Zinaida Prokofyevna Bounina

Zinaida Prokofievna Bunina, generally called Zina, is a woman working in Professor Preobrazhensky’s household. Her role is chiefly practical: she carries out the professor’s instructions, looks after the dog who becomes Sharikov, and helps contain the consequences of his disruptive behavior. Across these episodes, she is both a familiar presence in domestic routines and one of the household members caught up in the political and administrative conflict surrounding Sharikov.

Identity and Household Role

The professor addresses her as Zina and entrusts her with immediate tasks. When he examines the injured dog and decides to take him into the consulting room, he orders her to bring him there and fetch a white coat. Zina whistles and gestures for the dog to follow, leading him through the corridor and into the room. The dog enters reluctantly, but her part in the episode is presented as that of a household worker carrying out the professor’s medical instructions, not as the person who devised the treatment.

The household’s routines also make her responsible for managing the dog’s presence in shared spaces. After he destroys an owl, she points out the damage and asks the professor to teach him not to spoil things. The dog is distressed when his nose is rubbed against the remains, but the professor’s response is not expulsion: he orders the owl sent to a taxidermist and gives money for a collar and lead. The next day, Zina takes the collared dog out on a lead. That walk along Obukhov Street and Prechistenka Street marks a change in how the household presents him to others: he is no longer simply an unwelcome stray, but an animal visibly associated with a prosperous master.

Care and Household Crises

Zina’s work continues as the dog changes. In the professor’s case notes, Sharik’s growing ability to understand speech is recorded alongside the household’s attempts to teach him ordinary conduct. One entry describes his first clearly contextual response to an instruction about food scraps and records the professor’s realization that he understands what is said to him. The same account notes that the household is teaching him not to swear. Zina is part of the domestic setting in which this transformation unfolds, although the evidence does not assign her a role in the experiment itself.

Later, when an incident involving water leaves the bathroom door blocked, Zina joins Bormenthal and Darya Petrovna in pressing a rolled carpet against it while the porter climbs through the transom. The arrangement is improvised and collective: household members hold the carpet in place as they try to contain the immediate mess. The scene shows the practical burden that Sharikov’s behavior imposes on the people who live and work in the apartment, without identifying Zina as its cause or assigning her independent authority over him.

Naming and Administrative Conflict

Zina is present during the dispute over the transformed creature’s name and papers. When the professor objects to a calendar, she removes it while visibly frightened. Shvonder then proposes that the professor write a certificate identifying the bearer as Poligraph Poligraphovich Sharikov and describing the apartment as his birthplace. The professor rejects the premise that Sharikov was born in the ordinary sense. The episode places Zina among the household witnesses to an attempt to turn an extraordinary origin into a legible official identity.

The naming struggle has consequences beyond the apartment. Sharikov later signs a denunciation accusing the professor of threatening Shvonder, making counter-revolutionary speeches, and ordering Zina to burn Engels; the document also accuses Bormenthal of secretly living in the flat without registration. Zina’s name appears not merely as part of the household’s private life but as material in a political allegation. The evidence establishes that the claim is made in the denunciation; it does not establish that the alleged order occurred.

Accusation and Narrative Significance

When officials arrive and read out charges, they accuse the professor, Bormenthal, Zina, and Darya Ivanova of murdering Poligraph Poligraphovich Sharikov, identified in the charge as a sub-department controller of the City Cleansing Department. The announcement is followed by Zina’s sobbing and general commotion. The professor answers by treating Sharikov’s identity as absurd, referring instead to the dog on whom he operated. Zina’s presence in the accusation makes the household’s conflict suddenly public and legal, while the professor’s response rejects the official name and status on which the charge depends.

The available episodes give Zina no extended account of her private motives or independent ambitions. Her significance instead comes through repeated acts of household labor and through the escalating documents that enlist her in a dispute over Sharikov’s identity. She first helps bring the stray into the professor’s care, later takes him into public view on a lead, and ultimately appears among those accused in the name of the transformed creature. The progression links ordinary domestic service to the larger collision between the household and the institutions seeking to define and judge it.