DIARY OF A MADMAN SERIES

In the final diary entry, he has a vision of being taken up to heaven and he sees his mother and cries out to her. The dates on the diary entry become unintelligible. When he reads in the papers about a succession problem in Spain and comes to believe he is King Ferdinand the Eighth, he is called into work and compelled to sign resignation papers.įinally, he believes he is taken to Spain but it is clear it is an asylum where his head is shaved and he is beaten. This crisis precipitates a steep decline as he stops going into work. From these letters he learns that his beloved is going to marry a captain and that she laughs at the clerk who comes to sharpen her father’s pens. He goes so far as to steal and read the contents of letters written between the animals. He believes he can understand the conversation between her dog and the dog of one of the daughter’s friends. We learn that the clerk, in his forties, is an underachiever who resents the head of his section, who prides himself in that he sharpens the quills for the pens for his Excellency in the director’s room, and falls in love with his daughter.

The narrator’s descent into madness is reflected in the diary entries that become progressively more obscure e.g., “2000 A.D., April 43,” and “Martober 86 between day and night.”

DIARY OF A MADMAN SERIES

The story is a series of diary entries that begin on “October 3” written in the first-person by a clerk, Akenty Ivanovich Poprishchin, who works in a government office. Odoyevsky’s story-cycle “The Mad house.” Gogol may also have been influenced by a series of articles about Russian asylums that appeared in the prominent literary journal The Northern Bee. The story may have been a response to Prince V. The Diary of a Madman was originally published in 1835 under the title of Arabesques in what Gogol called a “mishmash” of articles and stories including Nevsky Prospect and The Portrait. His influence on Russian literature was immense, as Dostoyevsky famously observed, “We all emerged from under Gogol’s Overcoat.” Equally important is his novel Dead Souls and his play The Inspector General. In his most famous stories, Nevsky Prospect, Diary of a Madman, The Nose, and The Overcoat, he captures a vivid portrait of life in the capital of the Russian Empire. Born in a Ukrainian Cossack village then part of the Russian Empire, he made his way to Saint Petersburg where he found his métier in the short story a genre he pursued throughout his literary career. Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809–1852) was a member of the first wave of great Russian authors of the nineteenth century. Nikolai Gogol’s The Diary of a Madman January 22, 2019

Diary of a madman