The Diary of a Madman Study Guide

Nikolai Gogol lived in the Ukrainian village of Sorochintsy with his parents, who belonged to the “petty gentry,” a class of society distinguished by self-management of its lands and farms. In 1828, Gogol traveled to St. Petersburg to acquire a civil service job and work on achieving literary fame. Unable, at first, to form the connections necessary to secure a job, he traveled to Germany and returned to St. Petersburg only when his money ran out. He then took up a low-paying bureaucratic job and published sporadically for periodicals until achieving his literary breakthrough with Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. He continued to write throughout the 1830s, releasing Mirgorod and two volumes of prose titled Arabesques. His play, The Government Inspector, was performed as a result of a direct order from the tsar, Nicholas I. Gogol traveled through Germany and Switzerland before settling in Rome, where he finished the first volume of his book Dead Souls. Dead Souls was published in 1842, the same year that his first collection of his worksfeaturing the famous short story “The Overcoat”was released. Gogol attempted to finish the next volume of Dead Souls for the next few years, but his creative output declined. He returned to Russia in 1848 and eventually turned to the aid of a priest, Matvey Konstantinovsky, who prescribed intense ascetic practices and fasting; this caused Gogol’s spirits to deteriorate further. He eventually burned the drafts of the second volume of Dead Souls, began refusing food, and died shortly thereafter.

“Diary of a Madman” was written in 1835, during the reign of the autocratic tsar Nicholas I. Corrupt bureaucracy and militarism marked this time period in Russian history, with Nicholas I relying on military men to circumvent the normal administration of a kingdom. This atmosphere of bureaucratic secrecy and inefficiency is the backdrop for Gogol’s story, which depicts the life of Poprishchin, a low-level councillor St. Petersburg. Gogol’s story also references other European aristocrats; it makes allusions to the death of King Ferdinand VII in 1833 as well the politician Jules-Armand, minister of foreign affairs under King Charles X of France.

Like “Diary of a Madman,” many of Gogol’s other works, such as “The Overcoat” and the play The Government Inspector feature protagonists who are low-level civil servants or bureaucrats. In addition, “Diary of a Madman” contains elements of gothic horror and surrealism; these elements have much in common with those found in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Gogol’s use of satire has also led some theorists to link his work with the stories of Laurence Sterne. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground features a first-person point of view, much like “Diary of a Madman.” Dostoyevsky is said to have cited Gogol as the major influence for the Russian realist writers of the 19th-century.