A stray dog, bedraggled and weary, is about to perish on a cold Moscow night when it is found by a rich and successful medical professor who takes it home. The professor is already involved in the process of rejuvenating people through hormonal implantation and now he is about to embark on a strange experiment. He transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead man into the dog s body. Gradually the dog begins to change into half-animal, half-man, a creature which the professor calls Poligraph Poligraphovich Sharik. Sharik now has his own agenda. He fits very well into the new proletarian society and soon turns the professor s hitherto respectable life into a nightmare beyond endurance. Bulgakov s short novel succeeds both as a wonderfully high-spirited piece of comic fiction and as an absurdist parable of life in a Soviet society determined to remake its citizens through social experimentation.