Summary of "Notes of a Madman". Reflections on the story of N.V. Gogol

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The topic of this article could be simplified as much as possible by calling it briefly and standardly: "Notes of a Madman". Summary". Gogol, however, does not deserve such an attitude. He is a classic, so looking for and finding fresh non-trivial thoughts in his writings is a thankful task. Why did he take up writing this story?

Gogol is a connoisseur of the bureaucratic world

Twenty-five-year-old Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol knew the inside of the life of petty officials in Northern Palmyra firsthand. He himself, having arrived in the city of Peter, thirsting for immediate literary victories, was forced to serve for some time. He did not arouse particular enthusiasm for the career of an official; rather, the realization of the futility of such a “mouse life” came. However, Gogol would not have been a classic if he had not made lemonade from the lemon offered to him by fate.

An observant writer, having become an insider in the St. Petersburg office, collected material for the story. A summary of the Notes of a Madman is the subject of this article.

General information about the work

The story is written in the form of a personal diary of the protagonist, petty clerk, clerk at the department Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin. It has no chapters. There are clear dates for entries (there are 11 of them), they follow from October 3 to December 8. Behind them are records written in the chronology of a clouded mind (there are 9 of them). The “mad reckoning” begins on April 43, 2000, continues in March-October, then on a “day without a date”, on a date without a month, a date without a month and a year, etc. However, the word “February” that is sometimes found in this flight of fancy gives we have some reason to believe that the last entry was made in February of the year following the start of the diary.

So to summarize the above:

1. The Notes of a Madman is written outside the box. A summary of the chapters of this work, therefore, it is impossible to write (no chapters).
2. The diary covers Poprishchin's progressing megalomania for 5 months. It starts with the appearance of hallucinations (talking dogs) and ends with the placement of him in a lunatic asylum.

Storyline

Summary of the "Diary of a Madman" should begin on 1833-03-10, when Poprishchin, watching the rainyweather, sees the young unmarried daughter of her boss Sophie getting out of the carriage and entering the department building. She brings with her the dog Medzhi, who enters into a conversation with another dog, Fidelka, who follows two women passing by. The poor clerk likes the girl.

Intrigued, he leaves the office, follows the ladies and finds out that they live near Kokushkin's bridge, in Zverkov's house on the 5th floor. By the way, the house is real: an official familiar from Gogol's joint service lived in it.

What is this story about? The summary of the Notes of a Madman in our presentation follows the logic of the classic story: the love that has arisen finally destroys a person who has already gone crazy from a quarrelsome team, dissatisfaction with hopeless work, poverty and hopelessness.

However, let's get back to the logic of Gogol's storytelling. The next day, when the main character, as usual, cleans and mends feathers on the desk of his boss, the head of the department, the same Sophie enters the office. Picking up the handkerchief she dropped, Poprishchin already clearly feels in love.

He starts over the next month, not controlling himself, to give the girl the most ridiculous signs of attention. The head of the department proofreads him for this and puts him in his place. But this does not stop the mad lover. He wonders if Sophie has tender feelings for him.

Gogol's chaotic style of presentation is maximally adapted to the personality of the protagonist. Nikolai VasilyevichIt is impossible to win, but we do not set such goals for ourselves. Our summary of Notes of a Madman notes the details of the logic of insanity. Perplexed, Aksenty again resorts to the help of the aforementioned dogs (he has many friends in the book!).

First, he sneaks into his boss's house hoping to find out something about Sophia from Meji, but the tactful dog is delicately silent. Then Poprishchin goes to Zverkov's house, where he finds shreds of torn letters in Fidelka's bed. Poprishchin's "brilliant" mind understands that this is the correspondence of the two aforementioned little dogs, which is essentially similar to ladies' gossip. From the letters, the poor clerk learns disappointing news: his boss was awarded an order, a certain chamber junker Teplov has quite reasonable views on Sophia, and the girl perceives him not even with irony, but with open sarcasm, calling him “a turtle in a poke.”

Trying to distract himself, Aksenty reads newspapers. However, the effect is the opposite: unhappy love paradoxically makes him deeply experience (obviously, there is a split personality) the abdication of the king of Spain from the throne. He associates himself with the monarch. The disease enters megalomania. After a three-week absenteeism, he goes to work out of habit, but behaves inappropriately (after all, royal dignity does not imply noticing some kind of department director). On working documents, he affixes his new signature - "Ferdinand VIII". Then the "Spanish king" sneaks into Sophia's house to reveal his feelings to her, coming to the philosophical conclusion that the ladies, by and large,only the devil is cute.

After this, a sick person is hospitalized, but he does not realize what happened, considering the shaved patients of the house to be insane Spanish grandees and wondering why they are beaten with sticks.

Reasoning about the author's style

Our article does not just reveal the summary of the Madman's Notes. What matters is how the work is composed. You must have read it. The protagonist, head of the department Aksenty Ivanovich Poprishchin, falls into an altered state of consciousness (suffering from delusions of grandeur), which allows Gogol to touch exclusively the nuances of bureaucratic worldview with his mouth, with amazing artistic power to ironic over the emptiness of the souls of people "in the service of the sovereign." In the story, in addition to the main character, there are three more quite original images of petty officials - Petrushevich, Schneider, Kaplunov. Gogol sympathizes with Petrushevich, because he behaves adequately to his social status: he does not go to balls for "office plankton of the 19th century" and to "Bostonites". There is also an unpleasant bribe-taker Zakatishcheva. The image of Sophie is ironic, he is "empty mentally to the sound" and is somewhat in tune with Sofya Famusova from Griboedov's "Woe from Wit". The images of the characters at the time of writing are absolutely alive, evoking adequate emotions from readers.

Conclusion

What thoughts break into our debriefing Notes of a Madman summary? Gogol is, first of all, a talent that knows neither time frames nor genre. He, joking and creating, like Mozart, admiring the brilliance of his thoughts, created entire genres that receivedthen development in different types of literature and arts. Let's remember at least his Terrible Vengeance, written in the classic thriller style… But that's not what we're talking about now.

Which of the modern classics uses the technique of altered consciousness of the protagonist, discovered by the great Gogol? That's right, Viktor Pelevin.

Suffice it to recall his novel "Generation P", where Vavilen Tatarsky moves along the canvas of the work in a similar way: from one revelation received in an inadequate state to another. Excuse me, so why now venerable literary critics in all seriousness claim that Pelevin is the father of Russian postmodernism? Is this a fake author?

It was Gogol who used an unusual technique in the story "Notes of a Madman" - combining the real world with the imaginary one to achieve the maximum artistic effect, but he, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) was ahead of his time. And, following this logic, we come to understand that Nikolai Vasilyevich developed an artistic style a century and a half ago, which later became known as postmodernism.