Bulgakov....again...

After reading MASTER AND MARGARITA, which I found fantastic, its on to HEART OF A DOG.


Found this intro written by James Meek , for a new Penguin edition:

On March 7 1925, a group of about 50 writers and critics, at least one of them a secret police informer, gathered in a Moscow apartment to hear an ambitious 33-year-old, Mikhail Bulgakov, read the first part of his new, unpublished novel. Bulgakov's previous work, The Fatal Eggs, had been popular with the public, but it infuriated the Bolshevik rulers of the recently created Soviet Union, who took it - rightly - for a satirical attack, disguised as science fiction, on communism in practice.

The bulk of the audience seem to have hoped that Bulgakov's new novel, A Dog's Heart, would similarly mock the rickety state of affairs that Vladimir Lenin's heirs had inherited. It did. Bulgakov's tale of a professor who implants the sexual organs and pituitary gland of an evil man into a good mongrel, creating a loutish man-hound who fits with ease into communist society, went down well. The anonymous informer's outraged report to his masters describes how one passage, where the professor complains that the Russian revolution coincided with the theft of galoshes from the communal hallway, provoked "deafening laughter".
It is possible that Bulgakov not only knew there was a police informer in the audience, but may have been able to see who it was. The spy's report, filed a few days later to the Soviet secret police department of the era, OGPU, contains such an accurate transcription of parts of A Dog's Heart that he must have been scribbling notes at high speed, and the pompousness of his denunciation suggests that he would have been conspicuous by his straight face.

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."

The spy was not disappointed. Two months after the readings, the prospective publishers, Nedra, wrote to Bulgakov, returning the work and telling him that even a rewrite wouldn't save it. The following year, OGPU raided Bulgakov's flat and seized the manuscript. It was returned in 1929, but it was not until 1987, more than 60 years after Bulgakov finished it and almost half a century after the writer died, that the book was published in Russia.

For Russians, A Dog's Heart stands high among Bulgakov's prose works, alongside his later novel The Master and Margarita and his earlier, autobiographical account of civil-war Kiev, The White Guard. Partly this is because of Vladimir Bortko's superb 1988 film of the book, a masterpiece of late Soviet cinema. The other reason A Dog's Heart was embraced when censorship was relaxed was that Soviet culture had barely changed. The society Bulgakov mocked was bitter-sweetly familiar to Russians.

A Dog's Heart seemed fresh six decades after Bulgakov described the travails of disparate households crammed into apartment buildings seized from the wealthy, because people were still crammed into the same apartment buildings, barely renovated in all that time. Sixty years on, Pravda was still indigestible. Senior medical consultants were still, like Professor Preobrazhensky, using the leverage of their rare skills to gain or keep material advantages - big flats, for instance - from a corrupt communist leadership. Essential goods were still in short supply.

At the same time, some of the moments Bulgakov describes reflect an even greater, deeper continuity. He has a fascination with the rituals of the Russian table - with the proper and improper imbibing of vodka and the consumption of zakuski, the snacks to be served with spirits. That, together with the remarkable fact that, after a brief introductory passage where the homeless mongrel roams a bleak, snowbound Moscow, all the action of the book takes place inside a single flat, taps into an intense sense, both Bulgakovian and Russian, of the dining table as refuge. Outside there would be tyrants, wolves and 20 degrees of frost; inside there would be a bubble of warmth and yellow light, a last redoubt of cheer and wise, witty, fatalistic talk.

Bulgakov was not merely a brilliant observer of what was going on around him but had an uncanny ability to pick out the particular manifestations of folly and discord which would set the tone of the era to follow. His portrayal of the scientists in the book - Professor Filipp Filippovich Preobrazhensky and his assistant, Dr Bormenthal - is double-edged. Preobrazhensky, based on Bulgakov's uncle, a Moscow gynaecologist, stands up for the values of an old-fashioned gentleman-intellectual against the encroaching communists. Bulgakov portrays him sympathetically, though at the same time as vain, self-centred, pandering to the frivolous medical demands of the new elite and oblivious to any notion that his privileged life might have been partly inherited and not earned. He and Bormenthal and even their servants are shown as incipient victims of a communism which claims to be about building a new world but is, in fact, about plunder and class revenge.

When the time comes to operate on the dog, however, Preobrazhensky and Bormenthal switch to representing a different kind of bourgeois intellectual - those like Trotsky and Lenin who believed that in Karl Marx they had found a scientific system which could be imposed on human beings, and proceeded to carry out a great experiment in the form of a revolution, with the Russian people as the subject, and Russia as the laboratory.

In six extraordinary pages, the entire atmosphere of the book alters, as Bulgakov puts all his experience as a young war surgeon at the disposal of his novelistic skills. The urbanity of the original Preobrazhensky disappears; the professor is transformed into a ruthless butcher, motivated as much by curiosity and ego as by concern for the future of humankind. He and his assistant thus represent the bourgeois intellectual as victim of the revolution - like Bulgakov himself, their property, their material and cultural inheritance, their freedom of expression and inquiry, their status, their contribution to society, and their lives all under threat - as well as the very bourgeois intellectuals who brought about that revolution in the first place.

On the face of it, A Dog's Heart looks like an act of extreme courage, if not recklessness. Bulgakov was exposed. He was a member of the officially reviled bourgeois class. His foppish dress by Bolshevik standards - the bow ties, the monocle - didn't help. The voice of his published writings was of a patriot who believed Russia had taken a wrong turning in 1917, and believed it was his duty to do something about it. He was aware that the Soviet authorities had heard him, knew that they were being mocked and did not like it. If The White Guard offered the comfort to the Kremlin of representing an elegy for the death of middle-class tsarist Russia, The Fatal Eggs and A Dog's Heart seemed to propose terminal flaws in their own, communist project.

I believe Bulgakov was brave, but not quite so reckless as it might seem from the perspective of the 21st century. In early 1925, he had good reason to imagine that his position was more secure, and that of the Soviet authorities weaker, than we now know was the case. Communist Russia was not yet eight years old. Its rulers, its supporters and its opponents had no way of knowing whether it would survive in anything like the form its founders had hoped for. On the contrary, it seemed to be slipping back towards capitalism, even as it retained a degree of political freedom. Lenin, the captain of the revolution, had died the previous year, and no one had emerged from the top rank of Bolsheviks to take his place. Josef Stalin, who would come to toy personally with Bulgakov's life and career, was merely one of a group of contenders for a share of power, and not the best known. There was censorship, arrests and deportations, but not wholesale repression. A degree of dissent was tolerated. Travel abroad was still possible.

Lenin himself had accepted, in 1921, that Russia was not ready for full-on Marxism, and the communists relaxed the rules to allow some entrepreneurial activity. It was this society, half-capitalist, half-socialist, more authoritarian than totalitarian, ruined and rebuilding, full of chancers on the make, charged with energy and creativity after seven years of war and famine, which forms the background to A Dog's Heart

Bulgakov's letters from the period are full of this sense of hope and despair mixed together. There is unhappiness there, but also optimism, for the finite nature of the Soviet system seemed to hang within reach in a way that it no longer would once Stalin's reign of terror took hold. It would be wrong to assume, in other words, that Bulgakov thought of himself as a candidate for literary martyrdom in 1925. It is entirely likely that he harboured real hopes of being able to say one day that he had done his bit to push communist Russia to an early grave.

Bulgakov builds a complex structure under the surface to make his short narrative work. His willingness to shift perspective and modes of narration is characteristic of his best work, foreshadowed in The White Guard and fully realised in The Master and Margarita. A Dog's Heart contains buds of three of the four intertwined strands of his later masterpiece, the only one missing being the strand of sacrificial love between the title characters; it has the same exquisite scenes of Gogolian-Chekhovian buffoonery between weak, greedy, foolish characters, written with compassionate mockery; the same delight in the detail of the fantastical; and, though less obviously, the same theme of blasphemy.

Blasphemy, in the Bulgakovian sense, means not only denial of the authority of God, although it certainly does mean that. It also means insufficient humility in the face of the mysteries of nature. Bulgakov is not so reactionary as to believe in a divine or natural order of things which cannot be altered. He was a doctor, after all; he loved the rush of modernity and its machines. The message of A Dog's Heart is that man must recognise the existence of limits to his powers; that there are realms, divine and natural, where he cannot tread without the danger of creating something blasphemous and unnatural - without carrying out a Satanic act. This idea was anathema to the communists, whose entire programme was based on the notion that God did not exist, and that nature was infinitely plastic - that they could create a new, better man.

Only a handful of people knew of the existence of A Dog's Heart and The Master and Margarita until long after Bulgakov died in 1940. It can be said that he anticipated Orwell and his generation, but not that he influenced them, or met them. The extraordinary power of Bulgakov's works, enabling them to be thawed out, as it were, and still have the freshness to influence the writers of the late 20th century, is a tribute to his brilliance.

Many have remarked on the foresight Bulgakov shows in A Dog's Heart. By the end the professor is warning that his creation is more dangerous than ridiculous; that he has created something diabolical in its savagery. Bulgakov seems to anticipate the bloody, fratricidal war which was about to begin within the Soviet communist party, which would end with Stalin triumphant.

Foresight has its limits. The great secret of Stalin's success was that he always managed to be more wicked than anyone in Russia imagined a leader could be. He operated in his own free space of evil beyond the most ridiculous conspiracy theory, let alone the imagination of the most imaginative of writers.

For a novelist who takes as his theme the future woes of his country, the act of prophecy has two parts: the imaginative construction of a likely future, and a kind of charm against that future actually coming about. The two exclude each other. If the prophecy fails to come true, the writer may comfort himself with the thought that his writing formed part of the reason his society was able to evade its fulfilment. In Bulgakov's case, the novelist's success as a prophet signified his doom as a novelist within his lifetime.

· This is from the introduction to a new edition of A Dog's Heart, to be published next month by Penguin.