Artistic Representation of Madness through the Narrator-Protagonist’s Speech in N.V. Gogol’s and Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman”

The subject of the study is the speech of the narrator-protagonist as a means of the artistic representation of madness. The object of the study is N.V. Gogol’s short story “Diary of a Madman” (1835) and Lu Xun’s story of the same title (1918). The author examines in detail such aspects of the topic as the organization of time in the diary entries, the syntactic markers of speech (questions, exclamations, breaks, repetitions, the formula of self-censorship), the logic of the protagonists’ reasoning, the relation between perception and interpretation, and the sources and functions of the alien word. Special attention is paid to the final phrases of both works as the protagonists’ appeals to the world. The discrepancies between the Chinese original of Lu Xun’s story and its Russian translation, which affect the interpretation of the protagonist, are analyzed separately. In addition, the article refines a number of claims made in Chinese and Russian literary studies about the nature of the madness of Lu Xun’s protagonist and about what exactly Lu Xun borrowed from Gogol. The study is carried out within the framework of comparative literary studies. It employs a fragment-by-fragment textual analysis based on a unified set of parameters, linguostylistic analysis, analysis of the alien word in M.M. Bakhtin’s sense, and narratological analysis of the subject organization of speech. Both texts are analyzed in the original language. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the speech of the narrator-protagonist is considered for the first time as the main means of representing madness from a comparative perspective, and that Lu Xun’s story is compared with Gogol’s work on the basis of the Chinese original for the first time in Russian literary studies. It is established that in Gogol madness affects both perception and the form of speech: the dates of the entries disintegrate, the syntax is saturated with exclamations, breaks and mechanical repetitions from the first entries, and the logic is first subordinated to the “rule” of rank and then retains only its form. Lu Xun’s protagonist perceives reality accurately, and only his interpretation is wrong; his speech remains grammatically coherent, and his reasoning is structured as an investigation. Poprishchin borrows the form of the alien word and rejects its content, whereas Lu Xun’s protagonist reinterprets every alien word as evidence of his discovery. It is shown that the Russian translation, by adding exclamations and ellipses and removing ambiguity, brings Lu Xun’s protagonist closer to Gogol’s type of madness, which is also reflected in existing interpretations of the story.