A Dog's Heart

A dark, fantastical satire of Communist utopianism by the author of The Master and Margarita.

Lauded Russian author and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov's A Dog's Heart (sometimes translated as The Heart of a Dog) is a zany, violent, and whimsical satire of the failures inherent in the dream of a Communist utopia, following dog-turned-human Sharik as he tries and fails utterly to live a life of goodness and virtue--but goodness and virtue as defined by whom?

Both a nod to the Frankenstein myth and a vicious critique of the Soviet government's attempts to reshape and redefine personhood during and after the Russian Revolution, A Dog's Heart was rejected for publication by censors in 1925, but was circulated via samizdat--the clandestine production and distribution of literature that had been banned by the state--for years until it was translated into English in 1968. To this day, the book remains one of Bulgakov's most highly regarded works.