By Mikhail Bulgakov (1925)
The Heart of a Dog is terrific fun. I was a bit hesitant because The Master and Margarita is so good, but it didn’t let me down (and continues the obsession with cats, dogs and devilry).
An updating of Frankenstein to Moscow life in the chaos of the 1920s USSR, it follows the misadventures of a dog rescued off the streets and patched up with various bits of fallen (human) comrades.
It’s a brutal satire of the attempts to create a “new socialist man”, but the effect is pretty timelessly funny, with the dog-creature ending up barking soviet propaganda and haphazardly swearing at everyone. Bulgakov saw it confiscated and banned in his lifetime; it’s a considerable mystery that that was the worst that happened to him.