"Diary of a Lunatic" (sometimes translated as "Memoirs of a Madman" and "The Diary of a Madman") is a short story by Leo Tolstoy written in 1884.
According to literary critic Janko Lavrin, in August, 1869, Tolstoy travelled from Nizhny Novgorod (AKA: Gorky) to the Penza district and slept overnight in the town of Arzamas. But he couldn't sleep, though, and was overwhelmed with a maddening fear of death.[1] Many years later he recounted this experience in written form, and Diary of a Lunatic was the result. The title of the story is a reference to Nikolai Gogol's story "Diary of a Madman".
Literary analysis
According to literature professor Inessa Medzhibovskaya, this unfinished work uses an encounter with possible death as a flame to a spiritual awakening, though the conflict remains of misunderstanding between the real world and the spiritual one.[2] According to the editors at the Berkeley Undergraduate Journal, this work was an unfinished fragment, a deeply personal, autobiographical or autobiographical-like, first-person narrative whose resolution exists only within the Death of Ivan Ilyich, as Ivan Ilyich is just Diary of a Lunatic "prefigured in a different form."[3] According to the Cambridge Companions, this is a work which describes Tolstoy's crises in veiled form.[4]
This work is elsewhere very popular in literary analysis in universities, such as with professors and authors Henry W. Pickford at Duke University,[5] and Ernest J. Simmons at Cornell, Harvard, and Columbia.[6]
