Bulgakov in The Guardian

Over the weekend, The Guardian ran James Meek’s intro to the new edition of A Dog’s Heart by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Generally overshadowed by The Master and Margarita, A Dog’s Heart sounds really interesting, especially in Meek’s description of an underground reading that was infiltrated by secret police informer:

The bulk of the audience seem to have hoped that Bulgakov’s new novel, A Dog’s Heart, would similarly mock the rickety state of affairs that Vladimir Lenin’s heirs had inherited. It did. Bulgakov’s tale of a professor who implants the sexual organs and pituitary gland of an evil man into a good mongrel, creating a loutish man-hound who fits with ease into communist society, went down well. The anonymous informer’s outraged report to his masters describes how one passage, where the professor complains that the Russian revolution coincided with the theft of galoshes from the communal hallway, provoked “deafening laughter”.

Of course, this was all reported to the authorities, and Bulgakov’s publisher refused to publish the manuscript, which was then stolen in a raid, returned in 1929, and finally published in 1987.

On the face of it, A Dog’s Heart looks like an act of extreme courage, if not recklessness. Bulgakov was exposed. He was a member of the officially reviled bourgeois class. His foppish dress by Bolshevik standards – the bow ties, the monocle – didn’t help. The voice of his published writings was of a patriot who believed Russia had taken a wrong turning in 1917, and believed it was his duty to do something about it. He was aware that the Soviet authorities had heard him, knew that they were being mocked and did not like it. If The White Guard offered the comfort to the Kremlin of representing an elegy for the death of middle-class tsarist Russia, The Fatal Eggs and A Dog’s Heart seemed to propose terminal flaws in their own, communist project.