Professor Dowell's Head

France. Paris. Professor-surgeon Kern secretly conducts successful experiments to revive a human head. Marie Laurent, who joins his private clinic as an assistant, accidentally learns that Kern’s success in his research depends on the revived head of his former supervisor—the well-known professor Dower—who died under suspicious circumstances. Kern hides the fact that the revived head exists and forces it to work for him.

Many of Beliaev’s works were born in an unusual way. Recalling how the novel “The Head of Professor Dower” was created, the writer noted that the work is to a significant extent autobiographical. “Once, illness pinned me down for three and a half years to a plaster bed,” Beliaev wrote. “This period of sickness was accompanied by paralysis of the lower half of my body. And although I could move my hands, even so, in those years my life was reduced to the life of a ‘head without a body,’ whom I felt absolutely not…” “That’s when I changed my mind and relived everything that a ‘person without a body’ can experience.”