Dog Hearted: Essays on Our Fierce and Familiar Companions

Product Information

People who think you can use terror are quite wrong. No, no, terror is useless, whatever its colour—white, red or even brown! Terror completely paralyses the nervous system.” Junto con su ayudante, el doctor Bormental, lograrán que un castigado perro llamado Shárik, se transfigure en un hombre apellidado Shárikov.

After an hiatus of two years, I was delighted to read that Daunt Books would be publishing another collection of essays this year, having enjoyed their past collections, particularly In The Kitchen: Essays on Food and Life. For this collection, the central topic of our pooch pals could not have been more apt for me given that I have recently been initiated into the cult of canine companionship for the very first time! What's this Doc? Did you just stir up a recipe for breeding communists? And look at how this dog, this animal, is thinking like a Commie! Oy! Yes, a policeman! Nothing else will do. Doesn't matter whether he wears a number or a red cap. A policeman should be posted alongside every person in the country with the job of moderating the vocal outbursts of our honest citizenry.” ---------- Professor Philip Philipovich’s wry comment. Mikhail Bulgakov anticipates the omnipresent eye of the totalitarian state sending men and women off to forced labor camps for the slightest vocal outburst. 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. Ironically, I recall finding this much funnier on my first reading. I found it utterly witty and clever. This time around - with a lot more life experience - I realise that Mikhail Bulgakov was a kind of visionary with his observations. His humour not only showed the “Heart of a Dog” but the heart of humans. No wonder his works were silenced, and then not printed for so many years.

On the other level, it is a cautionary warning about what happens when power falls in the hands of those who should not be allowed to yield it, and the dangers and pitfalls of the system that allows that to happen. Yes, that includes an easy step from killing cats to pointing guns at real people, and demanding sex in exchange for keeping a job, and of course the ultimate evil that was to penetrate the fabric of the years to come - writing denunciations for little else than petty personal gains. " But just think, Philipp Philippovich, what he may turn into if that character Shvonder keeps on at him! I'm only just beginning to realize what Sharikov may become, by God!" All of dog life is here, and this charming book shows how much poorer our own lives would be without them.’ The Lady In the embryonic USSR, the line between literary criticism and repression was blurring. Ultimately, it was GlavLit, the Soviet censor, that would decide the fate of A Dog's Heart. But the police spy had an influence, and his review was hostile. "Bulgakov hates and despises the Soviet regime," he wrote. "Soviet power has a true, stern and clear-seeing guardian in GlavLit, and as long as its opinion coincides with mine, this book will never see the light of day."

this book made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me feel nostalgic and most of all it made me grateful that I still have my little odi by my side (although I’m sure we’re getting to the end of our little story now too- she’s thirteen years old). dogs are honestly such special animals that we somehow just let into our homes, onto our furniture, even in our beds, and we get to know them on such a microscopic level that sometimes they feel like humans. so it’s no surprise that some of these dogs continue to show that they suffer from memories from before they were rescued, some really keep to themselves and have this high-royalty air to them that exudes a “you cannot touch me” vibe, and some are just downright wild and eat everything in their radius, and nothing can stop them 😂 Science does not yet know any way of turning animals into human beings. This was my attempt, but an unsuccessful one, as you can see. He spoke for a while and then began to revert to his original primitive condition.’ I wonder if I would have got as much out of this if I hadn't read it soon after finishing a big history of the Russian Revolution, whose hypocrisies are so unerringly skewered here. The extravagantly detailed and gory scene in which the dog is operated on brings home the nature of the Soviet ‘experiment’ (which its leaders really did see in explicitly scientific terms) in a visceral new way. And the characters are no simple allegories; the doctor, Preobrazhensky (perhaps partly modelled on Pavlov), may in some way symbolise the Bolshevik leaders in that scene, but at other times he is a sympathetic model of liberal Tsarist Russia. Writing after waves of Red Terror and White Terror had bled the countryside, Bulgakov gives his learned protagonist a pointed speech on the subject of ‘kindness to animals’, which is, he says, Bulgakov explores such themes as the essence of humanity, ethics, and the limits of science. The story is also a satire on communism in the Soviet Union and the intention to create a New Soviet man.The consequences are not going to please Professor Preobrazhensky, quite the contrary. Preobrazhensky and his assistant are terrified at what they have done. Nobody should be whipped. Remember that, once and for all. Neither man nor animal can be influenced by anything but suggestion." But there is much more to this book than just the condemnation of the system. Had it been only that, it would have become quite dated quite soon. No, just like in Bulgakov's other works, it has a commentary on the state of humanity as a whole, on what makes us truly human versus merely humanoid. It is about the importance of morals and values, the etiquette and politeness and respect that make us really human, and moreso, civilized humans. ' I'm sorry, professor, not a dog. This happened when he was a man. That's the trouble.' AB - 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.

Excuse me,' Shvonder interrupted him, 'but it was just because of your dining-room and your consulting-room that we came to see you. The general meeting requests you, as a matter of labor discipline, to give up your dining-room voluntarily. No one in Moscow has a dining-room.'” -------- Four members from the apartment committee barge into the professor’s living quarters and attempt to lay down the law on how the new society will be structured. Each time committee members make their appearance throughout the novel is an opportunity for the author to poke a long satiric needle into the side of the Soviets. Ouch!This was a charming collection of essays portraying an extremely diverse cast of dogs that were both charming and confusing in equal measure. The essays were surprisingly intimate, as if the authors' dogs provided a window into their domestic lives, whether that be current or remembered, that might not otherwise have been exposed. Perhaps this intimacy and vulnerability is encouraged by the simple and honest love that most have for their canine companions, unlike the complexity of human-to-human relationships. A key work of early modernism, this is the superbly comic story of a Soviet scientist and a scroungy Moscow mongrel named Sharik. Attempting a medical first, the scientist transplants the glands of a petty criminal into the dog and, with that, turns a distinctly worryingly human animal loose on the city. The new, lecherous, vulgar, Engels-spouting Sharik soon finds his niche in governmental bureaucracy as the official in charge of purging the city of cats.