Book Review - Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by by Gogol

 Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Gogol, translated with an introduction by Ronald Wilks

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972                                                            ISBN 0140442731

Nothing is new in this world. The Surrealists burst onto the world scene in the 1920s as something new and different, and yet I've just read a marvelous collection of surrealist stories that were written one hundred years earlier. Kafka too certainly owes something to the madness of Gogol - I thought of him as I dipped my toe into the ocean of words created by this icon of Russian literature.

I say "madness of Gogol" advisedly - he did in the end go mad with religious mania and starve himself to death - for there are definite signs in the stories collected in this volume of incipient madness. The Diary of a Madman in particular describes a descent into madness, but written in such a way that the reader almost slips into madness with him - Gogol writes of the stifling life of a civil servant in such a way that we see that it could very easily drive one mad, as it locks power into toadys and martinets who take their own failures out on those beneath them in the tightly woven structure of the day (explained succinctly and well by Ronald Wilks in his introduction and notes).

From The Diary we move in this edition to The Nose, and the reader moves from having a descent into madness described to being immersed in complete madness. The story of a man who wakes up to find his nose missing, and then to chase it around St. Petersburg as it masquerades as a high-ranking civil servant is funny and disturbing at the same time. Gogol once again pokes fun at the absurdities of society, but there is no hint in the story that the main premise is absurd at all. The reader is waiting for some sort of punchline, but will be disappointed.

The final three stories in this edition sit on somewhat firmer ground, being more straightforward stories of Russian society and mores (although two of them are actually set in Ukraine from where Gogol hailed). In The Overcoat we see the poverty and hopelessness of those of the lower strata. The final two stories poke fun at the pettiness of the "gentlemanly" class of former soldiers, with their smallholdings and serfs.

Some of the beauty of Gogol is in his descriptive writing (well-translated I think here by Wilks), his mock innocent tone highlighting some of the absurdities he's writing about. His seriousness when describing the most absurd turns of events, for example in The Nose, shifts the reader's moorings and drags them into the swirling maelstrom of the world he manages to create in only a few pages.

I am never on firm ground with Russian literature - it always takes me out of my comfort zone. This book was no different: an insight into a different world, a different way of thinking, and very entertaining. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell