Heart of a Dog, by Christie Gibbons, page 3

After these scenes in the examination room with the professor’s clients, four men come barging into his apartment. They are the new house management committee. They are all wearing jackets, boots, and hats made entirely of leather. One is actually a woman dressed like a man (a transvestite? Perhaps another example of the absurdity of transforming nature). They accuse the professor of having excessive living space. He lives alone in seven rooms, and wants an eighth. They vehemently attempt to persuade him to downscale into a smaller apartment.

Naturally, Philip Philipovich and the new house management committee do not hit it off well, as the professor wants to live alone in that huge apartment, and they want to limit the number of rooms permitted for each tenant. This perhaps is analogous to the way wealthy companies today have a disdain for those groups who try to put limits on the size of their factories or the amount of emissions they are allowed to produce. Such companies will do all they can to keep growing and polluting, just as Professor Preobrazhensky will do all he can to keep his large apartment, his examination room, and all that goes on in, and comes out of, it. The committee warns the professor that they would have him arrested if it were not for his celebrity status throughout all of Moscow.

This celebrity actually doesn’t live entirely alone. His maid, Zina, and his cook, Darya, live with him. Sharik spends much of his days lying on the kitchen floor watching Darya cut off the heads of birds (and other animals), gut them, and cook them. The professor has many a meal of roast beef, lobster, eel, caviar, herring, lamb, turkey, and more, which are often shared with Sharik. This, too, symbolizes the professor’s domination of nature, as he freely eats from all realms of animal life.

Yet, Sharik’s new life in a comfortable home, where he is well-fed, changes suddenly one day when the professor receives word that a known alcoholic, Klim Chugunkin, has died. The professor instructs the caller to bring the body right over. When it arrives, Bormenthal and Philip Philipovich immediately begin an experimental operation, putting the dead Klim’s organs into the body of Sharik, the dog. The professor is no longer content with mere rejuvenation. He wants to dabble in the realm of humanization. At the end of this risky procedure when he realizes that Sharik has not died, Philip Philipovich exclaims: “The devil take it.” Variations of this phrase are used at other moments in the film as well. The professor often says, devil take me. It is as if that which he continuously proclaims actually comes to pass, as if the devil really does take him and his transformation of nature, which becomes, in itself, a sort of hell.

Although hell was not the intended outcome of their experiment, as is the case with most examples of detrimental dominion over nature, it nevertheless is the state in which the professor soon finds himself. For Philip Philipovich and his assistant, Bormenthal, things seemed to be going quite well at first. The dog slowly begins to moan, then to speak, all the while losing his body hair and acquiring a manly physique. He grows into a short, small-framed man with a low forehead and somewhat pointed ears, who, ironically, later wears a leather jacket, leather trousers, and tall leather boots. The first sign of things going awry begins when they realize that he speaks all of his words backwards. This is a blatant portrayal, on behalf of Bulgakov and Bortko, of the backwardness that most likely results from excessive domination of nature.

Oddly, though, while Sharik, self-deemed Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, progresses, things actually regress. Sharikov has turned out to be a vulgar creation, a Frankenstein of sorts, continuously swearing, smoking, being a slob, attempting to breed with women, chasing cats, pinching ladies’ breasts, wearing a gaudy necktie, leaving the apartment. All of these things are unacceptable behavior according to the professor and Bormenthal, who daily try to take the wild out of Sharikov and to civilize him, even though most of his actions are quite instinctual to a canine. Despite all of the reprimanding, Sharikov is not the one for whom people in the film feel sorry. It is Philip Philipovich who induces feelings of pity from those around him. The irony is shown, at one point, when the godhead calls out to God for help in humanizing such a monster.   

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