Heart of a Dog

Heart of a Dog (, translit. Sobachye serdtse) is a black-and-white 1988 Soviet television film directed by Vladimir Bortko. It is based on Mikhail Bulgakov's novel Heart of a Dog. Premiering show of the film aired on 20 November 1988 at 18:45 on the Central Television Programme One and aired on 1989 at 8:00 PM on the ABC. The film consisted of two episodes. The novel written in 1925 was censored in the Soviet Union, but during perestroika, it was adapted for Soviet television. Plot The film is set in Moscow not long after the October Revolution. A complaining stray dog looks for food and shelter. A well-off and well-known surgeon and professor, Philipp Philippovich Preobrazhensky, happens to need a dog and, with a piece of sausage, lures the animal to his large house with an annexed practice. The dog is named Sharik and well taken care of by the doctor's maids, but he still wonders why he is there. He finds out too late that he is needed as a test animal. The doctor implants a pituitary gland and testicles of a recently-deceased alcoholic and petty criminal, Klim Chugunkin, into Sharik. Sharik proceeds to become more and more human during the following days. After his transition to human is complete, it turns out that he inherited all the negative traits of the donor (bad manners, aggressiveness, use of profanity, heavy drinking), but he still hates cats. He picks for himself the absurd name Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov, starts working at the "Moscow Cleansing Sub-Department responsible for eliminating vagrant quadrupeds (cats, etc.)," and associating with revolutionaries, who plot to drive the doctor out of his big apartment. Eventually, Sharikov turns life in the doctor's house into a nightmare by stealing money, breaking his furniture, flooding the apartment during a cat chase, and blackmailing into marriage a girl he met at the cinema.