In Dostoyevsky’s famed (1868-9) novel, The Idiot, he makes these observations about a recurring element in human life:

There are some people about whom it is difficult to say anything which would describe them immediately and fully in their most typical and characteristic aspects; these are the people who are usually called “ordinary” and accounted as “the majority. . . .” When, for example, the very nature of certain ordinary persons consists precisely in their perpetual and unvarying ordinariness, or better still, when in spite of their most strenuous efforts to life themselves out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, then such persons acquire a certain character of their own–the typical character of mediocrity which refuses to remain what it is and desires at all costs to become original and independent, without having the slightest capacity for independence. . . There are a great number of such people in the world, far more than it appears. Like all people, they may be divided into two categories: some are mentally limited, others, “much cleverer.” The first are happier. For the “ordinary” person of limited intelligence nothing is easier than to imagine himself an exceptional and original person and to take delight in this delusion with no misgivings. It has been enough for some of our young ladies to cut their hair short, put on blue eyeglasses, and call themselves Nihilists for them to persuade themselves that, in putting on their spectacles, they immediately acquired “convictions” of their own. It is enough for a man to feel in his heart a droplet of humanitarian and benevolent emotion to be immediately persuaded that no one feels so deeply as he and that he stands at the very vanguard of civilization. It is enough for another to pick up some thought he has heard, or to read a page at random somewhere, to believe at once that it was “his own idea,” engendered in his own brain (481-483).

It is recurring in that all sensitive men of letters, all who actually went thought the crucible of suffering to develop truly scrupulous and critical abilities, develop their most acute aversion to those who have not been through the crucible, have not developed the fluency in ideas that creates the critic. The idlers, the armchair analysts, and the prosaic “columnists” are the standard form in Beltway politics and in American academia. However, such unqualified critics are in abundance in contemporary American life. In American academia, university “professors” and professorettes pontificate to their captive audiences the most trite and hackneyed multiculturalist sloganeering under the aegis of imparting “critical skills.” What is more irritating than a hack politician “standing up” for “his ideas” that read like a university syllabus for political science 100? Certainly, Dostoyevsky’s view of the herd has applications in nearly all modern societies and political systems.However, it is rare that such a work of literature encapsulates this decadent and irritating product of bourgeois democracy. Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman” is precisely this work. Though only 20 pages, the Diary stands out as the greatest exposer of the pretensions of bourgeois politicians, professorettes and bureaucrats, as well as the idle letter-writers who are always “appalled” about something or other. To a man, such persons are convinced that Dostoyevsky was correct, though the mockery, of course, is not aimed at them.

Gogol’s Diary is aimed at several things. Primarily, it is aimed at the alienated bureaucracy of St. Petersburg that began its development under the rule of Peter the Great. Furthermore, Gogol is also aiming his barbs at democracies, where “all men are equal,” and their Socrates is condemned to death by a threatened and clueless populace. Gogol was a monarchist, and near the end of his life engaged in bitter polemics with the Petersburg salon crowd about the nature of the Russian tsardom.

Previous to the reign of Peter, the imperial bureaucracy was a haphazard affair. Regimentation did not exist among the Russians nearly to the extent it did in Europe. Major boyar clans took the offices of state according to the prominence of the family line throughout Russian history. Therefore, massive genealogies were created in order to decided who would occupy what office. Battles and duels over wounded family honor would regularly take place after the inevitable disagreements such a method would engender. Families exaggerated their importance to take higher posts, and the worst form of insult was to serve the state in a lower capacity than one representing a family lower on the social or historical scale.

This sort of confusion was remedied by Peter by the system of ranks he created. Here, family history was irrelevant to the occupation of offices. Ranks were provided according to merit, as was promotion. Offices, then, in theory, were occupied by those who had the experience and competence, and, many of peasant or merchant stock received noble status under this system. There were 14 ranks (chin, in Russian) in all, the Collegiate Registrar was the lowest, while Titular Counselor, the sixth rank, provided the holder with personal nobility. The rank of Actual State Counselor, the eleventh rank, made the noble status hereditary. For competent service, government clerks were given promotions in rank about once ever three or four years.

Therefore, it was often the case that the son of a peasant could enter the government service, after the requisite schooling, and reach a noble rank within a rather short time. New nobles were bring minted regularly, regardless of their lack of knowledge about what noble life was like and what was expected of them. Therefore, a perfectly ordinary man might well begin calling himself a noble while remaining crude and ignorant of most things except his specific government post.

Further, very much like the American Beltway, Petersburg developed a massive federal bureaucracy like all bureaucracies, that acquired interests of their own, and eventually became isolated from the mainstream of Russian life. Therefore, for a traditionalist such as Gogol, living in Petersburg, having come from the village life in Ukraine, seeing around him an alienated, arrogant and self-aggrandizing officialdom all around, must have been a major culture shock and likely was the engine that fed his satirical pen. Each of these petty bureaucrats, within his own little world of the government office or political ideology, some even calling themselves by noble titles, began to think of himself as an “original critic.”

Of course, there was a great gulf between the person of the monarch and this self-interested body of government officials. Nicholas I created his own office, His Majesty’s Own Chancellery, the purpose of which was precisely to bypass the Petersburg system and rule the country through his own people. It is no accident that Gogol’s celebrated The Government Inspector, a satirical play mocking the absurdities of the Petersburg crowd, was applauded when it was performed in town by none other than Nicholas himself. It had been banned in Berlin. For Russia, attacks on the person of the monarch were verboten, but raking the bureaucrats over the coals was fair game. It is very interesting that the peasantry had always made that all important distinction between the monarchy and the bureaucracy, nearly throughout the span of Russian history. For them, the monarch’s will was generally always benign, if it weren’t for the influence of corrupt bureaucrats and advisors. There is much truth to this instinctive peasant wisdom.

The barbs that Gogol sends towards the mediocre exist on many levels. It is an attack, again, on the alienated and self-absorbed bureaucrat, whether it be in London or Petersburg. It is also an attack on the “individual” in western democracies, who believes his views (and his votes) matter. The Diary shows that Gogol, like the later Dostoyevsky, viewed the dilettante with scorn. Whether one visits the Congressional offices of one’s representative, or observes the nose-ring wearing college girls protesting with the Soros sponsored cause-of-the-month, Gogol’s venom is given new life.

Visiting one’s Congressman is always an amusing experience. At the front desk, as soon as one walks into the office, is an invariably attractive college girl (though usually without the nose-ring) who does not bother to look up from her desk, lest she lose track of the People story she is enraptured with. Communication with such a being is nearly always a losing proposition, partially because the girl is where she is because either a) she comes from a family within the district that has donated a sum of money to the political in question, or, b) she is there to pleasure the congressman himself. Such college girls are the first line of communication within the American system of “representative democracy.”

This writer has had, on numerous occasions, the delight of meeting large groups of such people in the various eateries in Georgetown or Foggy Bottom. Evidently, these people only socialize with one another. Usually, they enter an establishment only to loudly proclaim the esteemed Congressman they happen to work for, and then proceed to sit down to a boisterous session of eating and drinking. It might be significant to mention that never, at these ritual gatherings, has an unattractive girl been seen. It may be a coincidence. Attractive or not, they are linked only by their sense of self-importance, the stubborn belief that they are “making a difference,” but always contrast themselves favorably to those not as richly endowed.

Another crucial experience is the nose-ring crowd, huddled around a set of prosaic placards in front of nearly every collegiate student union in America. Clad in black, with an occasional campaign button festooning some part of their body, these overwhelmingly female collegiate activists invariably are protesting for a cause that requires a minimum of personal sacrifice. Fighting racism, demanding “democracy” in Burma or demanding their affection for grass be legalized, these girls, without exception, are precisely the pretentious, self-important conformists Gogol attacked nearly 190 years ago. The clothes change, the causes change, but the attitude of the products of decadent bourgeois society remain.

Regardless of the specific manifestation of the phenomenon, all of these individuals are parodied in Gogol’s Diary through the main character, Aksenty Ivanovich. He is already over 40 and his job still consists in sharpening pencils for the director of the office. Now, the main character has been promoted through the rank to that of noble. This itself is a mockery of the system of ranks in that his noble status is manifest in the august duty of sharpening pens.

Nevertheless, he is convinced of the importance of his task. When the section chief chides him for his incompetence, he remarks that it must be because “he’s jealous.” Further, he thinks to himself, “It’s true, our work is noble, it’s clean everywhere, as you never see it in the provincial government: the tables are mahogany, and the superiors address each other formally. Yes, I confess, if it weren’t for the nobility of the work, I’d long since quit the department” (280).

Some days later, after our hero sharpened all his boss’ pencils, a “lackey” came to him and asked him to leave, as his boss was not out of the building. His services, apparently, were no longer needed. Predictably, the main character looks down on the servant and exclaims to himself “But don’t you know, stupid churl, that I am an official, a man of noble birth?” (283)

The main character has no life whatsoever. Going to the theater is his main hobby, and, of course, condemns his fellow clerks for not enjoying the cultural treats of Petersburg, as he imagines himself to be a man of culture and learning.

Our friend has taken a fancy to the director’s daughter, who is charming and beautiful, clearly of noble bearing. Of course, it is comical to consider a clod like Aksenty having any chance whatsoever with a woman like that, but he is convinced he does, largely due to his august position. The main character, however, has a novel way of finding out of this young woman hasany interest in him, and that is to ask her dog. He is convinced that he can hear dogs talking, and is convinced that if he can intercept the letters her dog has written her friends, he can find out where he stands. He appears at her house, where the door was answered by a maid. Our main character told her in no uncertain terms that he would like a word with the dog. When the maid could not find the words to respond to this, Aksenty was convinced that this was solely because of her stupidity. He ran into the hose regardless and rummaged through the dog’s basket, looking for the letters the dog wrote. Grabbing some paper, he ran out of the house, to the dumbfounded expression on the maid’s face. It is significant that in his ability to hear dogs talking, he takes is not as a sign of insanity, but as a sign that he has special abilities that the vulgar crowd simply does not have.

Now, Aksenty begins to “read” the letters that he has allegedly found in the dog’s basket. He is either simply making up the text without knowing it, or he has taken some bits of newspaper upon which he imposes his thoughts. It is unclear. One interpretation of this bizarre section of the story is the long standing occult tradition that civilization derives from the star Sirius, also known as the “dog star.” Occult researcher Michael Hoffman describes this occult obsession thus:

In the Hermetic-masonic tradition the secret identity of Satan is the cosmic force represented in occult lore as emanating from the state Sirius, the so-called dog star, alpha Canis majoris. In the secret tradition of the Freemasons, Sirius is overwhelmingly identified with a single primary attribute, the bringing of civilization to earth (Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, 23)

If the Diary is about anything, it is about the perversion, common enough in the writings of Oswald Spengler, of civilization, that is, the domination of mind over matter, which has taken over from the life of the village, the life of culture and tradition. This interpretation of Gogol here is given further impetus in that he himself is a product of the village, moving to Petersburg to start his literary career. This distinction between the village and the life of “advanced” urban civilization could not have been starker.

It may well be that Petersburg itself is the product of a Masonic ritual. Peter the Great was most certainly initiated into a Masonic order during his “grand tour” of Europe. Returning to Russia, Peter then became convinced to being “illumination” to the overwhelmingly peasant and Orthodox culture of Russia. After defeating Sweden in the Northern Wars, Peter chose the nearly impassible swamps just across from Finland to build his new capital. The building itself, then, might be interpreted to be the imposing of mind upon an uncooperative nature. It should also be added that those who did most of the work were Cossacks from the southern steppes, who died in the nearly uninhabitable swamps by the thousands during construction. It is no accident that the Cossacks have always been identified in Russian thinking with the Orthodox tradition and the Old Belief. To sacrifice this entity for the building of the new “European” capital over such harsh nature has layers and layers of Masonic overtones to it. It is worthy of note that Gogol has his hero condemn Masonry on page 293. Furthermore, the layout of the streets of St. Petersburg have the air of perfect symmetry and regularity, further adding ammunition to the occult nature of that city. By this, the regularity of human, scientific thinking is imposed, as such, over the completely inhospitable nature on the Gulf of Finland.

Nevertheless, Gogol’s worry in the Diary is the nature of civilization, especially Petrine civilization. The table of ranks, self-absorption, the belief that the powerful have the right to impose upon whoever they please, are all products of the Enlightenment, the products of mind over “matter,” which, in the Russian, case, is Orthodox tradition, the village commune and a life close to nature. It may be in part attributable to Gogol’s literary cunning, but the talking dog may well be a condemnation of civilization as a whole (as separate from culture), for it produces, not merely the powerful who have the ability to work thousands of formerly free Cossacks to death, but also have created pathetic cases like our hero. The very fact that Gogol was himself Ukrainian may have been a further impetus to consider Petersburg the way he did. The “talking dog” story makes little sense, and is nothing more than a bizarre digression, unless there is a profound statement being made though it.

Regardless, he reads among the dog’s letters that the girl in question is in love with a kammerjunker, a “gentleman of the bedchamber,” a title the Russians borrowed from the Prussians. Immediately after mentioning that, the dog relates that her owner regularly laughs at the pathetic appearance of our hero. “What a vile tongue” he screeches in reply, “As if I don’t know it’s a matter of envy ” (291).

It is these revelations that bring our hero to his next level of delusion. For those of us who, either regularly or occasionally, deal with people who can only be called clinically deluded, we know how dangerous it is to burst their illusions. Often, one who has been living by fantasy, once confronted by reality, reacts, almost invariably, with hostility, sometimes even with physical violence. This rather universal phenomenon is also part of the baggage of civilization. In modern times, the rule of the powerful has a media of communication and manipulation that ancient monarchies simply did not have. The fact that the main character in this story is completely deluded as to who he is can only be interpreted here as the result of the artificiality of the society of St. Petersburg and its occult nature. Such delusions are impossible at the village level. In our times, the process of mind control and though formation have long gone beyond the primitive nature of the nobles of the artificial Russian capital. The process of identity formation in contemporary societies is the product of elite control over mass media and education. For our hero, learning that the woman he loves (or thinks he loves) laughs him to scorn sends him over the edge.

The next diary entry, December 3, has him wondering, as he waxes jealously at the kammerjunker who will marry the woman of his dreams, if he is in fact someone else. “Several times already I’ve tried to figure out where all these differences come from. What makes me a titular councillor, and why on earth am I a titular councillor? Maybe I’m some sort of count or general and only seem to be a titular councillor? Maybe I myself don’t know who I am” (292).

On December 5, he reads in the newspapers that there is a vacancy on the throne in Spain. Evidently, he has read that the royal line there has died out. This is a reference to the death of Ferdinand VIII in 1833, which left a vacancy that was to be filled by a three year old. Factions in the court were attempting to unseat the child. Regardless, he becomes obsessed with the Spanish succession, and it is here where Gogol’s major coup is made.

The next diary entry reads, “The Year 2000, 43rd of April: This day–is a day of the greatest solemnity–Spain has a king. He has been found. I am that king. Only on this very day did I learn of it” (294). The first person he told of his new discovery was his maid Marva, who, once told of his new identity “she clasped her hands and almost died of fright. The stupid woman had never seen a king of Spain before. . . .They’re benighted folk. It’s impossible to tell them about lofty matters.”

He refused to go to work for three weeks, believing that to sharpen pens, now, was below the dignity of a king. When he was asked to make an abstract of a certain paper, he signed it “Ferdinand VIII.” When the office staff took this as rather odd, he looked at them and exclaimed, “no need for any homage ”

As his psychosis runs deeper and deeper, he becomes convinced that his entourage would be arriving at any moment, though he is beginning to become a bit impatient. He worried about “presenting” himself at the Tsar’s court as the king of Spain, largely because he did not have royal attire. He cuts up some cloth and places it on his head as a substitute. Soon, what our hero thought were his deputies arrives, and he enters their carriage to be taken back to Spain. He thought Spain a rather odd country, because there were so many people there with shaved heads. He is in a mental institution. Here he came to his first major conclusion as king of Spain: “I discovered that China and Spain are absolutely one and the same land, and it was only out of ignorance that they are considered separate countries” (297). Deeper and deeper does his condition become, and the story ends with the madman calling for his mother.

It seems that both the citizen in democratic republics, as well as bureaucrats anywhere are the primary targets of this short story. For both of these sort of man, their world is very small, they believe their tiny universe of particular interests and concerns, as well as their rather small store of individual knowledge is in fact significant and is in itself deserving of attention. Modern political systems are based on the perpetuation of such myths and fables. The conventional interpretation is that Gogol was primarily mocking the rank system itself as arbitrary. While this might be the case, Gogol’s professed devotion to monarchy provides the reader with a better picture of the writer’s motives.

In other words, the fact that the hero of this story believes himself to bet he king of Spain is not only directed at bureaucrats who are convinced of the significance of their jobs and lives, but also of the citizen of democratic countries who becomes very indignant when his strictly considered views are not taken seriously. Whether or not these views are based upon anything other than prejudice or self-interest is neither here nor there. In democracies, the source of opinion, or its basis, is irrelevant. What matters instead is that such an opinion is registered and entered, along with millions of others, into voting tabulations.

Gogol is aiming his guns, not at the table of ranks, but rather at the delusional expectations of democracy and the very small world of officialdom. Gogol’s other short works clearly bear this out. It becomes clear that Gogol is considering the above institutions and ideas as part of a greater manifestation of corruption, that of modern civilization itself. This, of course, is to be differentiated from culture. In “The Nose,” the omnipresent government clerk wakes one morning to find that his nose is missing. Having wrapped himself in a scarf, he bumps into a well dressed gentleman who, at closer inspection, is actually his nose dressed in human clothes. Now, as bizarre as this plot is, it is little more than a harsh polemic against the superficiality that is a definite byproduct of civilized life. The nose, symbolic of all that is superficial and artificial in modern life, takes on a life of its own, and actually speaks to the poor unfortunate government clerk in the most condescending of tones.

Even worse is his short story “The Carriage,” where a local merchant is invited to a diner party where a recently billeted group of army officers in invited. In order to impress them, he invites them to his house the following night for another dinner, and to show them the very expensive carriage that he bought. Now, in Russia at the time, having colonels and generals at one’s house was a major social coup, and the merchant classes would spend outrageously high sums of money to pull of a huge and successful party. Russians have always had a sense of time radically different than the west, and such parties would routinely break up only at daybreak, or even later.

The main character in “The Carriage” comes home after the first party quite drunk, and falls asleep until well into the next afternoon. As the officer’s carriages begin to make their way to the man’s driveway, his wife, asleep when he came home, awakens him, and asks who the arrivals are. Horrified, the man realizes that none of the preparations have been made for the party which was to start presently, and his wife had no clue of the invitation. Dismayed to an unbelievable degree, seeing his reputation flying out he window, he quickly instructs his wife to tell the officers that he was called out of town, while he ran to the carriage, parked in a garage behind the house, and, in his bedclothes, hides inside it, covered in a blanket. The officers, naturally disappointed, ask to see the carriage anyway, given that the chief character bragged about it to such a degree, approach the garage only to find the unfortunate government inspector hiding inside, hung over and in his pajamas.

In his novel, Dead Souls, the main character, Chichikov, like nearly all of Gogol’s characters, is worried about his reputation. Without getting into too many details, the upshot of the novel is that the main character, desiring greatly to impress the upper classes with the number of serfs in his services, comes up with an ingenious idea: He will approach local landowners with the request to buy up the serfs who have died since the last census. In this way, he can, at least on paper, say he has hundreds and hundreds of serfs at his service, and even show legal papers that prove it. He need not tell those he wishes to impress that they are, in fact, dead. Therefore, the insanity of bureaucracy can make the dead seem alive, solely for the superficial desire to gain a reputation as a “man of leisure.”

Even here, Gogol’s comic genius, at the service of polemics, shows the differing reactions to Chichikov’s proposal. But one thing the landowner’s that he approaches have in common is that they still, even though the serfs in question are dead, bargain with the main character, as if the serfs were alive. Clearly, Gogol here is making the claim that bureaucracy, the legal system and the values it engenders have created an imaginary world where the dead are alive and are even worth money. Their mere appearance on a legal document “showing” that they “belong” the Chichikov is itself sufficient to become a part of “polite society” and impress the ladies in Petersburg. Gogol’s contempt is clear throughout.

Alternatively, his completely misunderstood short story “Old World Landowners” shows life in a radically different light. Instead of clerks working meaningless jobs, seeking to impress others to receive ranks, status and serfs that exist only on paper, as legal fictions, the older couple (significantly, in Ukraine) live simple farming lives, dedicated to quiet pleasures such as making jams, living close to their traditional agricultural virtues and treating their servants with kindness. The couple here are truly in love, and are completely honest with each other, showing the traditional peasant virtue Gogol thought was disappearing under the Petersburg mentality. Many critics have believed that this short story tells of the meaningless of agricultural life. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead, “Old World Landowners,” is not even a story, but merely a description of the virtues that are, in the early 19th century in Russia, being lost to the storm of modernity.

There is no question that Gogol was an agrarian traditionalist of the most radical kind. Bureaucracy, media empires and political ideology were creative of fantasies, worlds where things of no ultimate value such as promotion and reputation, were taken to–not merely be real–but have the utmost reality. Civilization had created these fantasies on the backs of a culture that was once thriving and virtuous, described in detail in “Old World Landowners.” The Petersburg bureaucrats, dilettante philosophers and swindlers existed in this fantasy world no less real than that of the modern Beltway, the American college campus or the TV addicted, sports worshiping modern American. They lived in a city that was–literally–built upon the defenders of the traditional Russo-Ukrainian order and symbolized their defeat under the reign of Peter and, later in the 18th century, Catherine. As much as the traditionalist tsars of the 19th century such as Alexander III and his son, Nicholas II, preferred Moscow to Petersburg (and was aware of Petersburg’s meaning), the Petersburg mentality guttered out with the social (and sexual) success of Rasputin and helped bring down the royal family at the end of World War I.

Clearly, “Diary of a Madman,” the simplest, funniest and most gripping of Gogol’s shorter works, and Gogol is a completely overlooked anti-Faustian writer. There is no difference, in Gogol’s mind, between the main character believing that he is the king of Spain, or that he is brilliant and noble (and all others are jealous), on the one hand, and Chichikov’s buying up dead peasants to impress the upper classes, on the other. Civilization to Gogol is a fraud. It has so severed the mind of modern man from the realities of village life that rank, facial features, carriage types and dead serfs are considered the utmost in importance and reality, becoming the be all and end all of civilized life. Civilization creates reality where there is only the imagination of the community which undergirds it. In the same manner as the girl at the Congressional office is a useless, meaningless, pretty piece of office furniture rather than the important “Hill staffer” she believes herself to be, the invented world of rank, status and possessions Gogol condemns is not a reality. As the nose-ring wearing, black clad college girl believes herself to be “making a difference” and bucking the system is in reality a mindless conformist to the bought and controlled “social opposition,” again, Gogol mocks the pretensions of democratic and bureaucratic societies with the vision of Chichikov or Ivanovich.

The city which Peter the Great named after himself was deliberately constructed to be a symbolic assault on nature, and, by extension, the village based upon it. It was to house the bureaucratic mentality and create a new reality based on those “values.” Civilization, or the egocentric imposition of the elite mind upon the simple lifestyles of the village, creates its own realty that drives those who insist in living in it insane. It creates reality out of nothing and forces all to life with its arbitrary hierarchies and plastic shared meanings.

This is the brilliance of Gogol, and is his lasting achievement. There is either the reality of a God given nature, based around the village and the rural life, close to creation and thus to reality, or the artificial world of the city, based around the will of powerful men, bureaucracies and a citizenry convinced of their importance and significance, largely due to their alienation from the life of true community. It is a message decidedly ignored today, though it is ignored at the peril of the western world.