The life of gifted people is often associated with great risk for the most vulnerable in a person - his consciousness. The rise to fame is often accompanied by dangerous flirting with the unknown, forbidden, or insane.
Perhaps that is why many famous people, at best, show a penchant for extravagant behavior, and some of them are even prone to various mental illnesses. Psychologists believe that their madness is the flip side of giftedness - the law of compensation works.
DEADLY LONELINESS
American writer Edgar Allan Poe is considered the ancestor of two popular literary genres: detective and horror.
Hoffmann had a great influence on Poe's work with his dark romanticism, which Poe brought to the consistency of a true nightmare - hopeless and sophisticated (remember his "Telling Heart" or "The Fall of the House of Usher").
In the genre of detective Poe gave birth to Auguste Dupin - the hero of the story "Murder on the Rue Morgue" and others - long before Sherlock Holmes, who used the deductive method.
Promotional video:
Edgar Poe was not yet 30 when he began to attend excruciating depression, accompanied by hallucinations, memory lapses, fear of the dark.
In addition, he abused alcohol, which did not have the best effect on his psyche. Drugs were soon added to alcohol. Doctors could neither establish an accurate diagnosis, nor help the writer. Once he was found in a cheap Baltimore inn after five days in obscurity.
Edgar Poe was admitted to the clinic, where he died, suffering from terrible hallucinations. One of his main nightmares - death in solitude - came true: he took an oath from many to be with him at the last hour, but on the night of October 7, 1849, no one was near him.
FALLING PUSH?
German philosopher and poet Friedrich Nietzsche is the author of the idea of the superman, as well as the idea of a new morality, calling for the morality of masters to replace the morality of slaves.
Here are its fundamental theses: a healthy morality should glorify and strengthen the natural desire of man for power.
Any other morality is painful and decadent, the sick and the weak must perish, the strongest must win ("Push the one who is falling!"). “God is dead,” Nietzsche told humanity.
He still had a lot of things to say before he died himself. The mockery of fate was that the man who created a philosophy that endowed the human mind and spirit with maximum greatness, ended his days, having lost both.
For the last 11 years of his life, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who proclaimed man to be God, spent most of his life in a home for the mentally ill, unable even to bring a spoon to his mouth on his own.
He suffered from delusions of grandeur, sending out notes like: "In two months I will become the first person on Earth" - and demanding that the paintings be removed from the walls, because his apartment is a "temple"; movement.
Nietzsche on the eve of his death, 1899
Nietzsche's medical record, in particular, said that the patient drank his own urine from the boot, emitted inarticulate screams, took the hospital watchman for Chancellor Bismarck, jumped like a goat and grimaced.
But it was during these years that his most significant works appeared - for example, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."
Doctors made an unambiguous diagnosis - "schizophrenia".
THE DOUBLE LIFE OF KAFKA
The Austrian writer Franz Kafka was not widely known during his lifetime, was little published, but after his death his work won over many readers and became a new aesthetic trend in literature.
The Kafkaesque world of despair and hopelessness grew out of the personal drama of its creator and became the basis of the “literature with diagnosis” characteristic of the 20th century, which lost God and received in return the absurdity of existence.
Young Kafka's family was not encouraged to write, and he had to do it furtively. "For me, this is a terrible double life," he wrote in his diary, "from which, perhaps, there is only one way out - madness."
When his father began to insist that his son work in his shop, Franz decided to commit suicide and wrote a farewell letter to a friend who managed to stop him at the last moment at the edge of the abyss.
However, the disease did not recede, and periods of deep calm were replaced by prolonged periods of painful condition. He could not sleep, monstrous visions shook him.
The doctors decided: severe neurosis, psychasthenia of a functional nature, depressive conditions, unfounded fears, psychosomatic difficulties in the intimate sphere. Kafka died just over his fortieth birthday.
GOGOL HALLUCINATIONS
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, the author of the classic Dead Souls and The Inspector General, was distinguished by a specific love for the “little man” (the man in the street), combining both pity and disgust.
From under his pen appeared a number of surprisingly accurately found Russian types. Several role models developed by Gogol (for example, the characters of "Dead Souls") remain relevant to this day.
A terrible misfortune for the writer was his mental illness. He was haunted by visual and auditory hallucinations, and periods of apathy and lethargy, up to complete immobility and inability to respond to external stimuli, increasingly bothered him. Nikolai Vasilievich was convinced that all the organs in his body were displaced, and the stomach was generally located "upside down."
One or another manifestation of schizophrenia accompanied the great writer throughout his life, but in the last year the disease progressed especially. After the death of his sister and close friend Catherine, he began a severe attack of hypochondria.
Gogol plunged into unceasing prayers, practically refused food, claimed that he was terminally ill, although the doctors did not find any disease in him.
On February 11, 1852, in a difficult state of mind, the writer burned the manuscript of the second volume of the poem "Dead Souls", and the next morning he explained this act by the intrigues of the evil one. Subsequently, his state of health constantly worsened.
Among other things, Gogol suffered from taphophobia - he was very afraid of being buried alive. Treatment - leeches in the nostrils, wrapping with cold sheets, and the like - did not give positive results.
On February 21, 1852, the writer died in his last refuge on Nikitsky Boulevard. The true reasons for his death have remained unclear.
PARALYCH OF THE BRAIN
Guy de Maupassant, who gave the world "Dear Friend" and a lot of other characters and stories, preached physiologism and naturalism, including eroticism in literature, was very afraid of losing his mind all his life. The writer was only 34 years old when he began to have frequent nervous seizures and hallucinations.
In a state of extreme nervous excitement, he twice tried to commit suicide: once with a revolver, the second with a paper knife. After some time, Guy de Maupassant was placed in a psychiatric clinic, where he lived in a semi-conscious state until his death in 1893. The final diagnosis is progressive brain paralysis.
BEARD ANCHOR
One could recall a number of writers and philosophers who had serious mental problems. Among them are Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf. Fortunately, not all of them had such tragic problems.
Victor Hugo worked so enthusiastically on his immortal novel Notre Dame de Paris that, so as not to be distracted from the manuscript, he cut his head and beard half, and then threw the scissors out the window. Now, in this form, he could no longer go out into the street and therefore sat at home without getting out until he finished the book.
There are, it turns out, other mental disorders that interfere with great writers - dyslexia (inability to read) and dysgraphia (inability to write). Many outstanding people suffered from them to one degree or another, including, oddly enough, some writers.
So, the recognized queen of detective Agatha Christie suffered from the fact that she could not write texts on her own. As a child, the parents had to take the girl out of school and transfer her to home schooling, as in every word the future famous writer made a bunch of spelling mistakes. However, starting a literary career, Agatha found a way out: she dictated all her works.
Constantin RICHES
