Mayakovsky and Bulgakov: Towards the genesis of the last name Sharikov in the novella A Dog’s Heart [Sobachie serdtse]

Abstract

   For a long time, the origin of the protagonist’s last name in M. Bulgakov’s novella A Dog’s Heart [Sobachie serdtse] has drawn literary scholars as a research subject in its own right. The article hypothesizes and proceeds to prove that Sharikov was not a derivative of a common dog’s name Sharik, but rather a reference to a poem by V. Mayakovsky, whose works appeared alongside those of Bulgakov’s in the journal Krasniy Perets. Among those lines, typically printed as subtitles for cartoons, we can find ‘Unimpressed by the ‘Bolshevik wild fantasies,’ There lived a petit-bourgeois Sharikov…’ There are distinct similarities between the two: both Mayakovsky’s and Bulgakov’s Sharikovs disturb and anger their fellow citizens. However, unlike Mayakovsky, whose ridicule of certain shortcomings stays within the censor-approved limits, Bulgakov ends up with a pamphlet that, ostensibly apolitical, subjects the Bolshevik regime to such scathing criticism that it took sixty years for the book to be published in the writer’s home country. In addition, Artemiev examines V. Kataev’s version of Bulgakov’s meeting Mayakovsky for the first time.