On prophetic Bulgakov and the situation when pigs and dogs are masters over the fate of a nation

In a way, Mikhail Bulgakov was either a psychic or prophet. His Heart of a Dog story was a nasty, yet also intelligent and funny satire on the Soviet system, which preceded Orwell's 1984 pigs, through whom the socialist and the capitalist systems providentially/prophetically converged, fused and confused each other with the new boss turning up to be the old boss, but with some pigs added to the rich men's VIP club. In Bulgakov, it is actually an anti-Soviet physician (intellectual) who produces the "new man" of the NEP, a hybrid of a man and a beast who is a vulgar response to Machiavelli's liberal hybrid of the man and the beast in the person of the new prince.

Bulgakov's dog prophecy has been strangely fulfilled by Life herself (and with the usual irony and twists that accompany these cases). Bulgakov's Citizen Sharik, synonymous with the Slavic "pestry" (multicolored) tied to the Slavic word for dog (pes), has turned into Russia's Sobchak and a whole pen of sobchakite bitches and dogs in which the base, the vulgar, and the obscene defines the liberal rulers, the rich and the powerful, "the bold and beautiful" of Russia.

Or did I forget to say that Sobach's father is held to be "the [native] father of Russia's colonial constitution" adopted under Yeltsin?


In Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, the revenge for the "outrages" of the socialist system is carried out by Satan himself on behalf/request of Jesus himself. And it is Satan under whose special protection the Faustian Russian Master is placed together with his lover Margarita. The Master is a man who "can't fight," as one critic put it, while it is the woman who becomes the instrument and the executor of the revenge. Her night ecstasy of riding naked on a pig of a man is telling. That's apparently where two symbols, the dog and the pig, merge together.

I only hope that Moscow did not get its idea of the desired place of Novorossiya from the concluding "happy" limbo of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita or the frozen, eternal Hell to which he condemned Pontius Pilate on the Moon.