This was an essay I wrote on Gogol for a class I had in the fall, and since it is a bit long I will divide it into two parts for the sake of space.

My precritical response to reading Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman is one of both comedic overlay with a gross, tragic underside that takes the reader into the deranged mind of the 19th century Russian civil servant, Porprishchin. The tale begins with the first entry made in the diary, which may or may not have been written in the 1830’s. Proprishchin, rambling about his day’s events, we find out in this first entry that he has a crush on the daughter of the Director of the Provincal Office at where he works. With the first entry as well, we are able to see that his mind is already beginning to slip as he notes in his diary a conversation he overheard of two dogs talking. Poprishchin’s sanity further deteriorates further in the story when he forces his way into the house where the dog lives and steals the letters to find out what Sophie really thinks about him.

With this realization, Poprishchin is disturbed about his position in the class system at the time, and sinks lower and lower into self-effacing dillusion so much to the where he contradicts himself and finally believes he is the rightful King of Spain after reading the news of a dispute in a newspaper. Poprishkin is then committed to a mental institution, where he believes he is actually taken to Spain, and is beaten to become sane. That is where the story ends. The question one needs to ask oneself is what approach would work better in the critisism of the particular work. Whether the traditional approach or the formalistic approach would create a better understanding of this particular work, I personally believe that it is an existential work of realism and should be read as all existential realism should be read which is by looking at the work itself and finding the work as a complete whole in the formalistic form of critisism. Without knowing who the author was or what was included in notes, biographies, and letters written by the author is not an important aspect in this work as I feel that regardless of these factors, a reader is able to recieve a sufficient enjoyment from reading Diary of a Madman.

After reading the work itself, I found myself contemplating issues of which role to take in criticizing this work. I wondered to myself, ‘Well, I could take this approach as it seems fit!’ but upon intense research and thinking upon this work I believe that it could be taken as a formalist criticism. As Thais S. Linstrom aptly notes, “In style, tone, and subject matter the Diary of a Madman is Gogol’s most compressed, most driven story”(Lindstrom, p. 77). Of this I agree on every count of Gogol’s genius and taken into the response his writings had on Dostoevsky, Chekov, and Tolstoy, it is undeniable.

To read Diary of a Madman, one is almost able to feel the insanity gradually tearing away small pieces of Poprishchins’ mind. The uses of words that Gogol used in this work lend themselves to the work as clear as a stained glass. There is a picture in which anyone reading the work is able to understand the overlying message, but at the same time there are underlying symbols that need discovering. I attempted to use Formalistic as an interpertive usage of how Gogol was portraying his work, by not knowing anything about him as a person. My initial formalistic response would be to take the text and analyze it as a work of its own, without forming any other critical resposes to it, which is how I feel this work is to be read.

The entire diary is a work of itself to where the reader is taken into the mind of the madman. If one part of the work would be taken out of context of how it was laid out in Gogols original text then it would lose almost all of the organicism that makes this story a living and breathing animal. If one is to take that stance on the work then one must agree that Diary of a Madman is a work in itself, and should not be concerned with the other works that Gogol put out. If one was to take this stance on Gogol, then one should be concerned with the uses of animals in this text.

Almost in every chapter of Diary, Gogol uses a comparison between a human and and animals. For the characters that compose the upper crust of the society that Gogol created such as the Governor and his daughter, Gogol has metaphorically used beautiful birds to describe these particular characters. The good birds are pictured with honor with Gogol while the bad birds are pictured as ugly and comedic. In the first entry, Poprishchin after being chastised by the head of his department calls him a “Damned old Buzzard” (Gogol, 17). After this incident with the head of the department, Poprishchin volunteered to sharpen ‘His Excellency’s’ quills in an attempt to make the head of the department jealous because he is seated in the head seat while he does this. Of course he will chastise anyone who will get before himself and his task as he did with the cashier, who was a Jew, and “The Last Judgement will be upon us before you can get a month’s pay out of him in advance” (Gogol, 17).

Gogol further goes on with his animal analogies. In the same chapter Poprishchin accuses all civil servants of being ‘beasts’ by going after every leg they see. While he himself came close to being associated with that class of men which he labeled as beasts and admitted fantasizing his own wanting to see the legs of the director’s daughter, but will admit his in passing and is too ashamed of his feelings to write his true thoughts. While Proporshchin is a civil servant and is a beast, he does like the little birds, such as the director’s daughter. As he said in his first sight of her, just after being a beast of a civil servant himself, “A footman opened the carriage door and out she fluttered, just like a litle bird" (Gogol, p. 18). The fact that she was a bird gives us thought that she was above the civil servant, which Poporshchin already gives bad names to. The director is an old Buzzard. Bobov is a stork in his jabot, while the greater people of the story are more dignified birds. Proporshchin first notices Sophia as ‘fluttering’ out of her carriage like a little bird. But later when she finally spoke to him, it was in the tone of a canary. The dog, Medji, would “only like the bones from game birds” (Gogol, 27.)

Gogol’s uses of other animals are shown elsewhere thoughout the story as well. Aside from the obvious uses of the dogs that write letters to each other and carry on conversations on Nevsky Avenue, Poprishchin also makes note of other animals that have spoken. He recalls hearing a story of a fish that spoke and remembers reading a story about two cows who went into a shop to buy some tea. Gogol goes further to compare the footman and most civil cervants to pigs and is shocked once he gets hold of the dogs letter to find that the directors’ daughter thinks of him as the dog calls him “a tortoise in a sack” (Gogol, 30). Later in the work, Poprishchin compares tailors as ‘such asses’ which is why he decides to cut up his own civil servant uniform. He excuses his servant Mavra’s expression when he tells her he is the King of Spain as being from the common herd and uses the analogy that “every cock has its Spain, tucked away under its feathers” to console himself when he is tormented in the assylum ” (Gogol, 40). Finally in the last entry made in the diary, Poprishchin calls for a “troika with horses swift as a whirlwind” to escape his tormented state as well as the physical confines of the assylum itself (Gogol, 41).