"Das hündische Herz" is the German title for Mikhail Bulgakov's novella "Heart of a Dog" ("Собачье сердце"), written in 1925 but suppressed in the Soviet Union and not published there until 1987.
Professor Preobrazhensky, a distinguished Moscow surgeon, takes in a stray dog named Sharik and, in a bold experiment, transplants human testes and a pituitary gland into the animal. Sharik gradually transforms into a man — Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov — but instead of becoming refined, he emerges vulgar, crude, and aggressively opportunistic, quickly attaching himself to the Soviet bureaucracy and turning the professor's life upside down.
Written in the years just after the Russian Revolution, the novella is a biting satire of Soviet social engineering and the fantasy of manufacturing a "New Soviet Man," and of the chaos and moral confusion of the era. Its blend of science-fiction premise, dark comedy, and political allegory made it too dangerous to publish under Stalin, and it circulated only in samizdat for decades before becoming one of Bulgakov's most celebrated works.
