Russian Blog

Everyone who’s read «Мастер и Маргарита» [“The Master and Margarita”], or perhaps only seen one of the many movies or TV-shows based on this wonderful fantastic novel (published first only in 1967, in an English translation, despite it’s author finishing writing it before his early death in 1940), knows that Михаил Афанасьевич Булгаков [Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov, born in Kiev 1891] is the man in Russian 20th century literature. I don’t know about you, dear readers, but personally I laughed all the way from page one of his masterpiece up until the very end, because his humor is just my kind of humor (though not everyone agrees with me and Bulgakov, I suppose and I understand this; one of my Russian friends, for example, said he couldn’t take it anymore after the first thirty pages, and put it down to never take it up again). Myself, I enjoyed everything about the book – the spicy Soviet satire, the peculiar episodes with Yeshua and Pilate (about which my roommate here in Yekaterinburg, an American girl from Minneapolis, receiving her Bachelor Degree in Russian Literature at Ural State next week, wrote her graduation thesis), and especially Margarita flying naked over Moscow. Now, as it happens Bulgakov didn’t just write one novel, even though he is mainly remembered by world literature for giving it a devil by the name of professor Woland, who arrives in Moscow ‘to try to do some good’, he also wrote other books, as well as many plays and short stories. By profession he was a doctor, something rather common among Russian writers, for example, Антон Павлович Чехов [Anton Pavlovich Chekhov] was also a doctor. Not too long ago I came across one of Bulgakov’s shorter works of fiction, «Собачье сердце» [“Heart of a Dog”], it is more like a novella than a novel, which is why I read it both fast and with great enjoyment. It was written in 1925, but not published in Russia until 1988, due to containing some rather curried criticism of Soviet society in the 1920’s. Not long after it was published, a movie was made based on it, read about it in Russian here and in English here. Almost directly after I finished reading the novella I watched the movie, something I can highly recommend, because since Bulgakov worked and wrote for the theater most of his life, it wasn’t necessary to change any of the dialogue in the book for the movie script – that’s how much of the man Bulgakov was!

Both the novella and the movie stand out as masterpieces because of their highly original beginnings – in the book the first chapters are written as if told by the dog itself, in the movie the first scenes are shot from the view point of a dog. The ‘hero’, or perhaps better ‘the main character’, is called Шарик [‘little ball’] while still a homeless dog wandering the streets of Moscow, and later Полиграф Полиграфович Шариков [Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov] after he’s been made into a man by Филипп Филлипович Преображенискй [Filipp Filippovich Preobrazhensky], who implants a human pituitary gland and testicles into him. Though at first having trouble adapting to the new reality of being a man in Moscow in the 1920’s, Sharikov soon finds his way around, while messing up the lives of professor Preobrazhensky and his helper, doctor Борменталь [Bormental’]. Sharikov becomes a man in the traditional way that boys usually become men – by drinking alchol, playing the accordion, and trying his luck with the pretty maid Zina. Eventually he makes good friends with the local board of communists taking care of the building where professor Preobrazhensky lives and works, they help him get a job killing stray cats and even give him a book of Engels’ letters as a way of educating him. But Soviet society corrupts the innocent creature, who still has the heart of a dog, he starts to steal money from everyone and to binge-drink with strangers. When Sharikov tries to get married to a young and naive girl, who doesn’t know her fiancé used to be a dog (he explains his scars with having served in the war) and then to rape Zina, Bormental’ and Preobrazhensky decide that they’ve had enough and operate him back to the way he was. The police are confused when they arrive at the apartment to find former ‘comrade Sharikov’ turned back into a dog, and even more so the communists who got him documents and helped him get a job.

Read more about the original ‘Master’ here: http://bulgakov.niv.ru/