N2 - 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. The novella has been interpreted both as a satire on Bolshevism and as a criticism of eugenics. [8] [9]

Bulgakov, who spent most of his writing life as a dramatist, has a perfect ear for dialogue and captures the absurdities of his homeland with a sense of unfazed abandon. It is his fearlessness as a satirist that makes this novel such a pleasure to behold, and even more telling that it would take a further sixty-two years before this book was printed in the Soviet Union.Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kyiv, Russian Empire (today part of modern Ukraine) on 3/15 May 1891. He studied and briefly practised medicine and, after indigent wanderings through revolutionary Russia and the Caucasus, he settled in Moscow in 1921. His sympathetic portrayal of White characters in his stories, in the plays The Days of the Turbins (The White Guard), which enjoyed great success at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1926, and Flight (1927), and his satirical treatment of the officials of the New Economic Plan, led to growing criticism, which became violent after the play, The Purple Island. His later works treat the subject of the artist and the tyrant under the guise of historical characters, with plays such as Molière, staged in 1936, Don Quixote, staged in 1940, and Pushkin, staged in 1943. He also wrote a brilliant biography, highly original in form, of his literary hero, Molière, but The Master and Margarita, a fantasy novel about the devil and his henchmen set in modern Moscow, is generally considered his masterpiece. Fame, at home and abroad, was not to come until a quarter of a century after his death in Moscow in 1940. Ultimately, the gruesome experiment does not work, and Preobrazhensky's reflection on it all again takes on the most direct political connotations.

Most importantly, though – the book is utterly hilarious. Narrated by Sharik, a stray dog hours from a chilly death on the streets of Moscow, the tale follows our mongrel hero through his rescue from the ‘mad Professor’ Preobrazhensky, his transformation from a dog into a man, to his life as an unruly proletarian scoundrel, mooching off his bourgeois masters. Chugunkin derives from Russian word for cast iron. Of course after transformation, iron becomes Stal or steel, which is word from which Stalin's name is driven.

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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. This anthology promises to bring – much as our four-legged furry friends do – joy and delight, and surprising depth and poignancy. It goes beyond the wet snouts and wagging tails and gets to the heart of what makes dogs our true lifelong companions. These essays are also sometimes toothy, sometimes bloody, sometimes gentle; much like dogs. Philip Philopovich Preobrazhensky is one sorry doctor. Not only does his experiment yield a strange and frightful sort of human creature of a Frankensteinian nature, but his 'creation' starts to call him out on his own shit. While foraging for trash one winter day, a stray dog is found by a cook and scalded with boiling water.

The book was rejected for publication in 1925, due in part to the influence of Lev Kamenev, then a leading Party official. Bulgakov subsequently wrote a play based on the story in 1926 for the Moscow Art Theater. However, the play was cancelled after the manuscript and copies were confiscated by the secret police, or OGPU. Eventually, Maxim Gorky intervened to get the manuscript returned. [1] Only a handful of people knew of the existence of A Dog's Heart and The Master and Margarita until long after Bulgakov died in 1940. It can be said that he anticipated Orwell and his generation, but not that he influenced them, or met them. The extraordinary power of Bulgakov's works, enabling them to be thawed out, as it were, and still have the freshness to influence the writers of the late 20th century, is a tribute to his brilliance. Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood In the aftermath, the fully- canine Sharik blissfully resumes his status as a gentleman's dog. However, in the ending of the book, he describes the professor to be bringing home a human brain and removing the pituitary gland. That perhaps shows that Sharik retains some memories of his time as a human or that the professor intends to carry out a similar experiment. As a dog lover, I was intrigued when I heard that Dr Paul W Ivey was about to pen a book about the human – dog connection/relationship. Having read other entertaining and educational books by the author, I wanted to read this one as well. I had an idea that I would not be disappointed and I was right.In 2007, Guerilla Opera staged the premiere of Heart of a Dog, an opera by Rudolf Rojahn, directed by Sally Stunkel. In 2010, the second production was directed by Copeland Woodruff. [17]