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
References
- ^ Janko Lavrin (2014). Tolstoy: An Approach Bound with Dostoevsky: A Study. Taylor & Francis. p. 82.
- ^ Inessa Medzhibovskaya (2009). Tolstoy and the Religious Culture of His Time: A Biography of a Long Conversion, 1845-1885. Lexington Books. p. 297.
- ^ The Berkeley Undergraduate Journal. University of California, Berkeley. Undergraduate Programs. 1990.
- ^ Orwin (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy. Cambridge University Press. p. 173.
- ^ Henry W. Pickford (2015). Thinking with Tolstoy and Wittgenstein: Expression, Emotion, and Art. Northwestern University Press.
- ^ Ernest Joseph Simmons (2014). Tolstoy. Taylor & Francis. p. 151.
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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- Bibliography
- War and Peace (1869)
- Anna Karenina (1878)
- Resurrection (1899)
- Childhood (1852)
- Boyhood (1854)
- Youth (1856)
- Family Happiness (1859)
- Polikúshka (1860)
- The Cossacks (1863)
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
- The Kreutzer Sonata (1889)
- The Devil (1911)
- The Forged Coupon (1911)
- Hadji Murat (1912)
- "The Raid" (1852)
- "The Cutting of the Forest" (1855)
- "Sevastopol Sketches" (1855)
- "Recollections of a Billiard-marker" (1855)
- "The Snowstorm" (1856)
- "Two Hussars" (1856)
- "A Landowner's Morning" (1856)
- "Lucerne" (1857)
- "Albert" (1858)
- "Three Deaths" (1859)
- "The Porcelain Doll" (1863)
- "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" (1872)
- "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" (1872)
- "The Bear Hunt" (1872)
- "What Men Live By" (1881)
- "Diary of a Lunatic" (1884)
- "Quench the Spark" (1885)
- "An Old Acquaintance" (1885)
- "Where Love Is, God Is" (1885)
- "Ivan the Fool" (1885)
- "Evil Allures, But Good Endures" (1885)
- "Wisdom of Children" (1885)
- "The Three Hermits" (1886)
- "Promoting a Devil" (1886)
- "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" (1886)
- "The Grain" (1886)
- "Repentance" (1886)
- "Croesus and Fate" (1886)
- "Kholstomer" (1886)
- "The Two Brothers and the Gold" (1886)
- "A Lost Opportunity" (1889)
- "A Dialogue Among Clever People" (1892)
- "Walk in the Light While There is Light" (1893)
- "The Coffee-House of Surat" (1893)
- "The Young Tsar" (1894)
- "Master and Man" (1895)
- "Too Dear!" (1897)
- "Work, Death, and Sickness" (1903)
- "Three Questions" (1903)
- "Alyosha the Pot" (1905)
- "Father Sergius" (1911)
- "After the Ball" (1911)
- The Power of Darkness (1886)
- The First Distiller (1886)
- The Light Shines in the Darkness (1890)
- The Fruits of Enlightenment (1891)
- The Living Corpse (1900)
- The Cause of It All (1910)
- A History of Yesterday (1851)
- Confession (1882)
- The Gospel in Brief (1883)
- What I Believe (1884)
- What Is to Be Done? (1886)
- The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894)
- What Is Art? (1897)
- "A Letter to a Hindu" (1908)
- The Inevitable Revolution (1909)
- A Calendar of Wisdom (1910)
- The Decembrists (1884)
- "Posthumous Notes of the Hermit Fëdor Kuzmich" (1905)
- Sophia (wife)
- Alexandra (daughter)
- Ilya (son)
- Lev Lvovich (son)
- Tatyana (daughter)
- Yasnaya Polyana
- Tolstoyan movement
- Christian anarchism
- Departure of a Grand Old Man (1912 film)
- Lev Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicholas II (1928 documentary)
- Lev Tolstoy (1984 film)
- The Last Station (1990 novel)
- 2009 film)
- Story of One Appointment (2018 film)
- A Couple (2022 film)
- Tolstoy Farm
- Tolstoj quadrangle
- crater
- The Triumph of the Farmer or Industry and Parasitism (1888)
- Vladimir Chertkov
- Aylmer and Louise Maude
- Translators of Tolstoy
- Tolstoy scholars
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