If you'd like some more info on Bulgakov, including a few photographs, see a web page I made for the Washington, DC area Swarthmore Alumni Book Club. It discusses Master and Margarita, but other things as well (entirely optional!).

As I mentioned in class, my daughter has been home sick all week, and I wound up reading this book in Russian, so if I ask a question that doesn't make sense given the edition and translation you read that is why. If you have any questions about the original Russian, I am particularly well prepared to answer them this time.

Questions for reading:

1. As you begin reading, at what point do you realize that the center of consciousness of narration is a dog?
2. How is this dog's experience presented? Have you read anything comparable?
3. Doctor Preobrazhensky has a talking name that suggests his origins: his father was a high-ranking priest, and the name means "Transfiguration" (pre- means 're-' or 'trans-'; obraz = 'figure' or 'form'). What does that suggest?
4. Ivan Arnol'dovich Bormental' is clearly not from a Russian family: later in the book we learn that his father was a fairly well-placed official in Vilno/Vilna/Vil'nius (Lithuania), and his German-sounding last name suggests he is a Baltic German. (Lots of Germans came to the Baltic Republics in the days of the Livonian Knights.) Later in the story, the two doctors speak in German so that Sharikov won't understand what they're saying. Any interesting associations there?
   [Not really relevant but fun: when I googled "Bormental'" in Russian, the first many hits were for "Doctor Bormental'" - but not from the Bulgakov story: he's a contemporary doctor, and the medical center that bears his name was fined for false advertising.]
5. And Sharik's name (as common as "Fido") means "little ball" or "little sphere." (I think it's the same name as the dog Ilyushenka in Brothers Karamazovthinks he has killed by feeding him a pin hidden in a piece of bread, though that dog is renamed "Perezvon," which means "resounding sound" - but this may be reading too much into what's a very common name.)
6. What is Sharik's relationship to language - spoken and written? How does this change when he becomes Sharikov?
7. The name Klim (held by the low-life whose organs go into Sharik) means "meek, humble" - any connection there?
8. My mother (born in 1929, lived in England till 1954) used to make cracks about monkey glands: has any of you heard about that quack fad from the 1920s?
9. What might the Soviet censors have objected to in this story?
10. What sort of picture of the Russian and then Soviet class system emerges as you read?
11. What do we see of the government or other high-ranking figures? (Are they moral and admirable?)
12. Preobrazhensky keeps singing (off key) lines from a piece by Tchaikovsky, "Don Juan," whose libretto was a dramatic poem written by A. K. Tolstoy. (See, it's all actually connected!) What do you know about the myth or the wandering plot of Don Juan, and what light might it cast on this novel?
13. As always, how is the science? How about the medical procedures?
14. Why would anyone want to carry out this kind of experiment?
15. One of the first rumors to spread about the results of the experiments claims that a Martian is in Obukhov Alley! (Note that Bulgakov himself lived in the Prechistenka area, where this story is set: "Prechistenka" refers to the biggest church in the neighborhood, one that celebrates... the Immaculate Conception.)
16. How does the pair of doctors, Preobrazhensky and Bormental', compare to Persikov and Ivanov in "The Fatal Eggs"?
17. What's the image of the media (mostly newspapers, still) - could you compare their hashing of reality with what Preobrazhensky does to the poor dog?
18. I found two references to Faust, though they'll be on different pages in your edition: what does it suggest that Preobrazhensky himself thinks of what he's doing in those terms? (And not in terms of Frankenstein?)
19. Any special significance to the many mirrors and panes of glass in the apartment?
20. "Polygraph" suggests an early kind of mass production of texts - it's from a calendar in Preobrazhensky's reception room (but probably the name of the printer, not of one of the saints whose names used to be listed on the days when they were celebrated - and indeed often given to children born on those days). What would it tell you about the crude proletarian Sharikov that he'd be named for a kind of printer's press? (For those of you who know Walter Benjamin's writings: do you think Bulgakov would agree with his warm [and Marxist] evaluation of the meaning of mechanical reproduction?) Is there any additional message, besides the fun, when the cook Darya Petrovna calls him Telegraph Telegraphovich? What effect soes the absurd suggestion that the self-named man had a father with the same [non-]name create?
21. How does Preobrazhensky handle the responsibility for the man he has created?
22. How does gender work inside the apartment - versus the way it works outside the apartment?
23. How does species work inside and outside the apartment?
24. What is the moral of the story?

Return to the syllabus for Russian and East European Science Fiction.