Mikhail Bulgakov's The Heart of a Dog still bites

Top 10 dogs' stories

This satire of life in the early years of the Soviet Union cost its author dear at the time and it has not lost its provocative power

Claire Armitstead
Wednesday 4 January 2017

Mikhail Bulgakov was 33 years old, a former doctor and an up-and-coming playwright and short-story writer when he invited a group of people to a reading of his new novella, The Heart of a Dog. He had held a similar soiree the previous year to launch another novella, The Fatal Eggs, and though the earlier reading had gone well, it had made him anxious enough to muse in his diary: “Is it a satire? Or a provocative gesture? … I’m afraid that I might be hauled off … for all these heroic feats.”

Books and writers / Bulgakov

 

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)

Ukrainian journalist, playwright, novelist, and short story writer, whose major work was the Gogolesque fantasy The Master and Margarita. In the story the Devil visits Stalinist Moscow to see if he can do some good. The book is considered a major Russian novel of the 20th century. It first appeared in a censored form in the Soviet journal Moskva in 1966-67. Bulgakov used satire and fantasy also in his other works, among them the short story collection Diaboliad (1925).