Diary of a Lunatic

"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.

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]

See also

• Bibliography of Leo Tolstoy

References

External links

• Original Text
  • Diary of a Lunatic, from RevoltLib.com
  • Diary of a Lunatic, from Marxists.org
  • Diary of a Lunatic, from TheAnarchistLibrary.org

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