As an artist, Gogol stands apart from all other creators of literature that we have encountered in the course. His stream-of-consciousness style is remarkable, and he has a certain singular way of painting the desires, motivations, and experiences of the pitiful mid-tier Russian civil servant that immediately took hold of my imagination, and I am sure that of others. He does all this with incredible humor, and manages to construct a narrative with incredible speed and power. The previous Gogol work we studied, The Nose, was understandably fixated on its titular focus. However, this olfactory obsession is not contained to The Nose. At several painfully obvious points in Diary of a Madman, the Gogol work we most recently studied, Gogol brings the faces’ most famous organ to the forefront. On page 165, he rather innocently writes “I had to hold my nose” (as a result of a nasty smell). Later, however, he mentions a dog “trying to sink his teeth” into the narrator’s nose. Again, on page 170, Gogol writes “It’s not as if his made of gold”, in reference to the narrator’s romantic adversary, the Kammerjunker. This is slightly more telling, using the nose as a central to pin an entire personality on. The narrator’s nose is mentioned again on page 176, and on page 178, perhaps most noticeably as the last word in the entire work. This last flourish convinces me that mention of the nose is not coincidental, and instead is entirely purposeful by Gogol. In the last sentence, the King of France is said to have a wart “right under his nose” as a way of devaluing him and demeaning him in the insane narrator’s mind. This goes hand and hand with the earlier description of the Kammerjunker’s nose being “not gold” as a way of rejecting his (in the narrator’s mind) superiority and wealth. I first thought of “noses” in the context of Gogol’s The Nose, it is quite evident after study that Gogol does have a strange fixation on the body part, and particularly enjoys using it as a barometer for certain characters when observed by the narrator.
When reading Diary of a Madman, I initially took the title as a semi-ironic take on the state of the archetypal St. Petersburg bureaucratic existence. As the story progressed, becoming more surreal and Kafkaeque, I took the title at face value, watching with interest as Gogol initiated a subtle descent into insanity. This was cemented during the talking dog (at the apartment) sequence, and carried on into the narrative past this first real expression of “madness” in the narrator. My opinion of the title changed for a third time during the final, “King of Spain” sequence. During this period of the story, in which the narrative becomes feverish and hazy, the title seems more of an overdone farce, Gogol commenting on a modern ideal of insanity, and taking it to full, demonstrative irony. The idea and demonstrated version of madness certainly fits Gogol’s writing in The Nose. I am glad to have discovered Gogol as a writer, realizing his place in the pantheon of surrealists alongside Kafka and Murakami.