Diary of a Madman

“Diary of a Madman” is an absurdist comedy about its protagonist’s descent into “madness,” as he is increasingly unable to reconcile his own inflated opinion of himself with his real social position and other people’s understanding of the place he occupies in the world. The story uses the form of a diary to document Poprishchin’s state of mind as he reports his daily activities, his fantasies, and his anxieties, while also indicating to the reader how his society actually views him. The story is more broadly a satire about people’s Obsession with Class Distinctions and Anxieties and their vain sense of importance about themselves.

The “madness” readers witness primarily has to do with social class. Poprishchin, a low-ranking nobleman, is extremely touchy about his sense of self-worth. He bottles up his resentments and vents his anger in his diaries. While the section head’s insults and rebukes sting him when they first occur, he only takes his revenge in his diaries, where he dismisses the man as envious. He does the same for servants who he believes do not show him the proper deference. While he makes no mention of saying anything to them in person, he insults them and inflates himself in his diaries. He also makes a show of his apparent sophistication by talking about his love of the theater, although readers are meant to understand that the performance he witnesses is supposed to be a cheap and low form of entertainment. The world of the diary, in other words, is Poprishchin’s ideal world, where he is a proud and sophisticated noble who is the envy of others and who is a potential match for the director’s beautiful daughter.

The real world, however, where Poprishchin makes quite a different impression, paints an alternate portrait of him. In the real world, he is a desk clerk who commands no respect. His immediate superior rudely bosses him around, and the director only ever talks to him about the weather. Sophie, the woman with whom he is obsessed, takes virtually no notice of him, other than to ask him if her father has been around. His duties do not appear to extend beyond the menial tasks of sharpening quills and signing papers. When he is not daydreaming at work, he is lying in bed and daydreaming at home, or writing in his diary. Because he has so little contact with people in the real world, his fantasies displace reality.

When the conflict between the two worlds presents itself to Poprishchin, the world of his fantasies, which is more comforting to his pride, proves to have the stronger grip. When the ultimate crisis comes, in the form of the devastating news that Sophie views Poprishchin as ridiculous and intends to marry the Kammerjunker, Poprishchin invents a fantasy even less grounded in the real world as a defense mechanism. He projects onto the real world the characteristics of a fairy tale, where he imagines himself to be the king of Spain going incognito and who is bound to have the beautiful princess in the end.

Much of the humor of the story comes from the reader’s recognition of the disparities between reality and Poprishchin’s diaries. Through these details, he unconsciously informs the reader that he truly believes himself to be the figure he writes about. For instance, when Sophie walks into the director’s study and asks him if her father has been around, Poprishchin fantasizes about an answer he might give her in what he imagines to be high-sounding and gallant rhetoric. What Poprishchin does not understand, but what the reader understands very well, is that he comes across as ridiculous when he only answers, “No ma’am” (161). While he spins an elaborate fantasy about his relationship with Sophie, the reader, alerted to be skeptical of his narration of events from the title of the story, recognizes the incongruence between the diary world and the real world.

There are, however, some respects in which the reader is left unsure whether the world that Poprishchin occupies is not also “mad.” For instance, it is never clearly established that Poprishchin makes up or imagines the dogs’ abilities to talk. In fact, he at first cannot believe what he hears and upon listening more closely seems to confirm that they can. Moreover, the letters he retrieves, in which Madgie is telling Fidèle about the director and Sophie, are immediately responsible for his complete break from reality. Whether these fantastical occurrences are real or not, therefore, is left an open question.

The validity of social and class distinctions is also questioned, even if this is delivered through Poprishchin’s descent into “madness” and in an attitude of extreme bitterness. Poprishchin writes, “Just because you’re a Kammerjunker it doesn’t mean you get a third eye in the middle of your forehead. It’s not as if his nose is made of gold; it’s no different from mine or anyone else’s…” (170). He makes a point that social and class distinctions are not physical or biological. Instead, their reality depends on the collective belief and regular acknowledgment through various social practices that they are real, which constitutes its own “madness” and “unreality.” In other words, Gogol, at the end, seems to attribute the idea of class distinctions to a collective fantasy, or a collective “madness,” just as we view Poprishchin’s idea of himself as belonging to a higher social position as his own particular fantasy or “madness.” This idea of class distinction is made even more absurd when we see that a dog belonging to a noble family takes on the qualities of Russian nobles themselves, dropping French expressions in her letters, as if class distinctions really were more real than biological distinctions or distinctions between species.