Book description
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY ANDREY KURKOV
A rich, successful Moscow professor befriends a stray dog and
attempts a scientific first by transplanting into it the testicles and
pituitary gland of a recently deceased man. A distinctly worryingly
human animal is now on the loose, and the professor's hitherto
respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. An absurd and
superbly comic story, this classic novel can also be read as a fierce
parable of the Russian Revolution.
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was born and educated in Kiev where he
graduated as a doctor in 1916. He rapidly abandoned medicine to write
some of the greatest Russian literature of this century. After a
lifetime at odds with the stultifying Soviet regime, he died
impoverished and blind in 1940, shortly after completing his
masterpiece,
The Master and Margarita
. None of his major fiction was published during his lifetime.
