![]() This article explores the relationship between the literary and the scientific experiments with severed heads in 1920s Russia. In just a few months, the major ‘scientific-fantastic idea’ of Beliaev's story came true: in the fall of 1925, a young doctor, Sergei Briukhonenko, announced at a congress of Russian pathologists that he had succeeded in reviving the severed head of a dog, and described a special apparatus he had devised to keep the head alive. 1 The story became an instant hit: it depicted the travails of a severed human head living in a laboratory, supported by special machinery. In the summer of 1925, an aspiring littérateur, Aleksandr Beliaev, published a ‘scientific-fantastic story’ entitled The head of Professor Dowell.
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