albeit with masterful exaggeration – the dining table groaning under comestibles to the road connecting Konotop and Baturyn, which is about 15 miles. In The Terrible Vengeance, Gogol touches on another important festivity among Ukrainians: wedding. He commences the tale with illustrative anticipation: “Noise and thunder at the end of Kyiv: Captain Gorobets is celebrating his son’s wedding” (Gogol 64). Then he bestirs himself to explain the source of the noise: The thing is that Ukrainian people were doughty trenchermen in the days of yore, and even doughtier drinkers, not to mention that they were doughtier merrymakers (Gogol 64). Looking with the benefit of hindsight, things changed much neither during Gogol’s time not after him. Descriptions of Captain Gorobets’ individual guests are even more marvelous and edifying: On his sorrel stallion arrived Cossack Mikita, who kept …show more content…
The plot of this tale revolves around a crazy man of humble descent, who contrives in his mind a life of wealth and fame for himself. In his phantasmagorical dreams, the madman imagines himself as a general, a governor and even an emperor of Spain. He commonly disassociates himself from the peasants, describing them as the rabble. The Diary of a Madman is not just a ridicule of a single madman; it is instead a denouncement of the entire ruling class. In general, the contrast between human nature in Gogol’s Ukrainian tales and human nature in his Petersburg tales is striking. Whereas in his Ukrainian tales Gogol is genuinely fulsome in his praise of the ways of ordinary Ukrainian people, in his Petersburg tales Gogol is unsparing in his criticism of high social stations. This, however, should not be interpreted that Gogol praised all Ukrainians and ridiculed all Russians. Instead, he lauded the ways of common people and criticized the coxcombry of the bureaucrats and