The life of a gifted writer is associated with great risk for the most vulnerable in man - his consciousness. And the rise to fame, no matter how smooth it seems, is almost always accompanied by dangerous flirting with the unknown, forbidden or insane.
Patient 1:
Edgar Allan Poe
American writer, poet (1809-1849)
Diagnosis: Mental disorder, the exact diagnosis has not been established.
Symptoms: Fear of the dark, blackouts, persecution mania, inappropriate behavior, hallucinations.
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Medical history: Already from the late 1830s, Edgar Poe suffered from frequent depression. In addition, he abused alcohol, which did not affect his psyche in the best way: under the influence of drunk, the writer sometimes fell into a state of violent insanity. Opium was soon added to alcohol. Significantly worsened by the serious illness of his young wife (he married his cousin Virginia at thirteen; after seven years of marriage, in 1842, she fell ill with tuberculosis, and died five years later). After Virginia's death - in the remaining two years of his life - Edgar Poe fell in love several more times and made two attempts to marry. The first failed because of the refusal of the chosen one, frightened by his next breakdown, the second - because of the absence of the groom: shortly before the wedding, Po got very drunk and fell into a deranged state. He was found in a cheap Baltimore pub five days later. The writer was placed in a clinic, where he died five days later, suffering from terrible hallucinations. One of Poe's main nightmares - death alone - came true: many of whom he took a promise to be with him at the last hour, but at three o'clock in the morning on October 7, 1849, none of his loved ones were around. Before his death, Poe desperately summoned Jeremy Reynolds, the explorer of the North Pole.explorer of the North Pole.explorer of the North Pole.
Ideas given to the world: Two of the most popular contemporary literary genres. The first is a horror novel (or story). Hoffmann had a great influence on Edgar Poe, but Poe's dark romanticism, however, thickened for the first time to the consistency of a genuine nightmare - viscous, hopeless and very sophisticated ("The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Fall of the House of Eschers"). The second genre is detective story. It was Monsieur Auguste Dupin, the hero of Edgar Poe's stories (Murder on the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roger), who became the founder of the deductive method and its apologist, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
Patient 2:
Friedrich Nietzsche
German philosopher (1844-1900)
Diagnosis: Nuclear mosaic schizophrenia (a more literary variant, indicated in most biographies, is obsession).
Symptoms: Megalomania (I sent out notes with the text: "In two months I will become the first person on earth", demanded to remove the paintings from the walls, because his apartment is a "temple"); clouding of mind (hugging a horse in the central city square, interfering with street traffic); severe headaches; inappropriate behavior. Nietzsche's medical record, in particular, said that the patient drank his urine from a boot, emitted inarticulate screams, mistook the hospital watchman for Bismarck, tried to barricade the door with fragments of a broken glass, slept on the floor by the bed, jumped like a goat, grimaced and protruded his left shoulder.
Medical history: Nietzsche suffered several apoplectic strokes; suffered from a mental disorder for the last 20 years of his life (it was during this period that his most significant works appeared - for example, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"), 11 of them he spent in psychiatric clinics, his mother took care of him at home. His condition was constantly deteriorating - at the end of his life the philosopher could only make up the simplest phrases.
Ideas presented to the world: The idea of a superman (paradoxically, it is this comrade who jumped like a goat and protrudes his left shoulder that we associate with a free, overmoral, perfect person who exists on the other side of good and evil). The idea of a new morality (morality of masters instead of morality of slaves): healthy morality should glorify and strengthen the natural desire of man to power. Any other morality is painful and decadent. The ideology of fascism: the sick and the weak must perish, the strongest must win ("Push the one who is falling!"). Assumption "God is dead".
Patient 3:
Ernest Hemingway
American writer (1899-1961)
Diagnosis: Acute depression, mental disorder.
Symptoms: Suicidal tendencies, persecution mania, nervous breakdowns.
Medical history: In 1960, Hemingway returned from Cuba to the United States. He was tormented by frequent depression, a feeling of fear and insecurity, he practically could not write - and therefore voluntarily agreed to undergo treatment in a psychiatric clinic. Hemingway underwent 20 sessions of electric shock, about these procedures, he responded as follows: “The doctors who gave me the electric shock, the writers do not understand: What was the point in destroying my brain and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and throwing me out on side of life? It was a brilliant treatment, but they lost a patient. Upon leaving the clinic, Hemingway became convinced that he still could not write, and made the first attempt at suicide, but his relatives managed to prevent him. At the request of his wife, he underwent a second course of treatment, but did not change his intentions. A few days after being discharged, he shot himself in the head with his favorite double-barreled gun, having previously loaded both barrels.
Ideas given to the world:The Lost Generation Idea. Hemingway, like his companion in the era, Remarque, had in mind a specific generation, ground by the millstones of a particular war, but the term turned out to be painfully seductive and convenient - since then each generation finds reasons to consider itself lost. A new literary device, the “iceberg method”, when a mean, concise text implies a generous, heartbreaking subtext. "Machism" of a new type, embodied both in creativity and in life. Hemingway's hero is a stern and laconic fighter who understands that the fight is useless, but fights to the end. The most uncompromising Hemingway macho was, perhaps, the fisherman Santiago ("The Old Man and the Sea"), in whose mouth the Great Ham put the phrase: “Man is not created to suffer defeat. A person can be destroyed, but he cannot be defeated. " Hemingway himself is a hunter,soldier, sportsman, sailor, fisherman, traveler, Nobel laureate, whose body was covered with scars - to the great disappointment of many, did not fight to the end. However, the writer did not betray his ideals. “A man has no right to die in bed,” he said. "Either in battle or a bullet in the forehead."
Patient 4:
Franz Kafka
Czech writer (1883 - 1924)
Diagnosis: Severe neurosis, psychasthenia of a functional nature, non-recurrent depressive states.
Symptoms: Anxiety, alternating with bouts of apathy, sleep disturbance, exaggerated fears, psychosomatic difficulties in the intimate sphere.
Medical history: The roots of Kafka's deep psychological failures stem from conflict with his father, difficult relationships with family, and complex, confusing love stories. Passion for writing in the family was not encouraged, and it had to be done stealthily.
"For me, this is a terrible double life," he wrote in his diary, "from which, perhaps, there is only one way out - madness."
When the father began to insist that after the service, the son also worked in his shop, and did not engage in nonsense, Franz decided to commit suicide and wrote a farewell letter to his friend Max Brod “At the last moment, I managed to intervene completely unceremoniously to protect him from“loving parents “, Writes Max Brod in his book about Kafka. In his mental state, there were periods of deep and even calm, followed by equally prolonged periods of pain.
Here are the lines from his "Diaries" vividly reflecting this inner struggle: “I cannot sleep. Only visions, no sleep. A strange instability of my entire inner being. The monstrous world that I carry in my head. How can I free myself from it and free it without destroying it?"
The writer died at the age of 41 from tuberculosis. For three months he was in agony: not only the body was destroyed, but also the mind.
Ideas presented to the world: Kafka was not known during his lifetime, was little published, but after his death, the writer's work conquered readers with a new direction in literature. The Kafkaesque world of despair, horror and hopelessness grew out of the personal drama of its creator and became the basis of a new aesthetic trend in "literature with diagnosis", very characteristic of the 20th century, which lost God and received in return the absurdity of existence.
Patient 5:
Jonathan Swift
Irish writer (1667-1745)
Diagnosis: Pick's disease or Alzheimer's disease - experts argue.
Symptoms: Dizziness, disorientation in space, loss of memory, inability to recognize people and surrounding objects, to grasp the meaning of human speech.
Medical history: Gradual worsening of symptoms up to complete dementia at the end of life.
Ideas Given to the World: A New Form of Political Satire. "Gulliver's Journey" is certainly not the first sarcastic look of an enlightened intellectual at the surrounding reality, but innovation here is not in the look, but in the optics. While other scoffers looked at life through a magnifying glass or telescope, the dean of St. Patrick made a lens with a bizarrely curved glass for this. Subsequently, Nikolai Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin enjoyed using this lens.
Patient 6:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
French writer and philosopher (1712-1778)
Diagnosis: Paranoia.
Symptoms: Persecution mania.
Rousseau saw conspiracies everywhere, he led the life of a wanderer and did not linger anywhere for long, believing that all his friends and acquaintances were plotting against him or suspecting him of something.
Case history: As a result of the conflict between the writer and the church and government (early 1760s, after the publication of the book "Emile, or On Education"), Rousseau's inherent suspicion took on extremely painful forms. Everywhere he dreamed of conspiracies, he led the life of a wanderer and did not stay long anywhere, believing that all his friends and acquaintances were plotting against him or suspecting him of something. So, one day Rousseau decided that the inhabitants of the castle in which he was staying considered him the poisoner of a deceased servant, and demanded an autopsy of the deceased.
Ideas given to the world:Pedagogical reform. Modern manuals on raising children on many points repeat "Emile": instead of the repressive method of education, Rousseau proposed a method of encouragement and affection; he believed that the child should be freed from the mechanical retention of dry facts, and everything should be explained using living examples, and only when the child is mentally ready to receive new information; Rousseau believed that the task of pedagogy was the development of the talents inherent in nature, and not the correction of the personality. A new type of literary hero and new literary trends. The beautiful-minded creature, born of Rousseau's imagination - a tearful "savage", guided not by reason, but by feeling (however, by a highly moral feeling) - further developed, grew and grew old within the framework of sentimentalism and romanticism. The idea of a legal democratic state,directly following from the work "On the social contract". The idea of revolution (it was Rousseau's works that inspired the fighters for the ideals of the Great French Revolution; Rousseau himself, paradoxically, never was a supporter of such radical measures).
Patient 7:
Nikolay Gogol
Russian writer (1809-1852)
Diagnosis: Schizophrenia, periodic psychosis.
Symptoms: Visual and auditory hallucinations; periods of apathy and lethargy (up to complete immobility and inability to respond to external stimuli), alternating with bouts of excitement; depressive conditions; hypochondria in acute form (the great writer was convinced that all the organs in his body were somewhat displaced, and the stomach was located "upside down"); claustrophobia.
Medical history: Various manifestations of schizophrenia accompanied Gogol throughout his life, but in the last year the disease has progressed markedly. On January 26, 1852, the sister of his close friend Ekaterina Mikhailovna Khomyakova died of typhoid fever, and this death caused the writer a severe attack of hypochondria. Gogol plunged into incessant prayers, practically refused food, complained of weakness and malaise, and claimed that he was terminally ill, although the doctors did not diagnose any disease other than a small gastrointestinal disorder. On the night of February 11-12, the writer burned his manuscripts (the next morning he explained this act by the intrigues of the evil one), then his condition constantly worsened. Treatment (not too professional, however: leeches in the nostrils,wrapping with cold sheets and dipping the head in ice water) did not give positive results. On February 21, 1852, the writer died. The true reasons for his death have remained unclear. However, most likely, Gogol simply brought himself to complete nervous and physical exhaustion - it is possible that the timely help of a psychiatrist could save his life.
Ideas given to the world: A specific love for a little person (layman), consisting half of disgust, half of pity. A whole bunch of surprisingly accurately found Russian types. Gogol developed several role models (the most striking are the characters of "Dead Souls"), which are still quite relevant today.
Patient 8:
Guy de Maupassant
French writer (1850-1893)
Diagnosis: Progressive brain paralysis.
Symptoms: Hypochondria, suicidal tendencies, violent seizures, delirium, hallucinations.
Case history: All his life Guy de Maupassant suffered from hypochondria: he was very afraid of going crazy. From 1884, Maupassant 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, both times unsuccessfully). In 1891, the writer was placed in the clinic of Dr. Blanche in Passy - there he lived in a semi-conscious state until his death.
Ideas presented to the world: Physiologism and naturalism (including erotic) in literature. The need to tirelessly fight the spiritless consumer society (the living French writers Michel Houellebecq and Frederic Beigbeder are diligently recreating the original clones of the "Dear Friend", our Sergey Minaev is trying to keep up too).
Patient 9:
Virginia Woolf
English writer (1882-1941)
Diagnosis: Depression, hallucinations, nightmares.
Symptoms: Being in a deep depression, Virginia complained that all the time she "hears the voices of birds singing on the olives of Ancient Greece." Often she could not work for a long time because of insomnia and nightmares. Since childhood, she suffered from suicidal tendencies.
Medical history: When Virginia was 13 years old, she survived an attempted rape by her visiting cousins. This marked the beginning of a persistent dislike for men and for the physical side of relationships with them throughout Virginia's life. Shortly thereafter, her mother died suddenly of pneumonia.
A nervous, impressionable girl out of despair tried to commit suicide. She was saved, but deep, lingering depressions have since become a part of her life. A severe attack of mental illness overtook young Virginia after the death of her father in 1904.
Emotionally frank letters and works of Virginia Woolf provide grounds for the conclusion about the non-traditional sexual orientation of the writer. However, this is not quite true. As a result of the tragedy experienced in childhood, the fear that she experienced in front of men and their society, she fell in love with women - but at the same time she abhorred all forms of intimacy, including with them, could not stand hugs, did not even allow handshakes. Having been married for 29 years to Leonard Wolfe (and this marriage is considered exemplary in terms of devotion and emotional support of each other's spouses), the writer, according to some information, was never able to enter into a marital relationship with her husband.
In early 1941, the night bombardment of London destroyed the writer's house, the library burned down, her beloved husband almost died - all this finally upset her nervous system, the doctors insisted on treatment in a psychiatric clinic. Not wanting that her husband spent the rest of her life in the worries associated with her insanity, on March 28, 1941, she performed what she repeatedly described in her works and which she tried to put into practice more than once - she committed suicide by drowning in the Ous River.
Ideas presented to the world: Innovation in the ways of expressing the transient worldly vanity, displaying the inner world of heroes, describing the many ways of refraction of consciousness - the works of Virginia Woolf entered the golden fund of literary modernism and were received with enthusiasm by many contemporaries. A faithful student of Tolstoy, she developed and perfected the "inner monologue" in English prose.
Patient 10:
Sergey Yesenin
Russian poet (1895-1925)
Diagnosis: Bipolar affective disorder (BAD).
Symptoms: Persecution mania, sudden outbursts of rage, inappropriate behavior (the poet publicly smashed furniture, smashed mirrors and dishes, shouted insults). Anatoly Mariengof described several cases of Yesenin's obscuration not without relish in his memoirs.
Medical history: Because of the frequent TIR attacks, usually provoked by excessive alcohol consumption, Yesenin was treated several times in neuropsychiatric clinics - in France and Russia. The treatment, unfortunately, did not have a beneficial effect on the patient: a month after being discharged from the clinic of Professor Gannushkin, Yesenin committed suicide by hanging himself on a steam heating pipe in the Angleterre hotel in Leningrad.
Ideas presented to the world: New intonations in poetry. Yesenin made a stylistic norm, with tears and sobs, love for the village and the villager (his direct followers, not in a stylistic, but in an ideological sense, are “villagers”). Yesenin, who worked a lot in the genre of urban hooligan romance, in fact, set the canon of the modern Russian chanson.