She was originally told that he had been maimed while fighting in the Siberian Army. Sharikov demands they be given their own room, but the doctor takes the woman aside, explaining that Sharikov is an experiment gone wrong. After this, he brings home a woman who he works with, and introduces to the doctor as his common law wife.

The Party is turning them into cheap fur coats for the working class.

Sharikov returns, and announces that he has been given a job by the Soviet State. The doctor says no again, but contradicts his former beliefs by saying that eugenics are a waste of time, because even a peasant could birth a genius. Then Bormenthal suggests redoing to operation, using the body of a genius. The doctor is horrified at the thought and says the person from whom the body parts were harvested is at fault, not Sharikov. He calls him a man with the heart of a dog. It is soon after this that Bormenthal begs the doctor to do something about the problem specifically, he asks for permission to dose and kill Sharikov with arsenic. Sharik is impressed, and takes on a ‘gentleman’s dog’ role. He refuses to decrease his seven room flat, and treats the Bolsheviks and Schwonder very badly. The doctor is vocally anti-communist, but he is untouchable because he treats the RCP leaders.

This is an ironic name, usually used to describe a pampered or pure-bred dog. The dog follows Philip back to his flat, and is named Sharik. Then a surgeon named Philip Philippovich Preobrazhensky offers the dog a sausage. The dog lays, dying, and waits for death. A stray dog is foraging for trash during the winter, and a cook who finds him scalds him with boiling water. The Kills released a 2016 song called Heart of a Dog, inspired by the book.

This includes: the comic opera, The Murder of Comrade Sharik in 1973 a 1988 Soviet movie named Sobachye Serdtse a Guerilla Opera staged an opera in 2007, and a second production in 2010 a staging at the University of Leeds in 2011 and many more. It has been filmed in both Russian and Italian versions, as well as English adaptations as plays and operas. It wasn’t officially released in Russia until 1987. This was a time when communism seemed like it was weakening in the Soviet Union, and the novel is often interpreted as an allegory for the Communist revolution. Heart of a Dog is a novel written by Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian author, in 1925 at the height of the New Economic Period in Soviet Russia.

Bulgakov heart of a dog