Diary of a Madman - Summary

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.

Documents

Diary of a Madman - Summary