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Sofi is a beautiful woman to whom Poprishchin has a strong sexual attraction. However, Poprishchin painfully discovers that Sofi finds him unattractive and irritable, and he is unable to cope.

The Diary of a Madman - Creepypasta

Poprishchin is enlightened about both the Director's ambition and Sofi's view of him from letters written by a dog. Poprishchin's imagination conjured the complimentary letter from Sofi, when, in reality, the letter neglects mentioning him. His destruction of the letter evidences his insanity by symbolizing his release of reality. One disruptive force contextualized is the relationship between the individual and society.

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As we allow Poprishchin to mislead us in his madness, we gain insight on the theme of alienation. His struggle allows us to contextualize his alienation from society through a lens set in the time and place of Diary of a Madman, but also to compare and contrast it with a more general sense of any alienation from society. Poprishchin's alienation from society is strongly rooted to the way he perceives and treats people around him.

Poprishchin sees a menace in everyone and always finds a way to blame others for his personal frustrations, and consequently treats them with the aggression he believes they deserve. This behavior fuels a vicious cycle that justifies the negative perception and treatment that the real world exerts toward Poprishchin. The many illusions Poprishchin creates for his false reality are intended to improve either his public identity or his private identity.

Power and dignity are the two most significant traits that Poprishchin fantasizes about. We see many attempts by Poprishchin to increase his power in his newspaper world by acquiring political rank, giving himself dominance relative to the general public and ultimately improving his public identity. This side of his fantasy is fueled by his desire of approval from others, a feat he can obviously not achieve in reality. Attempts to improve his private identity are synonymous with gaining dignity and self-respect - Poprishchin's erotic fantasies are the primary result of this quest.

Poprishchin does not feel love, but rather his feelings of humiliation and the need to assert himself serve as the main driver for his erotic fantasies. There have been many professional analyses on Poprishchin's unique diary entries attempting to interpret their meaning, with special interest taken to the entry: Richard Gustafson's analysis of the entry title is more grounded in the contents of the story.


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He agrees that Poprishchin is indeed trying to avoid May 13, but his reasoning for such is that the letters from the dogs that exposed the grave reality of Sofi and the Director were presented exactly half a year earlier on November Juxtaposition is Gogol's ultimate method for presenting the distorted world in Diary of a Madman.

The story juxtaposes the eccentric with the ordinary, the significant with nonsense, and ultimately reality with madness. Gogol's juxtapositions push the reader to have a complicated response to each of the story's elements. It is important to note that Poprishchin's transition from sanity to madness is not instantaneous, but rather can be tracked through a sequence of events. At each point during his descent to madness, the reader can see a fraction of his sanity being replaced with madness, ultimately revealing the double perspective of sanity and madness.

Poprishchin dominates the narrative like no other Gogolian character. The first-person perspective complements the themes Gogol is trying to display.


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In Richard Williams began an animated version of the story, but the project was left unfinished. In , The Black Mass radio series broadcast a half-hour adaptation starring Erik Bauersfeld who also produced and edited the series as Poprishchin. Both the director and the actor were critically praised, calling Lebedev's acting "unforgettable".

Journal of A Madman by Christopher Hicks

The story saw two opera adaptations: A translated audio book version of the short story was published in Malayalam in by Kathacafe [7]. Lu Xun , the pioneer of modern Chinese prose, read widely in Russian literature and was inspired by this story to create his own in The story's name was reflected in the name Lina Kostenko 's novel Notes of a Ukrainian Madman , which much refers to Gogol's writings. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Diary of a Madman.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses, see Diary of a Madman disambiguation.

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Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei Wang editors. From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China.

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Harvard University Press , China portal Writing portal. Works by Lu Xun. Selected Stories of Lu Hsun. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. The True Story of Ah Q.

Diary of a Madman (short story)

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