Glenny version from 1968, which I prefer in many ways (this is actually the one I meant to buy): Another way of looking at it is a satirical allegory of revolution. The dog-human being the government of prolls. The very name of human whose organs were used (a thief) It is possible that Bulgakov not only knew there was a police informer in the audience, but may have been able to see who it was. The spy's report, filed a few days later to the Soviet secret police department of the era, OGPU, contains such an accurate transcription of parts of A Dog's Heart that he must have been scribbling notes at high speed, and the pompousness of his denunciation suggests that he would have been conspicuous by his straight face. Nobody should be whipped. Remember that, once and for all. Neither man nor animal can be influenced by anything but suggestion."Sharik is seen as "a reincarnation of the repellent proletarian", and the professor represents a "hyperbolic vision of the bourgeois dream", according to J. A. E. Curtis. [1] The spy was not disappointed. Two months after the readings, the prospective publishers, Nedra, wrote to Bulgakov, returning the work and telling him that even a rewrite wouldn't save it. The following year, OGPU raided Bulgakov's flat and seized the manuscript. It was returned in 1929, but it was not until 1987, more than 60 years after Bulgakov finished it and almost half a century after the writer died, that the book was published in Russia.

AB - Collaborative essay commissioned by editors Rowan Hisayo Buchanan and Jessica J Lee for their collection 'Dog Hearted: Essays on Our Fierce and Familiar Companions'. Reflecting on the communicative and narrative complexities of dog-ownership, with themes including language acquisition and impossibility, family, concepts of 'training' and discovery via reflections on the 'canine memoir' as a genre and dog-protagonists in Virginia Woolf, Eileen Myles, Bryher and HD's bibliographies and biographies. To his surprise, a successful surgeon, Filipp Filippovich Preobrazhensky, arrives and offers the dog a piece of sausage.

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All the same, I refuse to do it,' said Philipp Philippovich thoughtfully. He stopped and stared at the glass-fronted cabinet. I’ve read two works of his now, and both have floored me with the scathing cleverness of their satire, the sheer originality of their ideas, and the fact that both these Russian texts – written during Stalin’s reign – are instantly accessible to the modern reader.