Heart of a Dog

Preobrazhensky performs the experimental surgery to test whether human pituitary gland and testicular hormones can transform an animal into a civilized human. The professor believes he can create a new, perfect citizen through surgical intervention, driven by scientific ambition to prove that character and intelligence are determined by organ function rather than upbringing or environment.

The professor's initial interest in Sharik as both companion and test subject hints at his willingness to use the dog for radical experimentation.

Sharik inherits the personality traits of the donor, Klim Chugunkin, a recently deceased alcoholic and petty criminal. The transplanted testicles carry the hormonal and behavioral characteristics of the donor, including his rough manners, aggression, profanity, and volatile temperament. The experiment fails to create a refined gentleman because the donor's nature overwhelms any potential for refinement.

The choice of a deceased alcoholic and criminal as the donor immediately suggests the experiment will produce undesirable results.

After becoming human, Sharikov takes a job with Moscow's department for extermination of stray animals, which serves as dark irony, he was once a stray dog himself. This position connects him to the new Soviet bureaucratic system and represents his assimilation into the regime's machinery, while also reflecting the story's satirical view of Soviet bureaucracy and social climbing.

His quick adaptation to bureaucratic roles shows his willingness to serve the new power structures.

Sharikov attempts to denounce the professor to the Soviet secret police because he sees it as a way to gain power and protect himself from exposure. When his position in the household becomes threatened and his misbehavior is about to be confronted, he turns on his creator, viewing betrayal as a path to favor with the new regime. This act demonstrates that despite his human form, Sharikov retains the criminal opportunism of his donor.

His earlier alliance with the Bolshevist building administration already signaled his willingness to use the regime against those who helped him.

Preobrazhensky decides to reverse the procedure after Sharikov's betrayal and violent confrontation make it clear the experiment has catastrophically failed. Sharikov has become a threat, stealing, destroying property, flooding the apartment, and attempting to have the professor arrested. The reversal represents the professor's recognition that scientific ambition has crossed moral boundaries and must be undone, even at the cost of admitting failure.

The professor's earlier attempts to reform Sharikov foreshadow his eventual decision that the only solution is complete reversal.

After the reversal, Sharik retains only hazy, fragmentary memories of his time as a human. He remembers nothing of the transformation, his life as Sharikov, or his betrayal of the professor. This memory loss allows him to return to a content canine existence without the burden of his human experiences, suggesting the experiment's effects on his identity were superficial rather than deeply rooted.

The film hints throughout that Sharik's human consciousness was artificially imposed rather than organically developed.

The experiment fails because Preobrazhensky incorrectly assumes that transplanting organs alone can create civilization. He believed that pituitary and testicular hormones would produce intelligence and refinement, but the donor's crude nature, the personality embedded in the biological material, overrides any potential for improvement. The film argues that character is not simply biological but shaped by environment, upbringing, and social context, which the professor completely ignored.

The professor's confident belief that surgery alone can solve human flaws foreshadows his blindness to the experiment's fundamental flaw.

The film serves as an allegory for Soviet society and the Bolshevik experiment itself. Just like the professor attempts to transform a dog into a human through radical biological engineering, the Soviet regime attempted to radically transform society through social engineering. Just as Sharikov becomes a crude, power-hungry creature who betrays his creator, the revolution produced opportunistic bureaucrats who corrupted the idealistic goals. The story critiques the belief that wholesale transformation of human nature can succeed through scientific or political intervention.

Sharikov's alliance with the Bolshevist building administration and his attempt to seize the professor's apartment mirrors the new Soviet elite seizing property and power.

Sharikov inherits the donor's hatred of cats, which manifests in one of the film's most chaotic scenes when he chases a cat through the apartment, accidentally flooding the entire living space. This hatred is one of the many behavioral traits transferred from the donor that persists despite the transformation, demonstrating that the transplant carries not just biological functions but entire behavioral patterns and instincts.

The persistence of this petty animalistic hatred highlights how superficial the human transformation really is.

Bulgakov's original novella was written in the 1920s but remained unpublished due to its sharp satire of Soviet ideology. The story's allegory, about radical transformation producing corrupt, power-hungry individuals, directly criticized the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath. The film adaptation, though released in 1988 during glasnost, still carried subversive weight by questioning whether fundamental human nature can be changed through political or scientific intervention, a direct challenge to Marxist ideology.

The professor's failed experiment mirrors the failed promise of creating a New Soviet Man through revolutionary transformation.