Analyzing Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov Character in “Heart of a Dog” by Mikhail Bulgakov
In what ways does Sharik embody the Russian Revolution’s Arc?
The Heart Of A Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. Vintage Classics.
After reading Bulgakov’s The Heart Of A Dog, I was struck by the defiant, wonderfully comedic story, written in 1925 at the height of the Soviet New Economic Policy. I found the prose humorous and Bulgakov’s sharp and multi-layered critique of Bolshevik Ideology to be fascinating and compelling. I decided to write a short literary essay on the most interesting character in my eyes: the dog-turned-human-animal “Sharik” as an extended allegory for the 1917 Russian Revolution.
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Animals are no stranger to Bulgakov’s works – they often emerge as twisted, half-human incarnations of demons or mysterious forces created by human beings. The evil, bloodthirsty reptiles with a “distinctly human cruelty” in their eyes in The Fatal Eggs (1924) immediately come to mind, and the monstrous black cat, “Behemoth”, who wreaks havoc in the streets of Moscow in The Master and Margarita (1966-1967). In Diaboliad, the abominable metamorphosis of a bureaucrat into a phosphorescent-eyed black cat is used as a symbol of the degeneration of Bolshevik society into dehumanized individuals. These transformations of humans into animals in Bulgakov’s stories are rarely simply degradations to a baser, impulse-driven nature but instead expressions of the extent to which human nature has deviated from its genuine essence (Gussago, 2019).
Such metamorphosis – and the deviation of human nature as a direct consequence – is exemplified in Bulgakov’s The Heart Of A Dog. In his 1968 satirical work, the process of dehumanization is reversed: a rich, successful Moscow professor, Professor Preobrazhensky, befriends a stray dog and transplants into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. By this process, the dog, Sharik, or by the ridiculous new moniker he chooses for himself, Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, takes on human speech, qualities, and appearance. He becomes a “grotesque, beastlike individual” (Gussago, 2019). He swears without reason, is rude and aggressive, yet retains his animalistic qualities: hating cats and sleeping in the kitchen, to name a few. Similar to The Fatal Eggs, The Heart of A Dog tells the tale of a failed scientific experiment. In both, they caution the dangers of unfettered, unchecked scientific ambition and the nature of humanity; in both, they act as vehicles for satirical critique against the prevailing Soviet regime. As such, this short literary essay seeks to explore the following question: “In what ways does Sharik embody the Russian Revolution’s Arc?”
The character Sharik is utilized by Bulgakov as a symbol of the Russian people before, during, and after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. The novel begins with the thoughts of an unnamed dog, who we are later introduced to as Sharik, as named by the interlocutors of Soviet Society. He is a pitiful, starving mongrel of a dog. In the dead of winter, with a “snowstorm moaning a requiem”, he had boiling water thrown on him by a cruel proletarian cook at the People’s Central Economic Soviet when he was scavenging for food. Because the water “scaled right under (his) fur”, there was “nothing to keep the cold out on (his) left side”. Accepting his fate, he accepted that he would “die in the doorway… despair overcame him… he was so bitter and sick at heart, so lonely and terrified that little dog’s tears, like pimples, trickled down from his eyes”. Sharik’s state of vagrancy and pitiful living conditions are characteristic of the living standards of the newly formed Soviet state, in which the vast majority of people were starving and extremely dissatisfied with the ruling class. His use of a proletarian cook expresses the fact that this damage was administered by the revolutionaries in power at the time.
Secondly, we are introduced to the character of Professor Philip Philippovich and his assistant, Dr. Ivan Arnoldovich Bormenthal. Bulgakov personifies them as what remained of the intellectuals and the elite ruling class after the Russian Revolution. This can be seen by his apartment, which was an anomaly of Russian housing space after the revolution: he is “living, alone, in seven rooms”. Furthermore, he had a “servant room” and a “dining room”, leading to the building committee's outrage (“No one in Moscow has a dining room”). The righteous anger he feels is a direct parallel to the elite’s disagreement with the new Bolshevik mandates, specifically the decree on land, which abolished private ownership of land, and the abolition of classes and civil ranks (Britannica, 2025). Similarly, the new building committee parallels the new Bolshevik government, who seek to make him “give up” his “dining room voluntarily”, in an attempt to redistribute the housing more in a more egalitarian manner. Professor Philippovich, in his staunch dismissals of the committee and outright refusal to give up his space, embodies the values of the elite ruling class in the Tsarist autocracy – he admits that he “does not like the proletariat”. This can be seen when “the girl” on the housing committee states with a deep sigh that “if (he) weren’t world-famous and if (he) weren’t being protected by certain people in the most disgusting way”, he “should be arrested”. Within this vein, he is reflective of the few elites that managed to keep their privileges in the wake of the revolution because of their vast network of connections.
Now, we come to the Le vif du sujet, or the “heart” of the argument. It can be seen that Professor Philippovich’s radical experiment to transplant human characteristics onto Sharik the dog is an extended allegory for the radical shift and transformation of Russian society following the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy and the establishment of the Soviet Union. Specifically, Sharik feels a “sense of foreboding” on the day of the surgery, “tremors of anxiety” and a “sense of chill” that Bulgakov utilizes as a metaphor for the pervasive unrest and instability amongst Russian society because of the economic hardship and inequality in Russia, all exacerbated by Russia's involvement in World War I. When he is forcefully “dragged” into the consulting room, the extreme gruesomeness and goriness of the surgery is emblematic of Bulgakov’s critique of the crude violence and viciousness through which the Bolsheviks rose to power. The violence of the procedure is evident through the savage diction: “Sharik's body was pulled apart by hooks, scissors, and little clamps”, Phillip “sawed through the skull as though he were making a lady’s fretwork sewing-basket”. Furthermore, the fact that the human that is transplanted onto Sharik's body is an uneducated, aggressive criminal highlights the Bolshevik’s state of mind – as brutish, frenzied, wholeheartedly unfit to lead.
Sharik survives the procedure and begins to exhibit human tendencies as time goes by. Here, the extended allegory of Sharik’s metamorphosis as a representation of the Russian Revolution continues. However, he is portrayed, and by extension the Bolsheviks, as crude and unsophisticated – “His swearing is methodical, uninterrupted and apparently totally meaningless”. This has a “very depressing effect on Philip”, and he becomes “unwell.”; to me, this reads as the pre-revolutionary elite’s reaction to their perceived barbarism of Bolshevik rule. While loyal to the cause, the Bolsheviks had to marshal the unlettered peasants and lower classes to keep their revolution alive. They pledged to educate the masses, but only within strict ideological fences, pruning away any lesson that failed to serve the party line. Bulgakov stages this dogmatic schooling in Sharik: he rebuffs every civility Professor Preobrazhensky and Dr. Bormenthal try to teach him and insists on christening himself Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov – a name as clumsy and defiant as the system that produced it. Moreover, Sharik exhibits the Bolshevik ideology and mentality, defiantly opposing his “maker”, Phillip. At a dinner time setting, he exclaims: “You act just as if you were on parade here… honestly, you stuffed shirts act as if it was still the days of tsarism”. Later, he states that he “won’t go to the theatre”. When asked why, he states, “hell, it’s just rot… … talk, talk. Pure counter-revolution”.
Sharikov’s outburst at the dinner table crystallises Bulgakov’s satire of revolutionary swagger: he wields stock phrases of proletarian indignation (“stuffed shirts,” “tsarism”, “counter-revolution”) like blunt cudgels. The irony is double-edged. First, the vocabulary he brandishes has filtered through the very bourgeois channels he professes to despise—newspaper editorials, committee minutes, the overheard cant of Party bureaucrats. Second, by accusing Professor Preobrazhensky of parading “as if it were still the days of tsarism,” Sharikov unwittingly exposes his dependence on a hierarchy every bit as rigid as the one he condemns. The physician’s apartment functions as a miniature state: Preobrazhensky is its monarch, Bormenthal the loyal minister, and the household staff a residual aristocracy of manners. When Sharikov barges in, he does not abolish this structure so much as vulgarise it – installing himself at the apex not through merit, but through the brute fact of his creation. This is reminiscent of the infusion of the peasantry into the Bolshevik cause, in which the lower classes, harbouring resentment towards the elite, began purging anyone opposed to the Bolshevik cause. Bulgakov shows this through Sharikov’s appointment to “director of the sub-section for purging the city of Moscow of stray animals (cats, etc.) of the Moscow Communal Property Administration”. Transformed into a chaotic, repulsive schemer, Sharikov is enlisted to root out anyone the Bolsheviks brand “undesirable.” His metamorphosis reaches its peak when he denounces Philip Philippovich to the authorities for supposed counterrevolutionary intrigues. Luck spares the professor: the complaint lands on the desk of a devoted patient, who discreetly warns him and blocks any investigation. That betrayal becomes the last straw, prompting Dr. Bormenthal and the professor to reverse the experiment and restore Sharikov to his original canine state.
The novel ends with a sinister, exciting scene, where the professor orders Sharikov out of the flat. Bulgakov writes that “it was Sharikov himself who invited his death”, drawing a “revolver on Bormenthal. Within seconds, he was suffocated by Bormenthal, and they regressed Sharikov back into dog form. Sharikov’s regression into the scruffy Sharik affirms the idea that a mongrel remains a mongrel. Flesh can be rearranged to mimic refinement, yet the fundamental nature beneath persists unchanged. Bulgakov drives this point home when, faced with the Criminal Police, Professor Preobrazhensky admits that science “has not yet found the means of turning animals into people. I tried, but unsuccessfully, as you can see. He talked and then he began to revert to his primitive state. Atavism”. Bulgakov’s writing of the reversion of Sharik into his primitive dog form speaks to his firm belief that a reversion of the Russian revolution was necessary, and that once such a reversion was done, the Russian proletariat would understand that they were much happier before – indicative of the “warm, comfortable thoughts flowing through the dog’s mind”. As he falls asleep, the professor, the “grey-haired magician,” sings a song connoting great pride and sympathy to the Tsarist regime. “To the banks of the sacred Nile…”.
In conclusion, Bulgakov’s transformation of the stray Sharik into the Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov only to strip him back again effectively echoes his satirical critique of the ineffectiveness of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Bolshevik rule. Each stage of the metamorphosis exposes how violence, coercion, and dogma disfigure both individual character and national culture, until the experiment collapses under the weight of its crudity. By ending where he began – Sharik once more a mongrel curled safely at the professor’s feet – Bulgakov declares the Bolshevik project not progressive but cyclic, an ill-conceived surgery. The novella’s bitter humour thus condenses a sweeping historical verdict: when power pursues perfection through force, it spawns only louder barking, leaving genuine humanity like reason, civility, and compassion waiting outside in the snow.
Works Cited:
Bulgakov, Mikhail. Heart of a Dog. Trans. Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Grove P, 1994.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Russian-Revolution
https://dc.cod.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgireferer=&httpsredir=1&article=1053&context=essay
