Russia and its World
Russia in all its aspects has always exerted a pull on me. Its history, art, music, food, landscapes, dress in all varied ethnic glory, and, above all, its literature have a special access to my attention. A major challenge is Russia’s colossal size and diversity of geography. Another continual surprise is the number of its distinctive peoples, each with unique folkways and histories. Russia has had some epic totalitarian regimes over its long history — but it also has been the home of some of the world’s greatest, most creative, and most influential anarchist philosophers. Russia is big enough and complex enough to handle all sorts of contradictions and paradoxes — and to claim them all proudly (and fatalistically, a classic Russian trait).
Over the years I have noticed that my store has become home to a great range of literature, fiction and nonfiction, of the Russian soul and mind and heart. I share it here and may update it as often as possible.
Heart of a Dog
Heart of a Dog
This hilarious, brilliantly inventive novel by the author of The Master and Margarita tells the story of a scroungy Moscow mongrel named Sharik. Thanks to the skills of a renowned Soviet scientist and the transplanted pituitary gland and testes of a petty criminal, Sharik is transformed into a lecherous, vulgar man who spouts Engels and inevitably finds his niche in the bureaucracy as the government official in charge of purging the city of cats.
Heart of a Dog, written in 1925, remained unpublished in the Soviet Union until 1987. Its satire is as ferocious and timely now as when it was written.
Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1891. At the outbreak of World War I, Bulgakov joined the Red Cross, and he graduated from Kiev University medical school in 1916. After graduation, Bulgakov joined the White Army, which opposed the rising Bolshevik presence in Russia, and he served as a field doctor in the Caucuses during the Civil War. After his family was forced into exile, in Paris, when the Soviets secured the government, Bulgakov became a journalist.
He began to write more and more in the 1920s, yet government censorship hindered his efforts and by 1929 his writing career was all but destroyed. In 1931, Bulgakov and his third wife settled in the Presnensky District in Moscow. It was here that he would spend the last decade of his life writing the great work The Master and Margarita, about the widespread corruption of the Soviet state. The work was published posthumously by Bulgakov’s wife, in 1966, although it circulated as samizdat for some time before. Other notable works include The White Guard, written in 1924, but published posthumously, and Heart of a Dog (1925), about a professor who turns a dog into a man, and is an indictment against Stalinism. Bulgakov died in 1940 due to a genetic kidney disease.