Revolting Masses

THE HEART OF A DOG by Mikhail Bulgakov. 146 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $3.95.

The Soviets are rehabilitating Mikhail Bulgakov, the satirical novelist and playwright who died in 1940, but so far they have not screwed their courage up to the point of publishing The Heart of a Dog, a novel recently spirited out of Russia in manuscript form. Bulgakov's complex and comical allegory, The Master and Margarita, was judged fit to be published in his homeland, after some ideological laundering. That was followed by Black Snow, a cudgeling of Stanislavsky. But these satires of Soviet life were devious enough so that the literary bureaucracy could pretend that they were not satire at all.

There is no mistaking Bulgakov's target in The Heart of a Dog: it is the boorish, overweening, ignorant, slogan-stuffed Soviet proletarian. Bulgakov wrote this short, scornful novel in 1925, drawing on his inexhaustible supply of contempt. Its method is the "fantastic realism" he was to use later in The Master and Margarita. Matter-of-fact becomes matter-of-fantasy; madly grotesque events are described in the language of naturalism.

Hideous Neckties. A world-renowned brain surgeon, Professor Preobrazhensky (the name suggests the Russian word for transfiguration), implants the testicles and pituitary glands of a dead balalaika player in the body of a mongrel dog. Lo, the animal is transformed; he begins to talk and to assume human characteristics. Unfortunately, they are those of the balalaika player, a sodden, crude-minded lowlife. Nevertheless, the dog is welcomed as an equal by the sanctimoniously proletarian house committee of the professor's apartment building. Sharik the dog becomes "Sharikov" the Soviet citizen. He is supplied with identity papers and, except for a tendency to chase cats, is indistinguishable from any other member of the ruling mass. That is to say, Bulgakov suggests, he is stupid, foulmouthed, disrespectful, noisily political, vodka-soaked, treacherous and fond of hideous neckties. After some thought, the professor chloroforms him and reverses the operation. The intolerable Sharikov again becomes Sharik.

The point of the book was clearly that the Russian intellectuals who made the revolution would have been well pleased to unmake it. To have written such a book, even for the author's private amusement, seems foolhardy. Lampooning the proletariat was unpardonable heresy, and Translator Michael Glenny suggests a fouler crime against the state: the figure of Bulgakov's too clever professor, he thinks, may be a caricature of Lenin. Obviously, Bulgakov was courageous; he wrote with rare fury for the rest of his life, muffled but not silenced by censors. But the evidence of The Heart of a Dog makes it questionable how clearly he saw things, at least in 1925. To Bulgakov, the proletarian state seemed vulgar, mindless and infuriating, but the book does not give a sense that he felt menaced by it. The growing shelf of Bulgakov's work begins to take the form of a literary puzzle, and a trustworthy biography would be a useful addition to it.

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