SOURCE: "Bureaucratic Brute," in The New York Times Book Review, July 28, 1968, pp. 5, 16.

Sourian is an American critic and novelist. Below, he discusses the political implications of The Heart of a Dog and lauds the story's humor, claiming: "implicit always is a passionate and severe humanity. "

In 1923, Lenin, the tired and ailing wizard of the Revolution, foresaw monstrous possibilities in what he had wrought. In one of his last letters he said, "I am horrified by the bureaucratic procedure of Stalin and Ordjonikidze." In his final letter, written to Stalin himself, he declared, "I must appeal to the Party as a whole and demand your expulsion. You are not fit to be a Communist," and characterized him as an Abdul Hamid with a drunken lust for power.

But it was too late; Lenin's death spared Stalin, and in 1925, in the same month that Mikhail Bulgakov began to write The...