Dog heart

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dog heart (original Russian title Собачье сердце , transcribed Sobatschje serdze ) is a short story by the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakow . It is a cynical satire on the "new Soviet people" propagated by the Soviet Union and is about a coarse, nefarious "dog person" who was created through an experiment and who develops into a nightmare for its creator.

The work was written in 1925, at the time of the New Economic Policy (NEP), when capitalist economic mechanisms were partially reintroduced in the Soviet Union, which resulted in violent political disputes and struggles and also resulted in a fundamental change in the party itself: The Communist idealist took a back seat in favor of the communist bureaucrat. Although the NEP led to a relatively moderate attitude towards writers and artists, dog-heart , with its unmistakable allegorical allusions to contradictions between original revolutionary hopes, official propaganda and the realities of the NEP era, was banned. It was not until 1987, 47 years after the author's death, that the story could appear in the Soviet Union.

action

The story takes place in Moscow in the winter of 1924/25 , mainly in the apartment of the successful and wealthy surgeon Professor Filipp Filippowitsch Preobrazhensky , who specializes in rejuvenating operations. In one experiment, he implanted together with his assistant Doctor Ivan Arnoldovich Bormental the stray dog Bello , the pituitary gland and testicles of recently deceased alcoholic and petty criminal Klim Grigorievich Tschugunkin . Contrary to expectations, the dog survives the operation, gradually heals and acquires more and more human features in the next few days: it loses its coat, grows, walks on its hind legs and begins to speak. After his transformation into a human is completed, it turns out that he inherited the negative traits of the donor: bad manners, aggressiveness, vulgar language and a strong propensity for alcohol. The new person gives himself the absurd name Polygraf Polygrafowitsch Bellow , finally takes a job as head of the subdivision for cleaning up the city of Moscow from stray animals (cats, etc.) in the city cleaning of the Moscow communal services and associates more and more with communists who try , Bellow off against its dissident Creator. With his behavior, he turns life in the professor's apartment into a nightmare, which leads him and his assistant to reverse the transformation: Bellow is operated on again and turns back into a dog. Bello cannot remember what happened and is destined to lead a comfortable life in the professor's apartment.

The first part is told from the perspective of the dog Bello and describes how the emaciated and injured dog is lured into the apartment by the professor, cared for and fed abundantly. As a result, the dog follows everyday life in the professor's apartment and fears for his good life in a heated house with plenty of food if he has misbehaved again. With the start of the operation, the perspective changes to the omniscient author. The next section, describing the dog's transformation to bellow after the operation, consists of texts from Doctor Bormental's diary. The rest of the story is again from the omniscient writer's perspective. Only in the last two sections of the epilogue does Bello become the narrator again.

Subject matter and interpretation

Bulgakow spun out the homunculus theme in the prose work Hundeherz (cf. Goethe's Faust or Shelley's Frankenstein ) and combined this with mocking allusions to the “new proletarian man”. Numerous analogies are drawn in literary interpretation, especially to Goethe's Faust .

As in Dog's Heart , animals play an essential role in many of Bulgakov's works. They are particularly suitable for criticizing in encrypted form.

The narrative was interpreted on the one hand as a satire on the Soviet utopian attempts to fundamentally improve human nature through the creation of the New Soviet Man , and on the other hand as an ironic statement on the attempts of scientists to intervene in nature. A widely accepted interpretation is that Bulgakov is trying to point out all of the inadequacies of the system that allows a human with the intelligence of a dog to perform important tasks.

According to the Oxford Slavist Julie Curtis, Bellow is a rebirth of the disgusting proletarian , while the professor represents an exaggerated vision of the bourgeois dream .

Names play an important role in history: Preobrashenski's name is derived from the Russian word for art of transformation . Bello's Russian name, Sharik , is a widely used dog name in Russian. The first and last name of the "dog man" Polygraf Polygrafowitsch can be roughly translated as printer, son of printing (printing is also known as the printing trade ) and continues a tradition of nonsensical double names in Russian literature based on Gogol's hero Akakij Akakijewitsch in Der Coat goes back. The name is also a satire on a fashion in the early Soviet era of giving children names related to the revolution, to (industrial) production and to “progress” in general. Nevertheless, in history the name was chosen according to the ancient Russian tradition of consulting the calendar, which indicated March 4th as the Polygrave's name day . His last name in the Russian original is based on the dog name Sharikov. The name of the drinking donor of the human implants is Tschugunkin , a derivative of cast iron and a possible parody of Stalin's name, which is likely to stand for the steel one .

The living role model for the figure of Professor Preobrazhensky was most likely the Russian-French surgeon Serge Voronoff , who gained fame through his experiments in implanting testicles and thyroid glands from animals. Bulgakov himself became part of the Moscow intelligentsia depicted in the book , which had come to terms with the Soviet power that was dependent on it and lived on as if on an island after he married the aristocratic daughter Lyubov Yevgenevna Belozerskaya in 1924 . In these circles he also met doctors who could also have served as models for the characters in the book.

Preobrazhensky, who as a “converter” gives the suffering dog a beautiful but unfree life, is also likely to represent a parody of Lenin as Russian Faust .

Publication and reception

Bulgakow wrote dog heart in the first three months of 1925, but could not achieve a publication as a single volume or as part of his collection of stories Teufeliaden ( Russian Дьяволиада ). For fear of censorship , the publisher Boris Leontjew rejected the publication and in a letter to Bulgakov gave the verdict of the influential party member Lev Kamenev on the dog's heart : “It is a caustic attack on our current circumstances and is by no means eligible for publication into consideration ... ". The anthology Teufeliaden , which was criticized as “ anti- revolutionary” , with its five stories of unequal length (including the fatal eggs ) was published in the summer of 1925 without a dog's heart . The book was confiscated shortly afterwards, but reissued in 1926.

In 1926, Bulgakov wrote a play for the Chekhov Art Theater in Moscow based on the story . The performances were canceled after the OGPU secret police confiscated the manuscript and copies on May 7th. Thanks to the support of Maxim Gorki , the author received the manuscript back from Hundeherz in 1929 . In the Soviet Union, Dog Heart was n't published until 1987, more than half a century after the work was completed. As a samizdat , however, the story was already circulated in the Soviet Union.

An exile publisher in Frankfurt am Main published the story for the first time in 1968. However, this text and the first translations did not follow Bulgakov's last transcript.

For a long time , Hundeherz was only available on the German book market in the anthology Teufeliaden , with a few other stories. In 2013, a new translation by Alexander Nitzberg entitled Das Hundische Herz , based on the last version of Bulgakov's text, was published.

Film adaptations

Dog heart was produced in 1976 in an Italian-German production as Why Herr Bobikow barks? (Original title: Cuore di cane ) filmed. In the main role Max von Sydow played Professor Preobrashenski.

Shortly after the official publication of the prose work in the Soviet Union, the very successful film Sobache serdtse or Sobatschje serdze ( Russian Собачье сердце ) appeared in 1988 , which was shot by Vladimir Bortko in sepia . Important scenes that made this film famous were shot from the unusually deep perspective of a dog. The portrayal of Professor Preobrazhensky is one of the most distinctive roles of the Russian actor Yevgeny Evstigneyev .

Musical performances

The comic opera The Murder of Comrade Sharik (1973) by William Bergsma and Alexander Raskatow's opera Hundeherz (2008/09) are based on this narrative.

See also

literature

  • German edition: Michail Bulgakow: Teufeliaden. Narratives . Luchterhand collection 62094. Luchterhand, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-630-62094-9 (with comments on literary history by Ralf Schröder ).
  • New translation: Mikhail Bulgakov: The dog's heart . Galiani Verlag, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-86971-069-3 (based on the last edition).
  • Edythe C. Haber: Mikhail Bulgakov. The early years . In: Russian Research Center studies . tape 90 . Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1998, ISBN 0-674-57418-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Marc Slonim: The Soviet literature. An introduction (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 418). Kröner, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-520-41801-0 , p. 47.
  2. ^ Marc Slonim: The Soviet literature. An introduction (= Kröner's pocket edition. Volume 418). Kröner, Stuttgart 1972, ISBN 3-520-41801-0 , p. 49.
  3. ^ Ralf Schröder: Notes on the history of literature . In: Michail Bulgakow (ed.): Teufeliaden - stories . Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-353-00945-0 , p. 316 .
  4. ^ Ralf Schröder: Notes on the history of literature . In: Michail Bulgakow (ed.): Teufeliaden - stories . Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-353-00945-0 , p. 318 .
  5. Reinhard Lauer : Brief history of Russian literature . CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-52825-2 , p. 212 .
  6. a b c d Ralf Schröder: Notes on the history of literature . In: Michail Bulgakow (ed.): Teufeliaden - stories . Luchterhand Collection, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-630-62094-9 , p. 300-360 (written in Berlin 1994).
  7. a b c Antonia Häfner: Social criticism using the example of the dog Bello in the dog's heart by Michail Bulgakow , Heidelberg 2006 (seminar paper).
  8. ^ Wilborn Hampton: Stage: 'Heart of a Dog' . In: The New York Times . February 1, 1988.
  9. ^ Encyclopedia of Soviet Writers: Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasievich. Retrieved October 30, 2013 .
  10. a b J. AE Curtis: The Heart of a Dog . In: Neil Cornwell, Nicole Christian (Eds.): Reference guide to Russian literature . Taylor & Francis, London, Chicago 1998, ISBN 1-884964-10-9 , pp. 203 f .
  11. Tatiana Batenewa: В погоне за здоровьем человек готов породниться с любой скотиной (In the pursuit of immortality, people are ready to become relatives of animals) . In: Izvestia . (unknown publication date).
  12. ^ Elsbeth Wolffheim: Michail Bulgakow . Rowohlt Taschenbuchverlag, Reinbek near Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-499-50526-6 , p. 57 .
  13. Michail Bulgakow, edited by Julie Curtis .: Manuscripts don't burn: a biography in letters and diaries , S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-10-011334-9 , p. 96.
  14. Michail Bulgakow, edited by Julie Curtis .: Manuscripts don't burn: a biography in letters and diaries , S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-10-011334-9 , p. 86.
  15. Nicola Steiner: How do you translate a virtuoso of bizarre language images? In: Swiss radio and television . May 21, 2013, accessed on May 22, 2013 : “The book was not published at first, the Soviet censorship classified it as counter-revolutionary. One of the consequences of this was that different versions of the text were circulating until the novel was first published in Russian in 1968 by an exile publisher in Frankfurt am Main. "
  16. a b Olga Hochweis: The canine in humans. In: Deutschlandradio Kultur. May 21, 2013, accessed on May 22, 2013 : "Versions were published in western countries in the 1960s, but they are not based on the last version revised by Bulgakov."
  17. Why is Mr. Bobikov barking? (Cuore di cane) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  18. Sobache serdtse in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  19. Sobachye serdtse in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  20. Olga Bugrowa: composer Raskatow - a French Muscovite . Radio "Voice of Russia". 15 March 2013.
  21. Olga Bugrowa: In La Scala there is not only singing, but also barking . Radio "Voice of Russia". March 16, 2013.