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Russian author Nikolay Gogol was one of the most important 19th-century Russian realist writers. His short story “Diary of a Madman” (1835) was narrated by a lowly, downtrodden clerk caught up in an impersonal bureaucratic machine under Czar Nicholas I, who ruled from 1825 to 1855. Tormented by his love for Mavra, a girl of a higher status, and his own seemingly unalterable social and economic position, the clerk eventually goes insane. In this excerpt, an excellent example of Gogol’s comic writing, the clerk obsesses on the successor to Spain’s King Ferdinand VII, who died in 1833, and eventually imagines that he is the king of Spain. From “Diary of a Madman”

"Romance does not mean to give someone a bag of chocolate, give a bunch of flowers, or make a poetry about love." For him, war is a romance with a little wrinkle. Sharing food or drinks when supplies were gone, giving last bullet to shoot the enemy in front of the eyes, protecting friend, sign up to donate life as a matchless devotion. Rather than simply providing a bullet, this is an engraving defend the country on behalf of a loyalty, but this is not just following orders, it is a decision with a logic of "to kill or be killed".

         Dear my pain and sorrow, your dangerous expression mean eyes full of earthly summations. Your words ruminate around my head like some unpleasant temptation. I don't require every pleasure to be pleasant or simple. Of course, you are never dead. Black words...