Contextul social și patologicul la Gogol și Dostoievski
The Social Context and the Pathological in Gogol and Dostoevsky

Summary/Abstract: The middle of the 19th century saw the rise of the Realist movement as the new dominant cultural phenomenon. While it essentially opposed the picturesque worldview of Romanticism, literary realism continued nevertheless to build upon themes that were particular to the Romantic Era. Such a theme is that of escapism, which is present in Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Double. This article explains how the social status of the main characters in the two texts plays a crucial role in the process that leads to a loss of sanity. The article argues that these works contain an underlying message of social criticism, seeing as they convey the bleak image of a society whose rigorous norms push the individual to psychological dissociation.

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