Ace of Diamonds
Context
In chapter 17 of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov describes how «the famous Ace of Diamonds», a «sharp-eared, muscular, ash-coloured dog with extremely intelligent eyes» was deployed by the secret police NKVD to find traces of Woland and his gang, who had caused a lot of commotion the day before at the Variety Theatre. But «his behaviour amazed them all». Rather than following a track, the dog started growling and crouched on his belly. He led the agents to the cab stand. There he lost the trail he had been pursuing. After that Ace of Diamonds was taken away.
Prototype
In Russian, Bulgakov’s police dog is called Тузбубен [Tuzbubyen]. Туз [tuz] means ace and бубен [bubyen] means diamonds. Tuzbubyen or Ace of Diamonds is probably a strange name for a police dog, but we don’t need to search much for the explanation. It’s a parody of a famous pre-revolutionary real police dog called Треф [Tref], which means Clubs.
In Bulgakov’s archive was found a newspaper cutting from the the Pravda of November 6, 1921, about the experiences of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) in the summer of 1917, when he had to escape to Finland. In that newspaper article we can read that not only the counterintelligence and police detectives were brought into action to track Lenin, but also dogs, among which the famous police dog Tref.
The dobermann Tref, the prototype of Ace of Diamonds
In 1907, after he had been visiting the Police Dog School of the city of Ghent in Belgium, Vasily Ivanovich Lebedev (1868-1930), Head of the Police Department of the Russian Ministry of Interior, published his book Полицейская собака в Генте [Politseyskaya sobaka v Gentye] or Police Dogs in Ghent. The ideas developed by Lebedev in the book were highly appreciated, and on June 21, 1909, the first Russian Полицейская школа собаководства [Politseyskaya Shkola sobakovodstva] or Police School for Dog Breeding and Training was founded in Staraya Derevnya near Saint Petersburg.
One of the first dogs sent to the school was Tref, a dobermann male, born in December 1908 in the von Thüringen dog nursery owned by Otto Geller in Riga, Latvia. Tref was trained by Vladimir Dmitriev, district head of Moscow city police. Tref, only 11 months old, won the first exam for «graduates» of the school on October 25, 1909, and became famous in Russia since he contributed to the solution of more than 1,500 criminal facts.
Tref in actie
In the early 1920s, Dmitriev would have been executed in Lubyanka. It is not known what has happened to Tref.
Video
In the TV series Master i Margarita by director Vladimir Bortko from 2005 it is shown clearly how Ace of Diamands, according to Bulgakov, behaved in the Variety Theatre. Director Bortko, however, did not use a dobermann, but a shepherd dog.
English subtitles
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