"Diary of a Lunatic" (sometimes translated as "Memoirs of a Madman" and "The Diary of a Madman") is a short story by Leo Tolstoy written in 1884.
According to literary critic Janko Lavrin, in August, 1869, Tolstoy travelled from Nizhny Novgorod (AKA: Gorky) to the Penza district and slept overnight in the town of Arzamas. But he couldn't sleep, though, and was overwhelmed with a maddening fear of death.[1] Many years later he recounted this experience in written form, and Diary of a Lunatic was the result. The title of the story is a reference to Nikolai Gogol's story "Diary of a Madman".