Grotesque in N. V. Gogol’s and Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman”: aspects of comparison

The research aims to determine the value-semantic potential of the grotesque as a category of comparative poetics of Russian and Chinese literature. The scientific novelty of this study lies in the fact that, for the first time, based on a comparative analysis of N. V. Gogol’s novella “Diary of a Madman” and Lu Xun’s short story “Diary of a Madman”, the study reveals the features of the grotesque’s functioning as a universal of verbal and artistic art, as a category reflecting the processes of national-cultural identification of literary and artistic systems, and as a method of authorial mythologization of reality. The research findings showed that the approaches to the grotesque established in literary criticism as a form of artistic worldview, a poetic device, and a principle of typification allow us to use this category as a parameter for the comparative analysis of works by Russian and Chinese writers. In N. V. Gogol’s and Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman”, the grotesque acts as a way to reveal the absurdity, phantasmagoria, and disharmony of reality, and the deep crisis of the individual of modern N. V. Gogol and Lu Xun’s time. Characters whose vision of the world is grotesque become a mirror of society torn by contradictions. Exaggeration and the mixing of the terrible with the comic allow writers to reveal absurdity in the familiar. Both writers associate the narrowness of outlook and the cramped inner world of the “little man”, trapped in the grip of perceived grievances, rivalry, malice, and despair, with the theme of madness, which becomes, in one case, a utopian way of resolving irresolvable contradictions, and in the other, an escape from reality, a protest against the inhuman laws of traditional society.