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Madness In Nikolai Gogol's Petersburg Tales

1908 Words8 Pages

Nikolai Gogol's Petersburg tales give rise to an image of Petersburg as a ghostly and mysterious city inhabited by poor clerks and artists. Among all the aspects of Petersburg myth the author creates, the idea of madness is a prevailing theme. Characters' madness in the short stories intertwines with the demonic elements and constant reference to dreams. Lack of a clear boundary between the reality and fantasy, sleeping and waking create a specific "gogolian" atmosphere of a surrealistic and mystical city. Even the main characters such as Chartkov in "The Portrait", Major Kovalyov in "The Nose" and Piskaryov in the "Nevsky Prospect" themselves do not fully realize whether the action takes place in dream or in reality. Therefore, in order …show more content…

The three elements that construct the notion of madness are the protagonist, the reader and the "city" (secondary characters) because "madness is not only a certain state of mind but also the attitude of the people around and the reader to the hero embodied in the term crazy" . The reader's and the secondary characters' perception is what defines the way in which the author discloses madness in the three stories examined. One way is when the author depicts madness of a single person, which is demonstrated through the correspondence of the reader's and the secondary characters' perspectives. In this case, both the reader and the minor characters perceive actions that take place in the story as absurd and unreal. Since the events are described from the point of view of the protagonist, it is his imagination that is inflamed, while the reader's and the minor characters' views are sensible. Another way in which madness is represented is the insanity of the whole city, which is communicated through the discrepancy in the reader's and secondary characters' perception of the action. Here only the reader remains sane and considers the events unrealistic, whereas even the most absurd incidents appear normal to the characters. In this case we are dealing with the insanity of the whole

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