Diary of a Madman

"Diary of a Madman" is a short story written by the Russian author Nikolai Gogol in 1835. It was published in the
collection Arabesques. The story dramatizes the low-level clerk Poprishchin's gradual descent into madness and
eventual confinement in an asylum. It can be seen as a parable for the fate of the faceless Russian everyman in the
confusing age of modernity.
Gogol's story was based by a large number of newspaper articles published in the newspaper The Northern Bee about
the inmates of insane asylums. The overwhelming majority of inmates institutionalized in asylums were civil servants
who either suffered from an inflated sense of pride or a crippling bout of timidness. In fact, one article focused on an
inmate who added the phrase "King of France and Navarre" to his passport
Plot Summary
Poprishchin by Ilya Repin
The central character of the story is the middle-aged man Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin who works for the central
government and has the meaningless occupation of sharpening pens for his director. He notes that sometimes he sees
and hears unusual things, such as a dog named Medji who can talk, but rationalizes these experiences with his own
examples, such as other animals that have been proven to talk. Poprishchin is berated by his section chief and
criticized for getting older and not making anything of himself. He longs to be noticed by his boss's daughter Sophie,
but their interactions are never substantial. Poprishchin fantasizes about correspondences two dogs have written to
each other, and seeks to obtain these letters and question the dogs. He examines these letters and convinces himself of
their authenticity due to elements of dogginess and an uneven style which shows that they weren't written by a man.
During this investigation of Sophie's dog, Poprishchin discovers much to his that Sophie is engaged to a
kammerjunker.
The second half of the work chronicles the worsening of Poprishchin's madness. In a journal entry dated as The Year
2000, 43rd of April, Poprishchin learns that he has been made the king of Spain. He stops going to work and begins
to sign documents as Ferdinand VIII. He secretly walks around the Nevsky Prospect without revealing his position,
and decides to make a royal uniform out of pieces of an overcoat so that the common people will recognize him. He
waits for Spanish deputies to arrive, and eventually believes himself to be in Spain, which he learns is the same nation
as China. This trip is his imagination of an actual trip to an insane asylum, where he is shaved and beaten. The story
ends in a nonsensical plea to his mother to save your poor son and pity your sick child while subjected to brutal
treatments in the asylum.
Themes
Rogue Ensemble's The Gogol Project at Bootleg Theatre
Alienation in Society
The story dramatizes Poprishchin's gradual alienation from the rest of humanity as he participates in a dehumanizing
bureaucracy, which defines him by the role he serves and not based on his individual identity. Poprishchin is
conditioned by society to view other people through a divisive lens that separates the people he meets into strictly
defined social groupings that cannot be crossed. For example, he dismisses "those vile artisans [who] produce so much
soot and smoke in their workshops that it's decidedly impossible for a gentleman to walk," but remains convinced of
the inherent superiority of the upper class when he blindly praises the intelligence of the director for asking the simple
question "How is it outside?" to which Poprishchin effusively replies "such learning as our kind can't even come close
to." Poprishchin's alienated status in society prevents any communication between social classes as he tries to make
witty conversation with his boss, but remains physically unable as his "tongue wouldn't obey" leaving him only able to
make trivial comments. Ultimately, Poprishchin completely withdraws from society as he creates his own private
reality, but ironically even this vision of the world is domesticated by society when he is thrown into an insane
asylum.
Status and Class Anxiety
The structure of the story suggests that Poprishchin's acute fixation on class differences is the direct cause of his
mental breakdown. Critic D.S. Mirsky uses the Russian word "poshlost" (best translated as "self-satisfied inferiority")
to characterize the specific type of status anxiety that is common to many of Gogol's protagonists. Mirsky uses the
term to capture the uniquely pathetic psyche of these figures who have been conditioned by society to believe their

inherent inferiority to the upper class, while simultaneously agonizing over small details (such as buying the proper
coat) that they think might potentially improve their social standing. [4] In other words, society places Gogol's
characters in a completely fixed and immovable position, but also leaves them with an unquenchable desire to change
their social position.
In Poprishchin's case he viciously criticizes people who are lower on the social ladder than him, but fixates on external
status signs such as uniforms, clothing, and the general's ribbon. Gogol satirizes how society values the most
superficial aspects of appearance in his story "The Nose" in which a minor official agonizes over finding his missing
nose, which he believes is critical to his social standing. This story illustrates how superficial facets of urban life
acquire an inordinate importance that can literally ruin a person. Poprishchin's anxiety over his unchangeable social
standing leads to his mental breakdown as he begins to talk about the Spanish throne immediately after he realizes
Sophie is unattainable. Poprishchin's only avenue for advancement lies in creating his own separate reality. However,
Gogol crown's the story's irony by showing how even Poprishchin's fantasy world is conditioned by his status anxiety.
Poprishchin imagines being a king who stands at the top of the social hierarchy rather than fantasizing about living in
some sort of idyllic existence separate from city life in which his happiness is defined on his own terms rather than the
standards that society imposes.
Reason and Madness
Poprishchin obsesses over finding facts and evidence to corroborate his feelings, which highlights Gogol's powerful
technique to chart Poprishchin's descent into madness through logically sound and reasonable narratives. In other
words, Poprishchin tries to use logic to explain his own madness. For example, he offers sensible analysis while
discussing the letters of the dogs, commenting on the "extremely uneven style" and questioning "how can one fill
letters with such silliness," determining that no gentleman could have written them. In some ways, Poprishchin
becomes more logical as his mind deteriorates, essentially making madness reasonable in Gogol's story. By equating
madness with reason, Gogol creates a distorted world that undermines any potentially stable conception of logic in
reality. In fact, the contradictions of Poprishchin's worldview define the central theme of Gogol's story because they
have a leveling effect that reduces all things to a plane of equal importance, which suggests that the apparent logic
used to organize society is just as arbitrary and unreasonable as the narrator's crazy perspective.
Escapism
Gogol's story dramatizes the necessity of escapism for the modern man trapped bleak, bureaucratic world. The major
turn in "The Diary of a Madman" occurs when Poprishchin learns that Sophie has married someone else, which pushes
him to embrace completely his wildest escapist fantasies. While before his fantasies had some correlation to his
everyday existence (i. e. Poprishchin imagined marrying an upper class girl), after this final disappointment
Poprishchin indulges in the most extreme incarnations of his delusions. The strict hierarchy in society forces alienated
members into escapist tendencies. Initially his fantasy takes the form of ruling another country, which changes both
his social position and national identity, but the story ends when he hopes to find a way out and asks "give me a troika
of steeds swift as the wind! Take the reins, my driver, ring out, my bells, soar aloft, steeds, and carry me out of this
world!" He wants to simultaneously wants to leave the country, but also to return to "Russian huts" and his mother's
bosom.
Satire
Satire is a critical aspect of Gogol's oeuvre, which is applied equally towards all subjects from the hypocrisies of
society to the neuroses of his protagonists. Gogol never lets the reader fully sympathize with Poprishchin by comically
undercutting his most emotionally powerful moments with nonsense. For example, after Poprishchin calls out "Dear
Mother! pity your sick child!" at the end of the story, Gogol deflates the emotional climax by concluding Poprishchin's
speech with the nonsensical query, "And do you know that the Dey of Algiers has a bump just under his nose?" Gogol
never allows the moment to become fully tragic, making the reader contend with the story's double perception. Donald
Fanger describes how Gogol's satire becomes so aggressive that it extends beyond the usual targets to ridicule, "the
great majority of the characters who appear in it - not for particular failings but for a radical cretinism
("insignificance") whose source is in the text's source and not in society or nature."[5] Fanger goes on to claim that not
satire itself but "the satirist's stance and the satirist's quasi magical belief in the power of words" becomes the defining
aspect of Gogol's fictional world.

Style and Literary Devices

Illustration by Milton Glaser for "Diary of a Madman" (Olivetti, 1987)

Point of View
"The Diary of a Madman" is the only work Gogol wrote in the first person, which emphasizes Gogol's desire to have
his reader experience Poprishchin's mental disintegration firsthand, without the mitigating influence of an external
narrator. This format allows the reader to see the mental breakdown step by step rather than viewing it from the
outside. The story's narrative landscape is completely controlled by the narrator's schizophrenic voice, which fully
immerses the reader in all of the contradictions of his distorted vision.
Tone
Gogol has Poprishchin use a matter of fact tone to emphasize the disparity between the absurd content of his story and
the banality of his descriptions. Poprishchin's wild tone is Gogol's primary tool for conveying both the story's irony
and comedy, since it forces the reader to evaluate the objective reality with Poprishchin's vision. The narrator treats
fantastic happenings as everyday occurrences as he is hardly phased by talking dogs or the prospect of noses living on
the moon. The familiarity with which he discusses fantastic subject matters emphasizes his estrangement from social
reality.
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition is Gogol's definitive method for presenting his story's inherently distorted world. The story juxtaposes
the fantastic with the mundane, the significant with the irrelevant, and most importantly Poprishchin's reality with
society's stringent world. By arbitrarily shifting between seemingly disparate subjects, Gogol's juxtaposition
dramatizes the contradictions that define Poprishchin's vision of reality. The critic John Kopper describes how the
unexpected shifts in Gogol's narratives from one thematic plane to another is exploited to create a natural tension that
"no longer stands apart from the devises of narrative, but exerts a gravitational effect upon them."[6] In other words,
the fantastic elements of Gogol's fiction exert a distorting interpretive pressure on all aspects of the story that prevents
the reader from understanding even a seemingly simple passage in a straightforward way. In "The Diary of a
Madman", the reader sometimes questions the most seemingly innocuous passages the most vigorously. Critic Victor
Erlich asserts that the reader cannot have any simple, sustained emotional response to the ending of Gogol's story,
explaining how Gogol's juxtaposition makes the reader have a contradictory and complicated response to all of its
elements.[7]
Gogol's story also features stylistic juxtaposition as many long and grandiose sentences deflate into anticlimactic
conclusions and elevated language is used to describe trivial subject matters. Victor Erlich stresses the disorienting
force of this juxtaposition at the end of "The Diary of a Madman" when he writes,
Toward the end of the story, the reader is jolted by two successive shifts of emotional perspective. For pages, he s
treated to a thoroughly unemotional, or if one will, inhuman exploitation of insanity as a source of morbidly comic
effects by means of a deft impersonation of mental disarray. Finally, contrived show breaks through, so as to allow,
indeed impel, the reader at long last to register the hitherto frustrated human response - to pity, to relate, to vibrate in
unison. Yet Gogol would not allow his audience to indulge its humanity for too long. As the crescendo of anguish
reaches an almost hysterical pitch, the last-minute empathy is subverted by a sudden lapse into bathos. It is as if
Gogol's art could not sustain empathy of involvement, as if these emotions became literally unbearable to hum as they
escalated into hysteria, and thus had to be resolved back into verbal clowning, to be undercut by the burlesque.[8]
Synecdoche
Gogol makes frequent use of synecdoche by describing isolated body parts removed from their larger whole to
emphasize Poprishchin's alienation and the literal dissembling of his psyche. Synecdoche dehumanizes other figures in
the city by reducing them to physical parts and Poprishchin's perception becomes increasingly fragmented as he
experiences grotesque parts separated from the logical context necessary to make sense of them. For instance, he
discusses how people can't see their noses because they live on the moon, and he refers to his boss as "an ordinary
doornail, a simple doornail, nothing more. The kind used in doors," emphasizing his lack of agency and discernible
human identity. Gogol effectively uses this literary technique to create the stifling atmosphere of his fictional world
that reduces all of the characters involved in bureaucracy and urban society to seeming automatons.

Analysis and Criticism

Gogol's Nonsense
Many critics are interested in Gogol's excessive use of nonsense in his fiction. One section of his story "The Nose"
famously begins, "Perfect nonsense goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all." Critic Gary
Morson discusses how Gogol luxuriates in the nonsensical details of his fiction, deliberately denying the reader any
logical explanation.[9] The intrusion of nonsense on reality disrupts any ability to make a coherent picture of the
story's fictional world and rejects any systemization of human experience. Nonsense often interrupts the narrative to
prevent the reader from sharing any complete emotional empathy with a character. Gogol does not attempt to justify
his nonsense, but simply makes one experience it.
Critic Susanne Fusso claims that the nonsensical elements of the story are meant to portray Poprishchin as the parody
of a historian.[10] Poprishchin constantly searches for facts to verify his beliefs leading him to create imaginary
documents (such as the letters written by the dogs) to justify his decisions. Poprishchin humorously tries to understand
his world through logical investigations like a historian would undertake, but ironically the story undercuts any notion
of objective history when Poprishchin tries to write himself into history as Ferdinand VIII. Moreover, Fusso highlights
the singular objective reality represented by history and society with the subjective account of experience represented
through art.
Grotesque
Critic Victor Erlich wrote an essay about "The Grotesque Imagination" that defines Gogol's fictional universe.[11]
This grotesque world wreaks havoc on normal distinctions and is characterized by confusion over things that are
simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. Erlich claims the grotesque effect "occurs when what seemed familiar and
natural suddenly turned out to be strange and ominous", when an object blurs the boundary between human and
inhuman, and when part of an object becomes out of balance or out of proportion. Gogol's protagonists fixate on the
grotesque, out-of-place aspects of their environment, which cannot be changed. For example, Poprishchin dislikes his
boss's face, which "bears a slight resemblance to a druggist's bottle, with a tuft of hair curled into a forelock sticking
up, smeared with some pomade." Not only is Poprishchin's grotesque perception of reality disjointed, but this
distortion actively pains him.
The claim that Gogol's fictional world is essentially grotesque is best reinforced with a quote from another Gogol
earlier story titled "Nevsky Prospect" that reads, "It had seemed to him as though some demon had crumbled the
whole world into bits and mixed all these bits indiscriminately together." [12] The distorted narrative world appears to
be a collection of disproportional parts that have been randomly (and perhaps maliciously) united together to form an
threatening and incomprehensible whole.
The Conflict Between Center and Periphery: The Blurring of National and Cultural Identity
"The Diary of a Madman" conveys both the individual and national tension between the center and periphery that
haunts the Russian identity. Poprishchin lives in the center of Russian life in the city, but perpetually stands on that
culture's peripheries as a clerk. He is circumscribed by the suffocating standards and definitions imposed on him by
society, so he reacts by creating his own reality in which he stands at the center of all activity as represented by Spain.
(The decision to locate his fantasy in Spain relates to Russia's anxiety over its own identity as a country on the
periphery of Europe.) Accordingly, this fantasy world blurs all the boundaries separating the peripheries as
Poprishchin claims Spain and China are the same country and most strikingly when he asserts that the moon was built
on Earth. By blurring all the barriers that separate distinct entities in Poprishchin's fantasy world, Gogol offers one
extreme example in which the center defines all the peripheries. Poprishchin's escapist fantasy dramatizes the anxiety
that all individuals within a larger society feel about maintaining their own identity (which is the center of their world)
while participating as peripheral figure in the larger action of the social world. This conflict is illustrated in the story's
last paragraph in which Poprischin calls for a carriage driver to "carry me out of this world" while simultaneously
feeling a desire to stay with his "dear mother" in the comfortable house of his childhood. Poprishchin is caught in an
unresolvable conflict between the two opposing desires to take flight to the peripheries and to uphold the traditional
beliefs of his upbringing. This conflict does not only affect the individual, but applies to the larger issue of Russian
national identity. Russia is torn between staying faithful to its tradition (or its center) and the need to push forward to
find new experiences on the peripheries. Gogol's fiction dramatizes this clash reminding the reader that this conflict is
and will remain unresolved.
Psychoanalysis and Sexual Frustration

Gogol himself suffered from a form of sexual impotency which prevented him from intimacy with women, which
some critics believe contributed to the distant and alien portrayals of women in his fiction. The critic D.S. Mirsky
claims in his celebrated A History of Russian Literature that "[Gogol] seems sexually never to have emerged from an
infantile (or rather, early adolescent) stage. Woman was to him a terrible, fascinating, but unapproachable obsession,
and he is known never to have loved."[13] In many of Gogol's stories, social standing is linked with marriage, and
accordingly Poprishchin only fully understands his own social immobility when Sophie marries someone else.
Throughout the story Poprishchin remains unable to have any meaningful contact with a woman, and he expresses his
anxious separation when he whines:
Oh, she's a perfidious being woman! Only now have I grasped what woman is. Till now no one has found out who
she's in love with: I'm the first to discover it. Woman is in love with the devil. Yes, no joking. It's stupid what
physicists write, that she's this or thatshe loves only the devil. See there, from a box in the first balcony, she's
aiming her lorgnette. You think she's looking at that fat one with the star? Not at all, she's looking at the devil standing
behind his back. There he is hiding in his tailcoat. There he is beckoning to her with his finger! And she'll marry him.
Marry him.
The critic Yermakov offers a Freudian interpretation of Gogol's fixation on noses as a form of castration anxiety.
Yermakov contends that Kovalev's missing part in "The Nose" represents his fragile masculinity.[14] In "The Diary of
a Madman", Poprishchin discusses how noses live on the moon and says, "And when I pictured how the earth is a
heavy substance and in sitting down may grind our noses into flour, I was overcome with such anxiety... I hurried to
the state council chamber to order the police not to allow the earth to sit on the moon." Many of the nonsensical
comments reveal his repressed castration anxiety as he constantly worries how forces outside of his control could
emasculate him.[15] Another notable example occurs while he is being tortured by the grand inquisitor, when he
randomly interjects, "However, all this has been rewarded by my present discovery: I've learned that every rooster has
his Spain, that it's located under his feathers." In this passage, he equates the country of Spain to a rooster's genitalia
obscured by his feathers. This bizarre comment offers revealing insight into Poprishchin's Spanish fantasy as an
attempt to protect his fading masculinity and sexual virility.
Schizophrenia
Many have discussed the role of schizophrenia in "The Diary of a Madman" as Poprishchin exhibits all the symptoms
characteristic of the disorder. Symptoms of schizophrenia include delusions, disorganized speech and behavior, losing
one's train of thought, emotional flattening, and hallucinations. [16] Moreover, Poprishchin's disjointed narration and
perception of reality mirrors the symptoms of schizophrenia and has lead critics to often classify the narrative world of
Gogol's short fiction as schizophrenic.

Relation to Other Gogol Works

A Russian troika
"The Nose"
"The Diary of a Madman" was published in the same collection as another story that it's often compared to titled "The
Nose." In "The Nose" Major Kovalev wakes up one morning to discover that his nose has gone missing from his face,
which forces him to embark on many wild chases throughout the city to catch his nose which has absurdly assumed
the identity of a person with a high ranking official job. Kovalev eventually finds the nose but remains unable to
reattach it until he awakes the next morning to find the nose has miraculously secured itself back on his face. Critic
Richard Peace comments on the similarity between "The Nose" and "The Diary of a Madman" asserting they have
nearly identical openings, which suggests they are meant to be read together. [17] However, both stories share similar
themes, "The Nose" stands out as the supreme example of Gogol's nonsensical artistic vision because it does not
provide any justification for the absurd happenings, while the fantastic elements in "The Diary of the Madman" can be
disregarded as facets of Poprischin's insanity.