27 pages • 54 minutes read
Diary of a Madman
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Themes
Class Distinctions and Anxieties
Class describes the manner in which people are understood and categorized by others in the story. In Poprishchin’s society, class is divided at birth, separating nobility from the rest of society, including serfs, who are not depicted in the story’s big city setting. High status is taken for granted by some, including by those near the top, like the director, and low status is taken for granted by others, including the various servants who are briefly encountered in the story. For those with a murkier social position, like Poprishchin, who is a low and poor nobleman, it is a source of great anxiety. Poprishchin resents any perceived slight, such as when he does not get the respect he thinks he deserves from servants, and he harbors an extreme hatred for his direct superior, the section head, who insults him. He is very sensitive to markers of class. He recognizes noblemen on the street and identifies with them to inflate his sense of his own importance, but becomes ashamed when he realizes that his coat is dirty and out of style.
Class distinctions even seem to be more important in the story’s world than distinctions between species, since the dog Madgie has all of the qualities of an educated aristocratic person. She drops French phrases into her letters, appears to be spoiled with the finest foods, and demonstrates her snobbery by making insulting comments about some of the dogs that come by her house.
Poprishchin only begins to doubt the legitimacy of class distinctions after his mental health crisis. He notes that there are no great biological differences between himself and a Kammerjunker, and that class distinctions are entirely arbitrary social phenomena. After remembering the manner in which class distinctions rapidly shift in fairy tales—where, for instance, a peasant is discovered to be a king—Poprishchin imagines that these cases also occur in the real world. His sense of the potential fluctuation of class distinctions in the rigidly hierarchical system of 19th-century Russian society comes to a climax when he comes to believe that he himself is the lost king of Spain. In order to combat his sense of inferiority after learning that he will never be fit to be Sophie’s love interest, he abandons any idea of climbing the social ladder in the limited manner available to him, and instead jumps to the top in his fantasies, where he is suddenly a peer of the Russian emperor, who he sees passing in the street.
The Blurred Line Between “Madness” and Reality
Readers first encounter the idea of “madness” in the story’s title, conditioning us from the beginning to doubt Poprishchin’s mental state and reliability. Initially, nothing extraordinary suggests that Poprishchin is “mad.” He dismisses his section head as envious in the first paragraph, but such expressions of resentment are relatively common among people who have been insulted and alienated in society. The first incident that makes us question Poprishchin’s perception is the conversation he records in his diary between two dogs, Madgie and Fidèle. Creating even more doubt, he soon gets over his initial surprise by saying that this is in fact fairly common.
Apart from this event, which by the end of the story we are still not sure is real or not, the reader’s idea of Poprishchin’s “madness” develops gradually. Not only tied to a dissonance between one’s imagined and real social position, Poprishchin’s “madness” is depicted in his absurd sense of time. While for the first half of the story Poprishchin uses real dates to mark the progress of time, by the end he is using nonsensical dates, like “The nothingth. There was no date today” (174).
Poprishchin’s absurd statements continue with his invented conspiracy theories. He says that a barber in Saint Petersburg is conspiring with the Turkish sultan to make people vain. He says that the Earth wants to sit on the Moon, and that when this happens, people’s noses, which are located on the moon, will be crushed. In the end, his concerns are no longer with the people he typically encounters but with abstract conspiracies. Throughout the story, we see a progress from fantasies grounded to some degree in his daily life to ones that are totally ungrounded.
While the diary form provides events exclusively from Poprishchin’s perspective, there are enough hints of how others respond that illustrate how wildly Poprishchin’s view of the world diverges from his society’s accepted reality. For the first half of the story, he adheres to the identity and social class he is publicly acknowledged as having: He goes into the office, performs his work, and shows the respect to his superiors that is expected. It is not until the end, where he imagines himself to be the king of Spain and ceases performing his established social role, that he is understood to be disconnected from reality, a telling comment on the absurdity of social appearance and imposed class structures.
Obsession
Poprishchin’s obsession ties in with the themes of class and “madness,” seemingly arising from Poprishchin’s futile frustrations in a society so focused on class status and the source of his eventual break from reality. It divides his idealized self from the real self that inhabits the world and engages with the people in it. He is obsessed with being viewed as important and of a high status, and he is obsessed with Sophie. When he is confronted with his reality as an insignificant person in his society with no chance of winning Sophie’s heart, his obsession pushes him to create his own reality—that the section head reprimands him out of envy, and later that he is the lost king of Spain.
Readers are able to get an idea that Poprishchin’s obsessions develop out of his lonely and isolated circumstances. For the most part, Poprishchin is said to do very little. There are several references to his laying in bed and doing nothing but daydreaming for most of the day. Moreover, he has a menial job in which he spends most of his time standing around and daydreaming even more. He has very little social interactions with the people around him, but his time daydreaming is spent building these interactions into events that are nothing like what they appear to be for others. He turns the section head’s rudeness and mockery toward him into a mortal hatred for the man. Above all, he turns his brief encounters with the director’s young daughter into an all-consuming passion. While he seeks to suppress this passion by averting his thoughts from Sophie when he finds them turning in her direction, his obsession manifests itself in his stalking the house in order to see her and forcing his way into a stranger’s house in order to get Madgie’s letters. While he often represses the manner in which he wishes to behave in public, his obsessions are given free rein in his diaries, where he curses out the section head and others for failing to show him respect and where he fantasizes about giving gallant speeches to Sophie.
Poprishchin’s obsession is also a tragic character flaw. It drives him to believe and to do things that only lead to his absurd perceptions and his torture and confinement in a prison. Numerous characters make reference to or react to Poprishchin’s frantic and troubling behavior throughout the story. This includes the section head, Mavra, Fidèle’s owner, and finally the people that take him to the “asylum” and are in there with him. By this, we understand his behavior as that of someone being driven by obsessions.
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