Heart of a Dog

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**Title** **Heart of a Dog**
A 2001 Russian edition of The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog.
Author	Mikhail Bulgakov
Original title	Собачье сердце
Country	U.S.S.R.
Language	Russian
Publisher
Released	1925
Media type	Print (Hardback and Paperback)
ISBN	NA

Heart of a Dog (Russian: Собачье сердце, pronounced 'so-bah-tchye ser-tse') is a 1925 story by Mikhail Bulgakov.

It features a professor Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky (his name is derived from the Russian word for "transfiguration") who implants human testicles and pituitary gland into a stray dog named Sharik. Sharik then proceeds to become more and more human as time passes, picks himself the name Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, makes himself a career with the "department of the clearing of the city from cats and other vile animals", and turns the life in the professor's house into a nightmare until the professor reverses the procedure.

Professor and Sharikov in the 1988 Soviet movie.

The story has analogies with Dr. Faustus, Frankenstein, The Island of Dr. Moreau. It was published in the Soviet Union only in 1987, more than 60 years after its completion, but was made known to Russian readers through samizdat. In 1968, it was published in English by Harvill Press, translated by Michael Glenny.

The tale has been interpreted either as a satire on the Soviet utopian attempts to radically improve human nature or as a wry comment on the scientists' attempts to interfere with nature. One commonly accepted interpretation is that Bulgakov was trying to show all the inconsistencies of the system in which a man with a dog's intelligence could become an important part (Sharikov); and that his other goal was to picture a man with a strong personality who could remain unaffected by the system and keep his personal independence (Preobrazhensky).^{[citation needed]}

A comic opera, The Murder of Comrade Sharik by William Bergsma (1973), is based on the plot of the story.

A very popular 1988 Soviet movie, Sobachye Serdtse, was made (in sepia) by Vladimir Bortko. Major sequences in the movie were famously shot from an unusually low dog's point of view.