Petersburg Tales | Nikolai Gogol | Alma Classics

After reading the very intense Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky, I had decided to put aside works by Dostoevsky for something a lot less intense.  

I happened to come across Petersburg Tales by Nikolai Gogol and was in quite two minds if I should read it.  The illustration on the cover did not look threatening to me, and I had positive memories of a short stay in St Petersburg, so I decided to try and see if I could read this book.

After the so very intense Demons, I must say Petersburg Tales by Nikolai Gogol is quite a hoot to read.  Comprising Nevsky Prospect, The Nose, The Overcoat and Diary of a Madman, Gogol wrote in a fantastical method that I found very enjoyable as I read the first three tales.  

The last story Diary of a Madman, however, had me feeling very deja vu-ish.  It reminded me of Flowers for Algernon written by Daniel Keyes and 鲁迅's 狂人日记.  All three stories were narrated in the form of a diary, which depicts the mental status of the writer.  In the Diary of a Madman, the diary entries chronicles the descent into paranoid delusion of Poprischin.  In Flowers for Algernon, Charlie Gordon's breathtaking improvement after his surgery and heartbreaking regression after the decline of surgical effects are narrated in his diary.  鲁迅's 狂人日记  appears similarly to chronicle the ravings of a delusional man.  But considering that Gogol's Diary of a Madman was published in 1835 while 鲁迅's 狂人日记 was published much later in 1918, I thought 狂人日记 had taken inspiration from Diary of a Madman, although 鲁迅 had intended his version to be a critique on traditional Han culture, which he felt was suffocating.

Petersburg Tales is for me a very good 入門 experience with Nikolai Gogol's writing.  And I must say I am now quite hooked and interested to find out more about Gogol and read his other works.

And I have to say, one very helpful item in the Notes section of this book is The Table of Ranks introduced during Peter the Great's reign.  This Table certainly clarified quite a bit of doubts I had about the ranks of the various characters that appeared in Fyodor Dostoevsky's books.