Black Snow was Bulgakov's satire on Stanislavsky's Moscow Arts Theatre, against which he had a personal grudge for its treatment of him and his plays. However, it is not so much bitter and vengeful as wildly and surrealistically funny, rather in the Gogol tradition of imaginative Russian farce, though the ending is almost tragic. If only some Irish writer - say, Flann O'Brien - had written an equivalent novel on the Abbey Theatre! By contrast, The Heart of a Dog is rather less than a masterpiece, though still very characteristic Bulgakov - he was, in fact, rather an uneven writer. Both translations read smoothly, but how much must be lost in sheer comic nuance?