Philip Preobrazhensky and Shvonder relationship

Philip Preobrazhensky and Shvonder’s relationship is a sustained conflict over the professor’s apartment that grows into a contest between professional independence and the claims of revolutionary-era administrative power. Shvonder approaches as a representative of the building’s management committee, but his efforts to redistribute rooms and formalize Sharikov’s place in Moscow bring him into direct opposition with Preobrazhensky. The dispute repeatedly turns on documents and official categories: who may occupy a room, who may be registered, and whose account of a person or household will prevail.

The committee claims the apartment

Shvonder first appears in this conflict as the head of a new building management committee, accompanied by other committee members. He explains that they have come following a general tenants’ meeting charged with increasing occupancy in the building. Preobrazhensky’s first response is disbelief and alarm, expressed not in abstract political terms but through concern for the apartment’s practical arrangements, including its central heating. The contrast establishes the competing grounds of their authority: Shvonder speaks for a collective mandate, while Preobrazhensky treats the apartment as a working and domestic space whose arrangement has concrete consequences.

The committee’s demand is specific. It asks Preobrazhensky, in the name of labour discipline, to surrender his dining-room voluntarily, adding that no one in Moscow has a dining-room. Shvonder also presses for the consulting-room to be given up. Preobrazhensky lists the apartment’s seven rooms by function—waiting-room, library, dining-room, study, consulting-room, operating theatre, bedroom, and servant’s room—and insists that the apartment is exempt. For him, the layout is not simply a display of privilege: it enables his medical work and the ordinary life of the household. The committee’s attempt to treat the dining-room and consulting-room as available surplus therefore threatens both domestic use and professional practice.

Preobrazhensky rejects the proposed rearrangement with a deliberately practical counterexample: under the committee’s plan, he would eat in the bedroom, read in the consulting-room, dress in the hall, operate in the servant’s room, and examine patients in the dining-room. He declares that he will continue to eat in the dining-room and operate in the operating theatre. Shvonder responds that the committee will lodge a complaint with higher authority because of his refusal. The exchange makes their conflict more than a disagreement about convenience: each side invokes a different form of legitimacy, and the committee’s collective decision is presented as a basis for intervention in a household whose owner claims exemption.

A threat answered with higher authority

When the committee’s demands appear to threaten his ability to work, Preobrazhensky raises the stakes. He says that he will close his practice, shut up the apartment, go to Sochi, and give the keys to Shvonder, who can operate in his place. The threat is pointedly conditional and exposes the practical absurdity of the committee’s position: if the professor’s working rooms are taken from him, the service he provides cannot simply be transferred by handing over the keys.

The committee members stand silent while Preobrazhensky speaks on the telephone to Pyotr Alexandrovich. He says that his patience has snapped after a second such incident since August, then agrees to accept a certificate on the condition that it prevent Shvonder or anyone else from knocking on his door. He demands an effective, comprehensive document, one that need not even bear his name, and hands the receiver to Shvonder. The moment reverses the committee’s attempt to bring a complaint against him: Preobrazhensky uses access to a higher authority to seek protection from the local body. His insistence on a certificate also reveals the administrative terms on which the conflict proceeds. Even the defense of a private household is pursued through official paper.

Registration, naming, and the making of Sharikov

The struggle over the apartment becomes entangled with Sharikov’s demand for formal recognition. Sharikov argues that he must be entered on the register because, as he says, people are not allowed to live in Moscow without registration; he also wants an identity card so he will not be arrested as a deserter. Preobrazhensky calls him an unnatural phenomenon and an artefact, but his answer falters as Sharikov presses for a name and legal standing. Sharikov chooses the name Poligraph Poligraphovich, and Shvonder later helps frame a certificate identifying him as Poligraph Poligraphovich Sharikov and claiming that he was born in the apartment.

That claim unsettles Preobrazhensky and Bormenthal because Sharikov was not born in the ordinary sense. Yet Shvonder’s intervention gives the new identity a bureaucratic form, linking the committee’s earlier interest in occupancy to its later support for Sharikov’s registration. Sharikov then asserts a residential entitlement of thirty-seven square feet, producing three pieces of paper—green, yellow, and white—and identifying himself as a member of the residential association and a tenant in charge of the flat. The papers turn the committee’s abstract demand for increased occupancy into a claim directed at Preobrazhensky’s own home.

The relationship is therefore mediated not only by direct confrontation but by Shvonder’s ability to help Sharikov acquire institutional standing. Preobrazhensky recognizes that influence when he tells Sharikov that Shvonder has been at work on him and threatens to find him a room elsewhere. Sharikov refuses to leave. The earlier dispute over whether the professor must surrender rooms has become a more immediate contest over whether he can remove a newly recognized tenant from the apartment at all.

Political alliance and reversal

Shvonder’s support for Sharikov continues beyond registration. Sharikov takes a job as a controller in the Moscow Cleansing Department, responsible for eliminating vagrant quadrupeds, and says that Shvonder arranged it. The appointment extends the committee’s influence from residence into employment: Sharikov now possesses an official role that amplifies the authority he has already claimed within the apartment. Preobrazhensky’s household, meanwhile, remains the place where those claims are tested and resisted.

The alliance eventually turns into an accusation against the household. A report signed by Sharikov and countersigned by Shvonder accuses Preobrazhensky of threatening to murder Shvonder, making counter-revolutionary speeches, ordering Zinaida Bunina to burn Engels, and keeping Bormenthal secretly in the apartment without registration. The charges convert the private dispute into a political case and present the professor’s household as a source of ideological and administrative offense. Shvonder’s role as countersigner makes him more than a distant committee opponent: he lends institutional backing to Sharikov’s account.

The conflict reaches its sharpest reversal when a man reads a charge that Preobrazhensky, Bormenthal, Zinaida Bunina, and Darya Ivanova murdered Sharikov, identified in the document as a controller in the City of Moscow Cleansing Department. Preobrazhensky answers by asking who Sharikov is, then describes him as his dog, the one he operated on. The official document insists on Sharikov’s bureaucratic identity; Preobrazhensky counters by rejecting that identity and invoking the earlier relation between himself and the dog. Their long struggle over rooms, papers, and authority thus culminates in a dispute over the category by which Sharikov is to be understood. Shvonder’s alliance has helped make him a registered resident and public official, but the final exchange shows that administrative recognition cannot settle the underlying conflict over who—or what—he is.