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Mikhail Bulgakov's The Heart Of A Dog

664 Words3 Pages

The Heart of a Dog, by Mikhail Bulgakov, was written in Russia in 1925, which was at the height of the New Economic Policy period. During this time period, the Soviet was obsessed with the idea of creating the perfect man, and Mikhail used his writing platform to create a unique and interesting science-fiction story to examine this soviet goal. In engaging story, The Heart of a Dog, Bulgakov successfully uses science-fiction and his scientific education background to attack this fixed mind-set of the Soviet and the pseudoscientific theory to transform mankind that was believed in the 1920s.
A fun fact about Mikhail Bulgakov is that he studied medicine prior to becoming a writer. In his story The Heart of a Dog and other stories such as The Fatal Eggs, Bulgakov shows a consistent use of pseudoscientific theories throughout the stories. In The Heart of a Dog, Bulgakov uses a pseudoscientifiic theory of transplanting human pituitary glands and testicles onto the dog named Sharikov. The use of this supposition reflected on the 1920s belief of sexual resuscitation through grafting monkey testicles, which Bulgakov may not have been as informed on had he not studied medicine prior to writing. I found this scientific …show more content…

In my opinion, the most captivating aspect of this story was Bulgakov’s savageness to attack these issues regardless of the the violence Stalin had towards many writers that he didn’t agree with. Despite the confusing changes in point of view, I appreciated the message of this story and the way it was written. Bulgakov used his scientific knowledge to write The Heart of a Dog to attack the attempts to create the ideal soviet man through eugenics, and sheds light on the idea that humanity is too flawed to create a perfect

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