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7/29/2019 Diary of a Madman - Summary
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"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.[1]
Contents [hide]
1 Plot Summary
2 Biography
3 Themes
3.1 Alienation in Society
3.2 Status and Class Anxiety
3.3 Reason and Madness
3.4 Escapism
3.5 Satire
4 Style and Literary Devices
4.1 Point of View
4.2 Tone
4.3 Juxtaposition
4.4 Synecdoche
5 Analysis and Criticism
5.1 Gogol's Nonsense
5.2 Grotesque
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5.3 The Conflict Between Center and Periphery: The Blurring of National and
Cultural Identity
5.4 Psychoanalysis and Sexual Frustration
5.5 Schizophrenia
6 Relation to Other Gogol Works
6.1 "The Nose"
6.2 Dead Souls
7 Influence
8 Fun
8.1 Short Film
8.2 Folk Song
9 References
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 fantasizesabout 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.
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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.
Biography
Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol was born in 1809 in present-day Ukraine and as a youth attended a
provincial school on a scholarship. Delaying his entry into the civil service, Gogol
turned to literature but his works were not well received. He worked in many
government departments, and at one point had a job sharpening pens for his
director.[2] While working, Gogol kept writing on the side and in 1831 published
the short story collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka. The collection was
praised for its depiction of the folk life of his home region and brought him to the
attention of Alexander Pushkin. In 1835, he published many short stories including
The Nose and The Diary of a Madman, and he only decided on a purely literary
career after the success of his polarizing play The Inspector General, which aroused
the ire of many bureaucrats. Throughout the rest of his life, Gogol traveled
extensively and was convince that travel was good for his health. While in Vienna
he published his story The Overcoat and while in Italy he completed his master
work Dead Souls, a novel which exposed the corruption of provincial Russia through
a man who cheats the taxation system and buys dead serfs to collect loans. Dead
Souls was supposed to be the first volume in a trilogy, but he accidentally burned
his manuscripts for the second volume. Obsessed with his health and spirituality,
Gogol made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1848. Suffering from a mental illness, he
died in 1852.[3]
Themes
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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?" towhich 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.
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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 mostextreme 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,
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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,
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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 wouldnot 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]
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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 increasinglyfragmented 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 howGogol 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.
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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 whatseemed 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 betweenthe 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 offersone 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
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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 intoflour, 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
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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 onemorning 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.
Dead Souls
Gogol's magnum opus is widely considered to be the novel Dead Souls about the
adventures of Chichikov who travels around Russia buying the contract of deceased
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serfs. The end of Dead Souls contains a famous passage about a troika (a type of
carriage), which evokes Gogol's earlier discussion of a troika speeding towards the
horizon during the conclusion of "The Diary of a Madman." Both passages represent
the uncertain future of the traditional Russian way of life as it hurtles into a
frightening new age of modernity. At the end of "The Diary of the Madman"
Poprishchin simultaneously wants to escape his fantasy world by accepting the
troika's reckless forward momentum while also desiring to hold on to the private
reality he has created for himself.
Influence
Geoffrey Rush as Poprishchin
Gogol's story "The Diary of a Madman" has enjoyed a widespread literary influence
as it dovetailed with contemporary literary interests in the psychology of madness
and the alienation of bureaucracy. Gogol's story also directly inspired several
writers from diverse cultural backgrounds. The French author Guy de Maupassant
wrote his own "The Diary of a Madman" several years after Gogol's story was
published, and the Chinese writer Lu Xun was inspired by its themes to write "A
Madman's Diary." Interestingly, Lu Xun originally encountered Gogol's story in a
Japanese translation further illustrating the story's widespread influence. [18] The
tale remains influential in modern literature as the Australian director Neil Armfield
recently wrote a stage adaptation for the Belvoir company starring the Oscar-
winning actor Geoffrey Rush. The production moved from Australia to New York
where it is currently playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music through March 12,
2011.[19]
Gogol's story has also proved to be an important sociological document that has
been helpful to psychologists for its accurate depiction of schizophrenia in a period
where psychological diseases were not widely studied. It offers one of the first
descriptions of schizophrenia and has been an important reference for researchers
studying the history of the treatment of mental illness before the modern era.[20]
Fun
Short Film
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The following series of videos is a short film adaptation of Gogol's "The Diary of a
Madman" by Colin McLaren.