The remarkable work of Mikhail Bulgakov, a recognized outcast of the Soviet writers' workshop, is of such topical importance that discussions on his subject have not ceased to this day. Let's try to understand and understand the meaning of the name “Dog’s Heart”.
Historical reference
Immediately after writing the story in 1925, a hail of criticism fell upon her. The authorities and writers, as one, opposed the publication, which was not slow to affect the social status of the writer. The manuscripts were seized, and the general public did not even suspect the existence of this magnificent work, and only relatively recently, already in the 60s of the twentieth century, she found not only her reader, and subsequently the viewer, who was able to appreciate the talents as a writer and directors of the imperishable manuscript. And if at first the book was distributed only in samizdat, then in 1968 it finally saw the light, and abroad, which is also very significant. The first official publication in the vastness of our country I saw the story quite recently - in 1987.
Attacks on the work, as well as on its author, began due to the presence of the OGPU agent during the first reading of the work. Search, seizure of manuscripts, all these are black pages of total censorship that took place in the emerging state of workers and peasants. But back to the main message of the article. Before we examine the meaning of the title of the story “Dog’s Heart”, we should go a little deeper into the basic factual material.
A little bit about the plot
Professor Preobrazhensky, by the way, inimitably performed in the film adaptation by the wonderful actor Evgeny Evstigneev, sets up a fantastic experiment on transplanting the pituitary gland and seminal glands of a person into the dog's body.
The indicated organs were taken from a drunkard who died in a fight. A successful transplant results in amazing results for the professor himself. A dog named Sharik suddenly begins to turn into a man. Moreover, the professor Frankenstein becomes not only a fairly reasonable human being, but also a very disgusting, arrogant and shameless "comrade" trying to survive himself from his own apartment. The situation, although fantastic, is absolutely unambiguously hinting at the seizure of power in the Soviet Union by people from the bottom, the proletariat, a couple of years ago not representing anything but already creeping out into the world political arena with a club at the ready.
Basic meaning
So, the meaning of the name of Bulgakov’s novel “A Dog’s Heart”, apparently, can be revealed in two ways. On the one hand, the dog’s body, and with it the heart, turned out to be equipped with some human organs, which caused unimaginable consequences that almost led to the disaster of the creator himself. It turns out that the dog’s heart in the human body is not only dangerous, but can also lead to self-destruction of a society consisting of such non-people.
On the other hand, the meaning of the name “Dog’s Heart” is deeply metaphorical. Recalling people without a heart, in a fairly large number of people surrounding modern man. For them to deceive or betray a loved one not only does not present any difficulties, and moreover, it often becomes the meaning of all life.
"New people
Continuing the conversation about the metaphorical nature of the story, you can even more deeply reveal the meaning of the title of the work “Dog Heart”. The “new humanity”, created by the Great October Revolution, revealed the terrible face of its heartless representative. This is really something created, as in the mentioned Frankenstein analogy, a kind of monster from a test tube, but only this is a whole class. The proletariat, who has frantically entered the arena of power, is uncultured, licking seeds, through a word mentioning his mother. He suddenly began to rule a country with a huge historical and cultural heritage, which he not only completely forgot, but curses, seeks to crush in himself and his surroundings.
This metaphor, this crazy forecast made by Bulgakov back in 1925, when the country was just getting up off its knees, barely surviving the Civil War, sounded a terrifying pamphlet. That is why censorship immediately trampled upon the work, remarkable in its power and prediction, with the edge of consciousness feeling that it was about her, about a frenzied class of plebeians, who suddenly seized power over a huge and powerful country.
The forecast came true
And how right he was! The meaning of the name “Dog’s Heart” by Bulgakov not only penetrated into the very essence of the situation in the Soviet Union, he predicted a terrible catastrophe that erupted over the country, throwing it away culturally many centuries ago. After all, it is no secret for a long time how many intellectual elites some years later Stalin rotted and his clique in camps and sharashka.
It was the canine heart of the whole class, the dominant class of the party apparatus, that caused catastrophic consequences for the whole country, for its intellectual resource. Not allowing it to become a cultural source for the whole modern world, but allowing it to become a provocateur of the Iron Curtain, the nuclear arms race and other, senseless from the point of view of rationality, crazy games of humanity.
All this continues to give us an understanding of what the meaning of the name “Dog Heart” is. The "new" humanity, formed by the ideas of collectivism, passed a destructive wave of cultural values, creating the Soviet Union as an untenable distortion of rational ideas about a society where justice rules. And, unfortunately, the Sharikov generation still continues to exist, and the idea of ​​an ideal society has remained the idea, making us continue to dream of the impracticable.
Conclusion
Thus, the meaning of the name “Dog’s Heart” lies on the surface itself. A person with such an authority should not have the right to exist on this planet. Bulgakov dreamed of such a society.
He saw what a society really turns into, where "everyone is equal", "from each according to his ability" and the rest are many slogans that have no real evidence. The society formed by the October Revolution was insolvent from the very beginning. His goal was to expose this failure, and he brilliantly coped with this task.