Bormenthal’s case notebook

Bormenthal’s case notebook is both a medical record of the experiment on Sharik and a narrative instrument that makes its changing interpretation visible. Its entries move from the operation’s immediate danger to a decisive diagnostic correction and a formal conclusion, while later scenes show that documentation is entangled with public rumor, political accusation, and the destruction of evidence.

Purpose and Initial Record

The notebook identifies the experimental subject as Sharik, a male mongrel of approximately two years old. The operation is described as an experiment by Professor Preobrazhensky to observe the effects of combined pituitary and testicular transplantation: whether the organs would remain functional in a host organism and whether the procedure would produce cellular rejuvenation. Professor Preobrazhensky performed the operation with Doctor Bormenthal assisting, so the record begins as an account of a planned medical inquiry rather than a settled claim about its outcome.

The immediate postoperative observations undermine any expectation that the experiment is a controlled, uncomplicated demonstration. During the night, Sharik’s pulse repeatedly weakened, and he appeared close to death. Professor Preobrazhensky ordered large doses of camphor injections. This detail makes the notebook register danger as well as procedure: before the later transformation can be analyzed, the record has to track whether the animal will survive at all.

Diagnosis and Changing Interpretation

By January 8, the clinicians had finally agreed on a diagnosis. Professor Preobrazhensky acknowledged that the initial expectation of rejuvenation was mistaken: pituitary transplantation had produced total humanization instead. The notebook stresses the intellectual significance of this correction without treating the unexpected result as a reason to dismiss the discovery. It preserves a change in scientific judgment, not merely the experiment’s surprising outcome.

The entry sets that diagnostic conclusion beside observations of the creature’s first movements through the flat. He walked there for the first time, laughed after looking at an electric light, and entered the study accompanied by Professor Preobrazhensky and Doctor Bormenthal. The notes describe his stance and appearance in terms of a short, poorly proportioned human male. His further laughter, an artificial-seeming smile, and the word “Bourgeois” are recorded alongside methodical, apparently meaningless swearing. Doctor Bormenthal admits that he is not a psychiatrist, marking a limit to what the medical record can confidently explain even as it accumulates observable behavior.

That contrast between precision and uncertainty is central to the notebook’s function. It can identify the subject, state the operation’s purpose, mark a date, and record newly observed speech; it cannot turn every feature of the new organism into a secure interpretation. Its claim to knowledge is therefore strongest where it reports what was done and seen, and more qualified where it attempts to classify the result.

Closure and the Limits of the Case Record

The final note declares that the case notes are concluded and that the new organism must now be studied as such. It lists verbatim speech reports, recordings, and photographs as appendices, and is signed by Doctor Bormenthal, identified as assistant to Professor Preobrazhensky. This formal ending closes the documented case without resolving the broader question of what the creature’s humanization means. The change in classification—from experimental dog to organism requiring study in its own right—is the notebook’s most consequential conclusion.

The documentary closure does not make the records secure. Later, when the household is silent and the consulting-room is lit, the account reaches the notebook indirectly through uncertain testimony: Zina reports seeing Doctor Bormenthal burn one of the blue-bound notebooks containing medical notes on the professor’s patients. The scene does not establish that this was the case notebook itself, and its hearsay framing leaves the precise facts uncertain. It nevertheless introduces the possibility that the experiment’s documentary trace could be deliberately reduced or destroyed, making the preservation of records part of the conflict rather than a neutral background detail.

Records, Rumor, and Official Accusation

The notebook’s medical observations stand apart from the rumors spreading around the experiment. Crowds gather in the street and dogs mass beneath the windows; newspapers circulate conflicting stories, including reports about a Martian and a child supposedly born able to play the violin. These claims are not established by the case notes. Their proximity to the clinical record instead exposes the difference between observation and public invention, while showing how the experiment’s consequences escape the household and become subject to sensational reporting.

An official document later turns record-making into accusation. A paper presented to Professor Preobrazhensky alleges that Sharikov threatened the house committee chairman, possessed a firearm, made counter-revolutionary speeches, and ordered Zinaida Bunina to burn Engels; it also accuses Doctor Bormenthal of secretly living in the flat without registration. The document bears Sharikov’s name and title as a sub-department controller in the City Cleansing Department, and is countersigned by Shvonder as chairman of the house committee. These assertions are the contents of an accusation, not independently verified facts in the notebook. Their formal signatures nevertheless give them institutional force, illustrating how written documents can shape public judgment as decisively as clinical notes shape scientific interpretation.

At the end, the investigators charge Professor Preobrazhensky, Doctor Bormenthal, Zinaida Bunina, and Darya Ivanova with murdering Poligraph Poligraphovich Sharikov, described in the charge as a sub-department controller. Professor Preobrazhensky answers by treating Sharikov as the dog he operated on. The conflict between that response and the official charge recasts the question the notebook had left open: what kind of being the experiment produced, and who has authority to name him. Across the medical record, hearsay, signed denunciation, and final accusation, the story makes documentation consequential but never wholly neutral; each form records some facts, excludes others, and carries its own stakes.