The Story Archive

Diary of a Madman

Nikolai Gogol · 1835 CE · Short Story · Russian · Romantic

A forty-two-year-old titular councillor whose office duty is sharpening the director's quills keeps a private record of his passion for the director's daughter and of the letters he has intercepted between her lapdog and another dog in town, which are unflattering about him. The dates come apart, Spain is found to have been left without a king, and the entries start arriving from somewhere with a different calendar. One of the Petersburg tales, and the first Russian fiction written from inside a disintegrating mind rather than observed from outside it.

Open Diary of a Madman in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.

Lineage

Attributes

Genre
PsychologicalSatire
Theme
MadnessIdentity & SelfClass & InequalityIsolation & Alienation
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
EverymanWise Fool
Plot structure
ConfessionUnreliable Narrator
Symbol / motif
The CrownThe LetterThe City
Conflict
vs Selfvs Society
Mode / tone
SatiricalIronicAbsurdist
Culture / tradition
Russian

Closest analogues