The Diary of a Madman

The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories is a bizarre and colourful collection containing the complete Ukrainian and Petersburg stories by the iconic Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. From the witty and Kafkaesque The Nose, where a civil servant wakes up one day to find his nose missing, to the moving and evocative The Overcoat, about a sad and reclusive man whose only ambition is to replace his old, threadbare coat, Gogol gives us a unique and satirical take on the absurd. Gogol's tales of inconsequential civil servants, mixing the everyday with the surreal, foreshadow the work of his later acolytes, Bulgakov and Kafka. None is more cutting than the main story, The Diary of a Madman, where a government clerk descends to insanity, claiming that he can communicate with dogs and that he is next in line to the throne of Spain.