Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
This is a very sad description of Soviet times in the 1920s, with some obvious parallels with our current masters American censors.
by Dmitry Gubin
[REGNUM] One hundred years ago, at the end of March – beginning of April 1925, it became finally clear to Mikhail Bulgakov, an employee of the newspaper of the People's Commissariat of Railways, Gudok: the new science fiction story, Heart of a Dog, would not be published in the near or distant future – and perhaps never at all.
Until the very last moment, Mikhail Afanasyevich had hope that Glavlit (the preliminary censorship body) would perhaps allow publication in the cooperative almanac Nedra, which was printed in the NEPman publishing house Mospoligraf. After all, back then, in the interregnum that followed Lenin's death, the censor's scissors were not particularly zealous.
The Bolshevik leaders had more important matters to attend to - “the question of consolidation was at stake”: who would take the vacant place at the head of the party, and who would slide down the career ladder.
On January 2, 1925, at the same time as he was conceiving the story about Philipp Philippovich Preobrazhensky and Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, Bulgakov noted in his diary :
“(Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars Alexei) Rykov got drunk after Lenin’s death for two reasons: firstly, out of grief, and secondly, out of joy.”
"Trotsky is now written as 'Troy' - the Central Committee has dropped out."
All these jokes were told to me by that sly, freckled fox Lezhnev in the evening, when I was sitting with my wife, drafting the text of the contract for the continuation of "The White Guard" in "Russia". My wife was sitting, reading Ehrenburg's novel... We didn't have a penny of money."
"The sly, freckled fox" — Zurich University graduate Isaiah Lezhnev — was the permanent editor of the Soviet magazine "Russia", "the first non-party organ", which, under the supervision of the Central Committee of the Party, was published for "fellow travelers", Smena Vekh members and other suspicious individuals. At the same time, Lezhnev wrote for the Paris-Berlin magazine "Smena Vekh" — something like that was still possible in Soviet Russia.
One of his fellow travelers, Bulgakov, wrote about his editor: “By the grace of God, he managed to publish (in the years 1922–1925!) a private thick magazine… on the outskirts of Moscow in a nice and dirty apartment.”
But it was not by God's grace that this happened. When in 1922 the head of the Comintern Grigory Zinoviev demanded that the hotbed of sedition be closed, "Russia" was saved by Lenin's personal protection. The intelligentsia "specialists" still required a special approach, and they were entitled to "the final piece of paper, armor." This fantastic state of affairs continued even after the untimely death of the leader of the world proletariat. Thus, in 1925, in Red Moscow, Lezhnev's magazine published "The White Guard."
A NICE APARTMENT AND THE TERRIBLE FATE OF ITS INHABITANTS
From Bulgakov’s diary for January 4, 1925:
“All of Moscow was covered in thaw mud, and I spent the whole day traveling, inviting guests... I saw the lovely Lyamins and gave them a copy of Rossiya with the White Guard.”
The Bulgakovs (Mikhail Afanasyevich and his then wife Lyubov Belozerskaya ) were friends with the literary scholar Nikolai Lyamin and his wife, children's book illustrator Natalia Ushakova. It was here, in an apartment on Savelyevsky Lane near Prechistenka, that they held "Bulgakov readings." "Everything, or almost everything, that he wrote, he read at the Lyamins'," Belozerskaya recalled. Among other things, the writer brought drafts of "Heart of a Dog" here.
On the other hand, not only the "dear Lyamins" themselves, but also their apartment, house and surrounding courtyards played the role of co-authors of Bulgakov's books. In the "enormous, extremely neglected hallway" there was a huge chest - this iron-clad chest would later materialize on the pages of "The Master and Margarita", in the scene of Ivan Bezdomny chasing Woland.
In the early 1930s, Lyamin spent a "funny" two weeks under arrest - the police arrested him on suspicion of possessing currency. Why not use this curious episode for the story of the house manager Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy?
Natalya Ushakova, with an artist's eye, suggested in which gateway with an "iron grate swaying in the wind" (between houses No. 6 and No. 8 on Prechistenka) Professor Preobrazhensky could have fed sausage to the "unknown incognito dog prince" - the dog Sharik. And this gateway was written into the book.
Bulgakov, as a joke for his own people, left in the text of "Heart of a Dog", as they would say now, an Easter egg. This episode was not included in the final version of the story, but, by the way, was included in the script of Vladimir Bortko's film.
Remember the scene in which an aging lady comes to Professor Preobrazhensky "for rejuvenation", to whom Philip Philipovich promises to transplant monkey ovaries? The lady complains about her young lover:
"I swear, Professor, this Moritz... He is my only passion. He is a card sharper. All of Moscow knows him. He cannot miss a single vile milliner! After all, he is so devilishly young!"
Nikolai Lyamin's first wife, a fashion designer, left him for a mutual friend, Vladimir Emilievich Moritz, who was, of course, not a card sharper, but a theater critic and translator known to all of intelligentsia Moscow.
Natalya Ushakova outlived her husband by almost half a century and, already during perestroika, she told about the “Bulgakov readings” and how Mikhail Afanasyevich hoped that “Heart of a Dog” could be read in Soviet newspapers (or rather, magazines).
After all, as was said, the times were fantastic. And the story about Professor Preobrazhensky, on the contrary, was almost documentary.
"WELLS' HEROES ARE NONSENSE COMPARED TO YOU!"
In 1923, the London Strand Magazine published Arthur Conan Doyle's story " The Man on All Fours ". Sherlock Holmes investigates the reasons for the strange behavior of anthropologist Professor Presbury and finds out: the professor decided to "rejuvenate" himself before marrying a young lady, injected himself with "monkey serum" and got so carried away that he almost turned into a wild beast.
But don't rush to suspect Bulgakov of plagiarism. Professor Presbury and Professor Preobrazhensky - and, perhaps, Professor Persikov from "The Fatal Eggs" - had a real, not literary prototype. It is also possible that the then king of science fiction, Herbert Wells, copied his crazy geniuses from him. Mentioned, by the way, in both "The Fatal Eggs" and in the film based on "Heart of a Dog".
This prototype is a French surgeon, Dr. Serge Voronoff, aka Sergei (née Samuil) Abramovich Voronov, a native of the Russian Empire. Since the late 1890s, he has been developing xenotransplantation — the transplantation of animal organs into humans.
The Russian illustrated magazine Iskra (not to be confused with the Bolshevik publication) wrote in July 1914:
"At the French Medical Academy, our compatriot, Doctor Sergei Voronov, made a sensational report about an operation he had performed in his clinic on a 14-year-old idiot boy... Voronov gave this boy an inoculation of a monkey's thymus gland. The success exceeded expectations. The boy's eyes came alive, and his mental abilities appeared."
The medical community, to which Dr. Bulgakov belonged, knew about Dr. Voronoff's work "Life; a study of means of restoring vital energy and prolonging life" published in New York in 1920. And immediately before the idea for "Heart of a Dog" appeared, in 1924, Voronoff published an article "Forty-three transplants from ape to man" and was preparing another book on the same topic.
"2 PRIESTS AND 15 EMPLOYEES WERE REJUVENATED"
The Franco-Russian "magician and wizard" had followers in Soviet Russia, with curious surnames.
The Krestyanskaya Gazeta newspaper wrote in its issue of January 12, 1924, that in Tver there were those who continued the work of Voronov and the pioneer of European sexology, the Austrian Eugen Steinach, who tried to achieve the effect of rejuvenation from vasectomy. These were a certain "Professor Voskresensky and Doctor Uspensky" - Professor Preobrazhensky, we note, also has a "priestly" surname, after all, he is the son of the cathedral archpriest.
Doctors Voskresensky and Uspensky “rejuvenated 10 workers, 5 doctors, 2 priests, 1 merchant and more than 15 Soviet employees in a year and a half; the monkey nursery provided the material for the operations,” reported the Krestyanskaya Gazeta.
Correspondence from Moscow could well have appeared nearby: " A child who plays the violin was recently born in Obukhovsky Lane. Only with the help of modern medical means was he able to come into this world. In our photo, Professor F. F. Preobrazhensky...".
But let us note that the experimental physiologist Leonid Voskresensky and the surgeon Vasily Uspensky were real people. Voskresensky later became the first director of the Sukhumi monkey nursery, Uspensky developed surgery in his native Kalinin (Tver), during the war he headed an evacuation hospital and, it is possible, became the prototype of one of the heroes of "The Tale of a Real Man".
"THE MONKEYS WILL DEFEAT THE BOLSHEVIKS"
The idea that experiments could result not in human rejuvenation, but in the complete humanization of an animal, was also not taken out of thin air.
Bulgakov knew well - from Kiev - Viktor Shklovsky, who recounted in his " Sentimental Journey " the rumors that circulated in the city during the Civil War: "They said that the English... had already landed herds of monkeys trained in all the rules of military order. They said that these monkeys could not be propagandized, that they went on the attack without fear, that they would defeat the Bolsheviks."
Rumors are rumors, but since the 1910s, Russian biologist Ilya Ivanov has been seriously trying to breed a hybrid of man and ape, which was written about not only in scientific journals, but also in the press, including the tabloid press.
And it was in 1924 that Professor Ivanov, who was then working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, received permission to work at a chimpanzee nursery in French Guinea. The project fell through, but, most surprisingly, the scientist received a grant from the Soviet government. Anatoly Lunacharsky favored the project of creating a new man, and through the manager of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR, Lenin's former personal secretary Nikolai Gorbunov, Ivanov, who had left for Europe, was given 10,000 dollars at that time.
Later, the professor conducted unsuccessful experiments on "artificial insemination of female chimpanzees with human sperm" already in the USSR, in the Sukhumi monkey house. It would be surprising if Bulgakov had not heard about the strange story of Dr. Ivanov.
And in general, the spirit of the times was filled with fantasy.
Not long ago, the Bolsheviks seriously counted on turning the Civil War into a world revolution. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who was no longer considered an eccentric from Kaluga, wrote articles for the interplanetary communications section of the Red Army Air Forces Academy.
And the old social democrat Alexander Bogdanov, a long-time comrade and opponent of Lenin (and, by the way, a science fiction writer, the author of the book "The Feast of Immortality") promoted his own theory of life extension and rejuvenation - through healing the body with young blood. To this end, in 1926 Bogdanov - with the support of Lenin's sister Maria Ulyanova and the People's Commissar for Foreign Trade, the USSR's plenipotentiary representative in Britain and France Leonid Krasin - headed the Institute of Blood Transfusion, now the National Medical Research Center of Hematology.
"THESE THINGS ARE MUCH MORE DANGEROUS."
The early Soviet "festival of immortality" did not last long. Bogdanov, who died suddenly in 1928 during a blood exchange with a young student, was, one might say, lucky. Time was inexorably changing, and the "fantasists" of politics and science were being replaced by pragmatists of Lenin's (and in fact, Stalin's) call.
In 1930, Professor Ilya Ivanov, who had failed to breed a new man, was sent into exile to Alma-Ata, where he died. Ivanov never bred "Sharikov" from a chimpanzee. Lenin's personal secretary, Academician Nikolai Gorbunov, through whom "sponsorship funds" were sent to Ivanov, was convicted on October 7, 1938, and executed the same day.
As for Professor Voskresensky, in 1931 he simply… disappeared, as if he were a tenant of the evil apartment No. 50. Journalist Vadim Nesterov notes that the official biographies of the scientist end with the mysterious phrase: “In 1931, he left his job at the nursery and left Sukhumi,” after which the traces are lost.
In the new tragic times there was no room left for ideologically dubious fantasy. The fate of the story about the professor who “did not like the proletariat” was one of the first warning signs in this sense.
Bulgakov wrote "Heart of a Dog" quickly.
He began in January 1925, and in March he was already reading two parts of the story at a meeting of the "Nikitin Subbotniks" in Moscow. And he was immediately "on the list". In two reports, transmitted by an OGPU employee who was present at the readings, the most outrageous quotes were given: about the devastation in people's heads, about the advice not to read "Soviet newspapers, especially Pravda" before lunch, etc.
“My personal opinion: such things, read in the most brilliant Moscow literary circle, are much more dangerous than the useless and harmless speeches of 101st-class writers at meetings of the All-Russian Union of Poets,” the agent shared.
It was becoming obvious that Glavlit would not prevail over the story. The last hope was left on the editor of the cooperative almanac "Nedra", the old Bolshevik Nikolai Angarsky, who was able to "push through" Bulgakov's stories "The Devil's Play" and "The Fatal Eggs". But "artillery" heavier than Angarsky, a party member since 1903, was connected.
Lev Kamenev, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), spoke out against the publication, stating: “This is a sharp pamphlet on modern times; it should not be published under any circumstances.”
On May 7, 1926, a search was conducted in Bulgakov's apartment, the manuscript of the writer's diary and two typewritten copies of "Heart of a Dog" were confiscated. Only three years later, with the assistance of Maxim Gorky, the confiscated texts were returned to the author.
The theme of "Heart of a Dog" came up later as well.
In November 1933, Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova wrote in her diary: “The writer (Sergey) Budantsev called and said that the physiologist (Sergey) Bryukhonenko, who is working on the issue of reviving a dead organism and is conducting experiments with a severed dog’s head, would very much like to meet Mikhail Afanasyevich.” But it was obvious that there could be no talk of taking the story out of the drawer.
Meanwhile, the flywheel of repression was grinding down Bulgakov’s close friends and acquaintances, literary officials and party functionaries, supporters and opponents of the publication.
One day in 1931, the theater critic and literary "card sharper" Moritz heard footsteps on the stairs - they had come to arrest him. The NKVD was investigating the idealistic circle of the philosopher and poet Georgy Shpet, and the theater critic, along with other "fellow travelers of the Soviet power", was sent into exile in the Arkhangelsk region.
In 1936, the hospitable owner of a literary salon, Nikolai Lyamin, was arrested on charges of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. This was before the Great Terror began, and he was also “lucky.” After three years in one of the Ukhtpechlag camps, he was released. In February 1940, Lyamin managed to visit his dying friend Maku, Mikhail Bulgakov. In 1941, he was arrested again, under the same article. Nikolai Nikolaevich Lyamin died of exhaustion in the Saratov NKVD prison in October 1942.
Politburo member Kamenev, who blocked the publication of the story about Sharikov, was convicted in the case of the "Trotskyist-Zinoviev Center" and shot. In 1940, Nikolai Angarsky, who promoted the story, was arrested as an "English and German spy" and a year later shot at the Kommunarka firing range.
CITIZEN SHARIKOV AND MR. BOBIKOv
The manuscript did not burn - until the writer's death in 1940 and for more than a quarter of a century after it, the story lay in the archive. And, apparently, it continued to be perceived "toxically", as a pamphlet on communism and its project of the "new man". Even though this project was taken seriously only in the early Soviet years and, perhaps, during the Khrushchev thaw.
If "The Master and Margarita" was officially published in 1967 (albeit in a truncated form) in the Soviet magazine "Moscow", then "Heart of a Dog" went into "tamizdat"
| …Soviet literature clandestinely published abroad… |
a year later. As Elena Sergeevna explained, the text of the manuscript was copied without her knowledge and against her will - and copied with errors. An additional "minus to karma" was that the story was published by the West German magazine "Grani", associated with NTS.
| The National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, a Russian anticommunist organization founded by Russian emigrés in 1930 in Yugoslavia on the principles of individuality and Christian tolerance. |
In 1976, the first screen adaptation was filmed in the West - a film co-produced by Italy and the FRG with Max von Sydow as Preobrazhensky. In German distribution, the film was called "Why Mr. Bobikov Barks" - for some reason, that's how Sharikov was renamed. It was possible to avoid "cranberries": director Alberto Lattauda had already filmed "The Captain's Daughter" and Chekhov's "The Steppe". But he exaggerated the colors. For example, when Bobikov comes to get a job at the "cleaning" and says that he wants to "work with cats", he is told: "There are no more of them here, they've all been eaten."
Another curious detail: Lattauda (given the leftist sentiments in Europe in the 1960s and 70s) said that his target was European fascism, not Russian Bolshevism. The "fascist" turned out to be the vivisectionist Preobrazhensky, and the good-natured scoundrel Sharikov-Bobikov was the victim.
Vladimir Bortko gave assessments closer to the author's in the film adaptation, shown at the height of perestroika, in November 1988. Just a year after the first publication of the story in its homeland, in the magazine "Znamya".
The director's discoveries and the skill of the actors - the master Yevgeny Yevstigneyev and the then unknown Vladimir Tolokonnikov - made the story even more ingrained in the public consciousness than Bulgakov's other works.
As befits a masterpiece, it had both admirers and haters.
In an interview with the newspaper Sobesednik, Bortko recalled a quarter of a century after the premiere: "I opened the newspapers and was stunned. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the quotes, but you can look up the archive and you'll see that I'm close to the text... It said something like this: 'Nobody has ever filmed such crap as "Heart of a Dog". For this, the director should have not only his hands cut off, but his legs as well, and be thrown off a bridge.'
THE POLYGRAPH-DEVIL AND VLADIMIR ILYICH PREOBRAZHENSKY
The article “Secret Writing in the Heart of a Dog,” published in 1987 in New York by a certain S. Ioffe, went viral in late Soviet society.
There, the "veils were already torn off": Preobrazhensky is Lenin, Sharikov, for whom Klim Chugunkin served as the material, is, of course, Stalin. Bormental is Trotsky, Shvonder is Kamenev. And Dzerzhinsky and Zinoviev were even "travestied" into the servant Darya Petrovna and the maid Zina. With the advent of the Internet, this conspiracy theory migrated there. It can easily be found on social networks.
There are also quotes from the fantasy-prone publicist Boris Sokolov, author of the 1996 Bulgakov Encyclopedia:
"The process of a dog's transformation into a human covers the period from December 24 to January 6, from Catholic to Orthodox Christmas Eve... The new man Sharikov is born on the night of January 6-7 - on Orthodox Christmas. But Polygraph Polygraphovich is not the incarnation of Christ, but of the devil."
But beyond the mystical and conspiracy theories, Bortko's film itself, and along with it the original source, became not just one of the many "revelations" of the perestroika era, but also remained in memory for decades, now becoming a source of memes and videos on social networks.
Sharikov and Shvonder are mentioned in everyday conversations in Russia much more often than Pechorin and Chatsky. It is impossible to imagine Russians without “Heart of a Dog” in a hundred years. Even those who have not read it. After all, they also know what “Abyrvalg” is and that the word “suffocated” is pronounced eight times. The question of whether it is possible to change and improve human nature by “humanizing the beast” remains open in the 21st century.
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