was sitting in his armchair and the dog Sharik, delectably relaxed, lay on the carpet beside the leather sofa. The March mists affected the dog with morning headaches which tormented him along the line of the scar round his head. But the warmth helped, and by evening they no longer troubled him. And now it was getting easier and the thoughts flowing through the dog’s head were sweet and warm.

I was so lucky, so lucky, he thought, drifting off to sleep, indescribably lucky. I’ve really got settled into this flat. Now I’m quite certain there was something odd about my origins. A Newfoundland must have had a hand in it somewhere. My grandmother was a bit of a fly-by-night, God rest her soul, dear old thing. It’s true they’ve made scars all over my head for some reason or other, but that’ll mend. There’s no call to count that against them.

---

There was a faint clink of phials from the distance. The bitten man was tidying up in the cupboards of the consulting room.
The grey-haired magician sat and hummed to himself:
“To the sacred shores of the Nile…”

The dog had seen terrible things. This important man would plunge his hands in slippery gloves into glass jars and fish out brains — a determined man, persistent, always trying for something, cutting, examining, narrowing his eyes and singing: “To the sacred shores of the Nile.”

The End

Commentary

In September 1921, after a short period of about two years in Vladikavkaz with visits to Tiflis, Batum and Kiev and still weak from typhus, Mikhail Bulgakov arrived in Moscow. Life in the capital was very hard at that time, and the future writer was immediately confronted with the problems of finding accommodation and a way of earning a living. “This is the blackest period of my life. My wife and I are starving. Had to ask Uncle (the doctor N. M. Pokrovsky, the brother of Bulgakov’s mother) for some flour, cooking oil and potatoes… Have been all over Moscow — no work,” he wrote in his diary in early February 1922. By then the writer had already changed jobs several times, not of his own volition, of course. His two months in the Literary Department of the People’s Commissariat for Education ended when the department was “disbanded”. The private newspaper for which the future author of The Master and Margarita sold advertisement space “packed up”.

In March 1922 Bulgakov started work as a reporter for the high-circulation daily Rabochy (The Worker). During this period he wrote a great deal for the newspaper Nakanune (On the Eve), which published about thirty of his feuilletons, then contributed for four years to the newspaper Gudok (The Whistle), for which Yuri Olesha and Valentin Katayev wrote feuilletons at this time, as well as Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov at a later stage.

“It was not from a splendid distance that I studied the Moscow of 1921-1924,” Bulgakov wrote. “Oh, no, I lived in it and tramped the length and breadth of the city…” He was repeating, as it were, the experience of the young Chekhov, working for all sorts of newspapers and periodicals and writing lots of sketches, humouresques and notices (mostly under pseudonyms).

Documentary evidence suggests that the autobiographical story Notes Off the Cuff was to have consisted of three parts. The full manuscript has not been found. During Bulgakov’s lifetime Part One was published three times, in the newspaper Nakanune, then in the almanach Vozrozhde-niye (Rebirth) and, in part, in the newspaper Bakinsky Rabochy (The Baku Worker). Another part, without any indication of which one, appeared in the journal Rossiya (Russia). We have made a composite text of Part One based on the three published versions, and this text has been translated for the present volume. Part Two corresponds to the original publication in the journal Rossiya.

With regard to the hypothetical third part (which was actually intended to follow Part One), some specialists believe that the stories “The Unusual Adventures of a Doctor” and “The Bohemian” can be regarded as constituting this. It was this text (but without “The Unusual Adventures of a Doctor”) which the magazine Teatr (Theatre) chose when it published Notes Off the Cuff in 1987 (No. 6).

During these years Bulgakov’s pen eagerly recorded the rapidly changing, incredible and unique reality around him. (“Moscow is a cauldron, in which a new life is stewing. The trouble is that you get stewed too,” he was to write in the sketch “The Capital in a Notebook”.) Bulgakov produced many satirical sketches and articles based on workers’ letters in the mid-1920s. A rich gallery of types, time-servers, nouveau riches and bureaucrats, thronged the pages of his “small prose”.

At the same time he was working on a long novel, The White Guard.
In 1924-1925 the satirical novellas Diaboliad and The Fateful Eggs about contemporary Moscow life were published in the series of literary almanacs called Nedra (The Inner Depths). His attempts to get the third novella, The Heart of a Dog, published were unsuccessful. It did not come out in the Soviet Union until 1987.

These stories form a kind of satirical trilogy. It can be said of all three that they are “fantasy rooted in everyday life”. Bulgakov’s social satire is set against a carefully painted urban backcloth, and ordinary everyday life is closely interwoven with fantasy. In a series of sharp and merciless scenes the author satirises the “diaboliad” of bureaucracy, its lack of culture, its negligence, irresponsibility and aggressive ignorance.

Naturally the significance of Bulgakov’s “fantastic” satires extends beyond these topical issues of his day. The writer’s intention was, using the concrete background of Moscow in the 1920s, to present more important and far-reaching problems.

The Fateful Eggs is one of Bulgakov’s finest works. In subject matter and artistic structure it is easily appreciated by the present-day reader. Experiments that interfere with nature, the misuse of scientific discoveries, the role of pure chance in what appear to be perfectly well-founded and carefully planned undertakings and the unpredictability of human behaviour—all this is portrayed with prophetic clarity.

Critics who belonged to the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers gave the novella a hostile reception. There were also reviews of a different tenor, however. Maxim Gorky praised The Fateful Eggs highly. True, as a great writer he evidently sensed that Bulgakov had not fully exploited the possibilities at the end of the story and drew attention to this. It is interesting that in the first draft the closing chapters of The Fateful Eggs were far less “optimistic”.

It ended with the evacuation of Moscow as hordes of giant boa constrictors advanced on the city. The final scene was of the dead capital with a huge snake wound round the Ivan the Great Bell-Tower. Either the writer himself decided against this ending, or the censor objected to it, for it was changed in the final version. To quote a specialist on Bulgakov, this story “should be read aloud in all gene engineering laboratories and all offices responsible for the work of these laboratories”. It is indeed full of prophetic ideas.

One of the main themes in The Heart of a Dog is that it is impossible to predict the outcome of an experiment involving the human psyche. The ideas of rejuvenation and eugenics, so fashionable in the 1920s, which seemed to open up incredible possibilities for “improving” and “correcting” imperfect human nature, have perhaps an even more topical ring today than sixty years ago. The second half of the twentieth century has witnessed the start of gene engineering and raised the much alarming question of possible abuses when people begin tinkering with the mechanism of the human mind. Bulgakov’s story sounded this alarm as far back as the 1920s.

Another revelation by Bulgakov in this story is the figure of Sharikov. Obviously this was directed primarily against the anarchistic Lumpenproletariat who made capital out of their working-class background and refused to recognise the most elementary rules of civilised behaviour. This powerful and thought-provoking story has by no means lost its relevance today.

Notes

1. “Okhotny Ryad shops…” Trading booths in the middle of old Moscow for the sale of dead and live poultry, wild fowl, meat, fish, berries, mushrooms, etc.
2. Mosselprom — the Moscow association of industrial enterprises for processing agricultural produce.
3. “Eliseyev Bros., ex-owners.” The owners of the largest food shop in pre-revolutionary Moscow.
4. “…Mendeleyev the chemist!” D. I. Mendeleyev (1834-1907), Russian chemist and progressive public figure. Mendeleyev discovered the periodic law of chemical elements, one of the basic laws of natural science.
5. “Just take a walk down the Kuznetsky…” Kuznetsky Most, one of the streets in the centre of Moscow.
6. Nepman — a private entrepreneur or trader in the 1920s, when the Soviet government introduced its New Economic Policy (NEP).
7. “Then again, there’s the Union, the Labour Exchange…” The Union is a reference to the trade union. In the 1920s in the Soviet Union labour exchanges performed certain mediatory operations on the labour market.
8. Yussems — a family of Spanish acrobats who gave guest performances at the Moscow circus during this period.
9. “After all, Madame Lomonosova bore that famous son of hers in Kholmogory…” M. V. Lomonosov (1711-1765), the first Russian natural scientist of world standing, also a poet, artist and historian. Kholmogory — a village in Archangel Province.
10. “They make squirrels out of them and sell them on workers’ credit schemes.” Articles of sham squirrel fur for sale on credit to members of the working class.