Sunday, March 18, 2012

Russian literature example of Speculative Fiction

I started learning about the Speculative Fiction at Dawson college thinking that I've never met this kind of literature before, but I was wrong. Right after I've discovered the definition and some examples of it one book that I've read back in Belarus jumped into my mind.
It is a novel called "Heart of a Dog" by Mikhail Bulgakov. Even though main focus of the Wikipedia article I have linked here is how this novel criticizes and mocks the newly instated USSR, I believe that there is a lot more to this book that simple "opposition" to the regime.
The novel itself is a tragic story of a street dog who was picked up to perform a medical experiment of transplanting human organs into the animal body. As the result, this dog started turning into a human being. This creature started rapidly evolving from the role of the dog to the role of a member of a human society. It still had all the memories of his "dog" life, all the emotions and sympathies, but now he was expected to participate in the complex social interactions, which were even more complicated by the fact that the activists of the communist party became interested in him and started alluring him into the communist ideas. However, the doctor who "created" him was a strong proponent of the old imperial state, which complicated things even further.
The story ends when doctor decides that the experiment was a success and places the old glands into this "creature", thus turning him back into a dog.
This novel can give a lot of new topics to ponder and investigate, especially in the light of new developments in gene-engineering and medicine.
Here is a little image of this "creature" taken from the movie, which is as good as the book is.

No comments:

Post a Comment