A brilliant short story; a satire of unparalleled quality that exposes the flawed system of human interactions that existed in Soviet Russia. A homeless dog is adopted by a self-made scientist who specializes in the transfer of organs between different species. The unsuspecting 'Sharik' is given the heart of an alcoholic; slowly the transformation into a physical human being begins. The metamorphosis however is flawed. Sharik (meaning Ball) never achieves the humanity that the professor was seeking. Sharik gets a job at an animal shelter where he strangles cats and thinks back to the good old times when 'we strangled cats all day long'. This is only a taste of his misbehavior as he abuses the Soviet system and provides a metaphor of how the revolution changed people into somothing supposedly greater, but in reality into less than what they were before.