Heart of a Dog

[Erratus]

So I have to read Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov this semester. I hadn't ever heard of it before but reading the first few pages it clearly takes place in the Soviet Union. Read some brief stuff online about it and they said that it mocks the notion that people became selfless in the Soviet Union. Wondering what people here thought about it if they read it before.

[cenv]

Read it several years ago -- from what I remember, it's a critique of Soviet bureaucracy in general and especially the idea of the New Soviet man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man). While it's true that socialism will lead to qualitative changes in people's psychological structure (what exactly these changes will be is an interesting and under-discussed question), the CPSU's vision of the "New Soviet man" wasn't fundamentally different than capitalism's vision of an obedient worker who has internalized bourgeois morality; in fact, it's the same idea taken a step further. Bulgakov's work is even flimsier than the idea it seeks to critique though -- its essentially a restatement of the argument that communism inevitably fails because people are innately greedy and that workers have no business making decisions about how society is run. That said, it does raise some valid points about the disparity between the CPSU's promises and the realities of the bureaucratization of socialism.