by Nikolai Gogol · 1835
A lowly St. Petersburg clerk, hopelessly infatuated with his director's daughter, starts eavesdropping on the lapdogs he believes are writing letters to each other, then declares himself the missing King of Spain and marches off to be crowned. His journal entries grow ever more deranged and the dates dissolve into nonsense as the delusion carries him, finally, into an asylum he mistakes for the Spanish royal court.