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This street portrait of Professor Preobrazhensky and the dog Sharikov from Mikhail Bulgakov’s popular novella The Heart of a Dog is one of many Bulgakov-related works of street art that were done in Moscow in 2014 by the 33 Plus 1 project as part of the Best City in the World festival. At least nine portraits were created in thin layers of plaster slapped on regular city walls. The plaster “canvas” was then inscribed, if you will, with an image, usually using the edge of a spatula-type instrument. To the fullest I can determine, the series was created by two artists, Pavel Shugurov and Pavel Zyumkin. Also, to the best I can determine, the entire series included images of Begemot, Azazelo, Margarita, Annushka and Korolyov from The Master and Margarita; Preobrazhensky, Shvonder and Sharikov from The Heart of a Dog; and Ivan the Terrible from the play Ivan Vasilievich. Many of the works are located in courtyards or archways tucked away from view. Many, like this one, are in the Arbat region, but some are in other places in the old, historic city center. At least one of them (Annushka) was vandalized; I don’t know how many remain intact now. This one of Professor Preobrazhensky, in excellent shape, is located on a long, open wall at 3 Krivoarbatsky Lane, in front of building or corpus No. 2. You can see photos and read background stories about them (if you have Russian) on several websites, including Live Journal and the 33+1 website. Somebody named Valera who apparently was carrying around a very big black magic marker, or even a thin brush and paint, sort of claimed authorship of the work. Don’t believe him or her. It isn’t true.
While The Master and Margarita is, hands-down, Bulgakov’s most beloved work, The Heart of a Dog does not lag far behind it. A film of huge cult popularity was made in 1988 by Vladimir Bortko. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this film, to this day, runs 2 or 3 times a month on some Russian TV channel. Probably even more than that if we were to include all the regional Russian TV channels that show films. I run across it constantly as I channel surf, trying to avoid the bile and lies that dominate Russian TV these days. If you want to watch that film online, you can do so through several online cinema sites, including ivi.ru. The film is shot in a kind of sepia two-tone and it stars some very good actors, including Yevgeny Yevstigneev (as Preobrazhensky) and Boris Plotnikov.
Before the film was made, the novella debuted in performance at the Moscow Young Spectator Theater, where Henrietta Yanovskaya unveiled her dramatization in 1987. It was a monstrously successful production that toured the world and drew audiences for decades. Shortly thereafter a second dramatization showed up on the stage of the Stanislavsky Theater, right around the corner from the Young Spectator Theater. So for years and years there were two popular productions of the same work playing side-by-side in theaters located essentially in the same city block.
It’s probably worth explaining a thing or two about the work for Russian literature neophytes. It tells the story of a professor during the Russian Civil War who ignores the mayhem around him while continuing with his scientific experiments. He turns a dog, Sharik (or Ball), into a human, Sharikov. In step, if not in agreement, with the new Soviet state whose goal is to remake mankind and raise it to new levels, Preobrazhensky wants to show that animals can become human. Ultimately all he proves is that a human created out of a kind stray dog is a beast, indeed. Bulgakov’s tale, originally written in 1925 (though not published), seemed to predict early on that nothing would come of the Soviet experiment. For that reason it was banned for decades, and Yanovskaya’s production was the first to bring it to a wide audience simultaneous to the first-ever official publication in 1987.
In a book called What Was That? a fabulous dual memoir published by Yanovskaya and her husband Kama Ginkas in 2014, Yanovskaya wrote how “Bulgakov lived inside that time, while I staged it 60 years after it was written. I was older than he was at that moment and I knew more than he did. I also knew more about the further fate of Preobrazhensky and poor Shvonder. Rage and hatred boiled inside Bulgakov. I had no hatred. I believed all of us were the children who came of the union of Preobrazhensky, Sharikov and Shvonder. They were our parents; I was not about to judge them. When you talk about parents you speak only in terms of sorrow and tenderness. There are degrees of Sharikov, Preobrazhensky and the idealistic Shvonder living in every one of us in this country.”
Russian Culture in Landmarks 