“School for fools” by Sasha Sokolov and “Notes of madman” by N.V. Gogol: reflections and roll calls

The article, thematically related to the authors previous works devoted to Gogol’s life in the Russian literary space of the 19th-20th centuries, attempts to consider the semantic traces left by the story “Notes of Madman” in the novel “School for Fools”. The author pays special attention to the reflections of Gogol’s motives in the text of the novel, which are essential for its narrative organization. A good reason for a comparative analysis is the fact that the hero of “School for Fools”, a teenager suffering from a split personality, takes his place in the genetic series of crazy characters in Russian literature, keeping their own notes. The author consistently considers how the most important motifs of love and the destruction of time are reflected and transformed in “School for Fools”. Poprishchin is captured by a love passion for his director’s daughter, but cannot count on marriage with her. He compensates for his inferiority by fantasizing, deciding as a result that he is the Spanish king. A mentally ill teenager develops a love feeling for his biology teacher and invents various stories that connect him with the object of virtual love. Miraculously, he turns into an engineer with a machine, which is functionally akin to the metamorphoses experienced by Gogol’s hero. Poprishchin denotes a change in his status with the help of absurd dates that fix the process of the destruction of time. The hero of “School for Fools” destroys the existing ideas about time, because he believes that linear time does not exist and time is reversible. The final part of the article shows how Gogol’s motifs, interacting in the narrative structure of the novel, set a fundamentally different perspective on life than arises in the tragic finale of “Diary of Madman”.