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[FIRST BOOK EDITION OF BULGAKOV’S FANTASY] Sobachie serdtse [i.e. The Heart of the Dog]

Bulgakov, M.

Paris: YMCA-Press, 1969. Item #2056

159 pp. 18,5x13,5 cm. In original illustrated wrappers by Yuri Annenkov. Very good.

First book edition. Scarce.

The novella was completed by the early 1925 and was read to an audience of Nikitina’s Literary Meetings in March 1925. The work was imbued with anti-socialist satire noted by everybody,
and the audience welcomed it warmly. According to an OGPU spy, the first part was heard by 48 people, most of them were writers as well. A year later OGPU searched Bulgakov’s apartment and seized 2 typewritten copies of ‘The Heart of a Dog’ and the writer’s diary. Three years later, all the papers were given back to him, thanks to Maxim Gorky, – Bulgakov burned the diary but kept the novella, with no hope of publication.
After the death of Mikhail Bulgakov in 1940, a commission on his literary heritage was created in the USSR. The widow Elena Shilovskaya (Bulgakova) drew up a plan to return his name to literature, but contemporary politics delayed publications. She succeeded with many works printed since the start of Khrushchev’s Thaw. Thrilled by the publication of ‘Master and Margarita’ (1966-1967), she dreamed about the official Soviet publication of ‘The Heart of the Dog’. She wrote letters to two major foreign publishers (Einaudi and YMCA-Press) asking (or warning) not to publish the work before its release in the USSR. The owner of the Parisian publishing house YMCA-Press, Ivan Morozov, intended to publish “The Heart of a Dog” in 1967 but refused the idea, because of her letter. In 1968, unexpectedly for Elena Shilovskaya, the novella was first published in two magazines: “Student” (London) and “Grani” (Frankfurt), both with a huge amount of typos. ‘Student’ was published at the Flegon Press, known for pirated editions of Soviet authors.

In 1969, after journal publication in Germany and Great Britain, ‘The Heart of a Dog’ was published as a separate book in YMCA-Press. It could also be considered the first authorized edition. The first Soviet publication of the work happened almost twenty years later, in magazine ‘Znamia’ (1987, No. 6).

The first samizdat of “The Heart of a Dog” appeared in the mid-1920s. According to family legend, the editor of the Nedra publishing house, Nikolai Angarsky brought the manuscript to Y. Gembitsky (his relative) with the words: “It’s a brilliant thing, but I won’t have it published, I can bring it in for a few days – read it.” Gembitsky copied the text by hand into a notebook, preserved by his descendants. In the 1960s, Bulgakov readers used the 1969 Paris publication to copy the novella. The work was retyped on a typewriter, photocopies were made in secret laboratories in apartments, and copies were made using copying machines at offices, access to which was strictly regulated.

Besides to contre-revolutionary ideas, ‘The Heart of the Dog’ echoed a popular trend of that time, male rejuvenation surgeries. The most popular among physicians was the Steinach operation i.e. vasectomy. The less common method was transplant of testicles of a younger organism. The main character of “The Heart of a Dog”, Preobrazhensky specialized in this type of surgery.

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