‘One can find time for everything if one is never in a hurry,’ explained his host didactically.

So I might be the only person I know who doesn’t absolutely love The Master and Margarita, but I did really like this really bizarre little novella. This story is a kind of Pygmalion, a kind of Frankenstein, a kind of George Schuyler’s Black No More, and a touch of the episode of Futurama where Bender becomes human.

This story starts with a dog thinking upon his own situation, eating trash, living rough on the street, and sleeping in the cold. He is brought into the warm house of a scientist and is immediately grateful and excited. He is also party to a number of different conversations of truly bourgeois, if not explicitly political conversations of people lamenting the recent revolution. He is then subject to an experiment that transfers a pituitary gland of a human into his brain. This triggers a significant change in him where he becomes more and more physically human (as a result of the hormones contained in the gland) and as he does, he quickly realizes that becoming human-like and being human are not the same thing. He is not allowed to still act like a dog…chasing cats and humping legs.

(It reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAuolj8pXlY)

Anyway, he reaches a kind of a crescendo and he slowly rescinds back into dog form.

This novel has a brilliant conservative streak hidden as Soviet critique, and is positioned very interestingly close to the actual revolution/still among the fallout. It’s pretty on the nose to have the dog represent a recently risen proletariat worker now brought unto equality.

I cringe a little at that concept (though not at how it would all bear out), but also this book is really funny…so.

(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Heart-Dog-Mikhail-Bulgakov-ebook/dp/B01DV1Y7LW)