Sharik’s return to dog form is the decisive reversal of the experiment that had turned him into Poligraph Poligraphovich Sharikov. After the supposed human being begins reverting to an animal state, a bark from the chair unsettles an official investigation; the final scene then presents Sharik again beside Professor Preobrazhensky, at home and thinking of himself as a dog. The reversal restores his former domestic place but leaves the experiment’s consequences visible in his scar, the case records, and the contested paperwork that had named him a man.

From Dog to Registered Man

Before the transformation, the dog is called Sharik by the gentleman who gives him a piece of sausage. The name is bestowed in the same encounter as food and rescue: Sharik responds with gratitude, and the name attaches to a creature whose immediate concerns are survival and shelter. The experiment’s subject is later recorded as an approximately two-year-old male mongrel named Sharik, a clinical description that treats the dog as an object of study even as his individual name persists.

After the transformation, a request to choose a name becomes a struggle over identity. The newly human figure proposes the name Toligraph Poligraphovich; when asked for a surname, he insists on his real name, and Shvonder helps frame a certificate identifying the bearer as Poligraph Poligraphovich Sharikov. The proposed document claims that he was born in the flat, a formulation that makes his artificial origin legible through an administrative fiction. His movement from Sharik to Sharikov is therefore not simply a change in what others call him: the new name is presented as a route to official recognition and a claim to human status.

Reversal and Public Consequences

The attempted human identity acquires political force through documents as well as speech. Sharikov’s complaint against Professor Preobrazhensky and Doctor Bormenthal accuses them of counter-revolutionary conduct and describes the professor as a Menshevik; it also alleges that the professor ordered Zinaida Prokofievna Bunina to burn Engels and that Bormenthal lives in the flat without registration. Sharikov signs as a sub-department controller of the City Cleansing Department, showing how far the dog’s transformation has carried him into institutional life—and how his borrowed authority can be turned against the people who created him.

The status is precarious. At a later confrontation, an official reads a charge accusing Preobrazhensky, Bormenthal, Zinaida Bunina, and Darya Ivanova of murdering Poligraph Poligraphovich Sharikov. Preobrazhensky answers by identifying Sharikov as the dog on whom he operated, refusing the premise that the paperwork settles who the accused person is. The threat of prosecution thus hinges on the divide between an administratively recognized human name and the biological and experimental history that the professor insists lies behind it.

Preobrazhensky explains that science has not yet found a means of turning animals into people: Sharik talked, he says, and then began reverting to a primitive state. When the man in black addresses him, the dog barks from his chair. The bark is the immediate proof of the reversal, and it disrupts the official scene: the visitor drops his briefcase and collapses sideways, while the people present react in confusion. Shvonder’s request that the remark be entered into the report makes the moment’s absurdity especially pointed. The investigation tries to fix events in a written record just as the speaking, barking subject escapes its categories.

The Restored Domestic Life

The final scene returns to the apartment rather than ending with the official charge. The grey radiators hiss; the blinds shut out the night sky over Prechistenka Street; and Sharik lies on the carpet beside the leather couch while Preobrazhensky sits in his chair. Bormenthal tidies the shelves in the consulting room. The arrangement restores the domestic world in which the dog had first been sheltered, though the scar on Sharik’s skull remains as a mark of what was done to him.

Sharik’s sleepy thoughts register both comfort and uncertainty. He considers himself lucky to be settled in the flat, but now doubts the Labrador ancestry he had apparently believed in, deciding that his grandmother was no thoroughbred. He accepts that his head was operated on as something that is, in the end, not his business. The return to dog form does not erase the intervening human identity; instead, it leaves Sharik with a canine perspective on the bodily alteration and with renewed ease in the household that has taken him in.

Meaning of the Ending

The closing contrast is between the official effort to define Sharikov and the ordinary scene of Sharik at home. The certificate and accusations give a name institutional consequences, but they cannot make the transformation stable. The final bark exposes the limits of those records, while the quiet domestic image gives the restored dog a presence not reducible to the experiment’s paperwork.

The return is also not a clean erasure of the experiment. Sharik remains marked by the operation, Preobrazhensky’s concluding explanation names the attempt as unsuccessful, and the final image turns back to the professor’s continuing search through a brain while he hums a repeated song. That juxtaposition leaves the scientific inquiry unfinished even as Sharik’s own place in the apartment appears settled. The ending restores the dog without pretending that the humanization project, or the conflicts it generated, never happened.