Professor Preobrazhensky's Faustian experiment in Mikhail Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog"

Abstract

Starting with the self-definition of Mikhail Bulgakov, who saw himself as a “mystical writer”, primarily interested in the dark aspects of man and the “terrible traits” of his own people, this paper examines the deeper, mystical layers of Bulgakov’s satirical-allegorical story “Heart of a Dog”, as wells as its “dark colours”. Along with the focus of the research on the contradictory and ambivalent divine-demonic nature of the main character, Professor Preobrazhensky, and his scientific, quasi-magical-religious experiment, light is also shed on the key similarities between Bulgakov’s story and Goethe’s Faust. Apart from the motivation of Professor Preobrazhensky and the contract by which he strikes a deal with the devil (i. e. former revolutionaries and Bolsheviks), by which he pledges his soul, it is shown that both the beginning and the end of the story have a Faustian intonation. Having reviewed the key differences between “Heart of a Dog’ and Faust, and looking at the reasons why Preobrazhensky – on the eschatological level – will not and cannot be saved, his relationships to God, the immortality of the soul, the heart (feelings) and the spirit are also considered, and, consequentially, to the devil.

            Metaphorical and psychological reading of the story, in place of a literal or allegorical one, reveals the possibility of perceiving the demonic aspect as a part of the main character’s soul. Namely, Preobrazhensky creates Sharikov in his own image and countenance, in the image of that dark, shadowy, demonic part of himself, which S. Freud calls the id (identifying it with the drives and actions of the pleasure principle), while C. G. Jung speaks of the Shadow, the dark side of the human soul, which can be individual, but also collective. Sharik / Sharikov is the epitome and manifestation of precisely these aspects of the professor. At the same time, this is also the Shadow of the Russian man, and neither less nor more the Shadow of the intelligentsia, more precisely, its scientific elite, which suggests that the Bolsheviks and the bourgeoisie, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, high and low culture, centre and margin, elite and demi-monde are inseparable, and that they are the face and reverse side of the same phenomenon and are a part of a single whole.