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Here’s a taste of what we’re serving today:

  • What would happen if a dog became human? 🐶

  • PLUS: Extreme Dormancy, Japanese American Immigrants in California, and Smartphones are Bicycles for our Mind.

MFL

What would happen if a dog became human? 🐶

Me (dog) when I become human (not a dog)

Although it might not be the question at the top of everyone’s minds, it certainly was for Mikhail Bulgakov when he wrote Heart of a Dog in 1925.  Set in the early USSR, it is the story of a surgeon, Professor Filip Filippovich Preobrazhensky, and his assistant, Dr Ivan Arnoldovich Bormental, who capture the stray dog Sharik and perform experimental operations on him.  Eventually, by transplanting human organs – in particular, the pituitary gland – into the dog, Sharik turns into a human.  As he gradually gains consciousness, he becomes a fully-fledged human, starts speaking Russian, acquires legal documents and names himself Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov.  However, he soon turns out to be a thief, miscreant and liar who wreaks havoc in the lives of his creators.

Mikhail Bulgakov, born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1891, first trained as a doctor before turning to writing.  Heart of a Dog, along with many other of Bulgakov’s works, was censored and remained unpublished until the 1960s, long after Bulgakov’s death in 1940.

Mikhail Bulgakov

💡 Things to consider

  • What right do humans have to exercise the full power of science? The question of whether Preobrazhensky and Bormental had the right to experiment on Sharik runs throughout the novel.  Is it acceptable to risk an animal life for the advancement of human scientific understanding? Bulgakov certainly suggests that it isn’t, as the Frankenstinian monster that he creates is a clear warning against such experiments.  Bulgakov also draws parallels between experimental surgery and murder, and throughout the process, the dog is terrified for his life.  Where is the line drawn between experimentation and destruction?

    🧟

  • The inhumanity (and inhumaneness) of being human: Contradictorily, from a narrative perspective, Sharik appears to become dehumanisedtour de force of inhumane human behaviour – from people who mistreat Sharik when he is a stray dog at the start of the novel, to the cruel behaviour of Preobrazhensky and Bormental in operating on Sharik, to Sharik’s behaviour himself as a human, Bulgakov makes us wonder whether animals are more humane than humans. when he takes on human form.  The novel can roughly be divided into four sections, with different narrators.  Sharik narrates the first and last sections – the two sections when he is a dog.  When he is a human, he has no narrative voice.  Does this suggest that there is something deeply inhuman in being human? Furthermore, the novel is a

  • How does a dog fit into human social structures? As innovative as the novel is, the same unfortunately cannot be said of Bulgakov’s views on social class.  Coming from an aristocratic family part of the Russian intelligentsia, Bulgakov’s family had fought against the Bolsheviks, and Bulgakov, it appears, still held pre-revolutionary ideals of a society strictly separated into classes.  As such, while he exaggerates and parodies class differences throughout Heart of a Dog, this is not to refute them – rather, it is to highlight their existence.  Therefore, it is perhaps unsurprising that, when Sharik is in human form, Bulgakov attributes him to a lower social class, and depicts him, and other working-class people, as immoral, unintelligent, vulgar and violent, in stark contrast to the upper-class characters such as Preobrazhensky and Bormental who (their immoral experimentation notwithstanding) are presented in much more favourable terms, in particular in regard to their sophistication and intellect.  Is the positioning of the humanoid dog into a lower social class meant to be a comment on the innately base behaviour of animals, or a damning indictment of the lower classes in the USSR?

The real question is: why can’t a dog be both a dog AND sophisticated?!

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That’s it for this week! We’d like to thank this week’s writer: James Pearne (MFL).

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