The Heart Of A Dog (Panther S.) - Tapa blanda

A rich successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and attempts a scientific first by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. A distinctly worryingly human animal is now on the loose, and the professor's hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. An absurd and superbly comic story, this classic novel can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.

Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was born in Kiev on 15 May, 1891. He trained and briefly practised as a doctor, but in 1920 decided to devote himself to literature. He settled in Moscow, and began by earning a living as a freelance journalist. In 1925 he completed The Heart of a Dog, which remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987. Throughout his life he encountered problems with his the censors. His novel The White Guard was successfully dramatised as "The Days of the Turbins" in 1926, but was later suppressed. By 1930, worn down by the political climate, he wrote to Stalin begging to be allowed to emigrate. Instead Stalin telephone him personally and offered to arrange a job for him at the Moscow Arts Theatre. There, Bulgakov wrote a number of plays and a novel, Black Snow, in which he satirises Stanislavsky. In 1938, the year before contracting a fatal illness, he completed The Master and Margarita, his prose masterpiece. In 1966-7, thanks to the persistence of his widow, Yelena Sergeyevna Bulgakova, it finally appeared in the Russian literary journal, Movska, and was published in full in 1973. Bulgakov died in 1930.