In June, when Black Lives Matter riots erupted in American cities, conservatives began rereading Tom Wolfe for insides on race relations. I, too, dusted off my copy of Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. But once BLM and Antifa moved on to toppling monuments, I wanted a different kind of wisdom, something that dissects not the hypocrisy and venality of the “social justice” mindset, but the phenomenal stupidity of revolutionary consciousness. So I reached for one of the most extraordinary works of Soviet-period Russian literature, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog.
Bulgakov was born in 1891 in Kiev, son of a theology professor, and a grandson of two Orthodox clergymen. He graduated from a medical faculty, quickly embarking on a successful career as a doctor. He started writing during the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and soon left the medical profession entirely.
Despite the frankly reactionary themes of his work, Bolshevik censors permitted publication of some of the writer’s books and production of his plays. Throughout the 1920s in particular his plays were the major draw of the Moscow Art Theater, practically keeping it alive. It took authorities another decade to raise a generation of socialist writers, and in the meantime they had to settle for the likes of Bulgakov.
The author died from kidney disease in 1940, failing to finalize multiple revisions of The Master and Margarita. Although the novel is widely considered to be his signature work, it at times feels self-indulgent and both overedited and incomplete. The storyline of Heart of a Dog, on the other hand, is perfectly developed, with every line, every syllable in its intended place—a true masterpiece. It’s also the best reactionary work of literature ever written.
Heart of a Dog was one of Bulgakov’s books that was censored during his lifetime. Completed in 1925, the manuscript was not only rejected, but at one point seized from the author. Fortunately, it was returned several years later, enabling its publication abroad in the 1960s and its replication in samizdat. The book officially appeared in the Soviet Union only in 1987, during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika. The following year it was made into a film directed by Vladimir Bortko. Both novella and movie immediately gained cult status.
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