Ingenious Drug Addicts Of The Soviet Union. Valery Bryusov - Great And Terrible

It is currently possible to recognize a person as a drug addict only after an appropriate diagnosis has been established and he is registered with a narcologist, with all the ensuing consequences. Due to this circumstance, most celebrities preferred to be treated anonymously and "privately". Therefore, the examples below refer to pre-war times

Valery Bryusov (1873-1924) - Russian poet and prose writer, public figure; one of the organizers and theorists of Russian symbolism.

Before moving on to the facts of Bryusov's clinical dependence on drugs, let's get acquainted with the psychological characteristics of his personality. An epigraph could take his line:

Many worship me …

I want to be one for all

In infinity.

(V. Bryusov. From the collection Tertia Vigilia)

Childhood Valery Bryusov predisposed to such conceit, since, according to the poet, he "grew up among women and younger brothers, surrounded by adoration and worship, accustomed to command and arrange everything in his own way, dreaming of glory and victories." By his own admission, already from the age of twelve he “learned to pluck all the city's“flowers of evil”:“I learned the corrupt love”,“I looked into the area of cafes and merry houses”)”.

His popularity could be envied by any ambitious person. In 1893, the poet makes the following entry in his diary: “Talent, even a genius, will honestly give only slow success if they give it. It is not enough! It is not enough for me! We must choose something else … Find the guiding star in the fog. And I see her: this is decadence. … the future will belong to him, especially when it finds a worthy leader. And I will be this leader! Yes I!"

See also: Ingenious drug addicts of the Soviet Union

• Michael Bulgakov
• Leonid Brezhnev

But the path to fame turned out to be more thorny. Therefore, in order to “escape from everyday life”, Bryusov resorted to very trivial means: “drunkenness, drugs (by the end of his life V. Ya. Bryusov had turned into an inveterate morphine addict) and even masturbation as a means of creating some voluptuous poetic worlds. Participation in various kinds of sexual orgies was a common occurrence for V. Ya. Bryusov at that time”(Brachev V., 2007).

Valery Bryusov not only was not ashamed of his ambition, but was distinguished by pathological frankness, which broke through in his poems. He was proud of “the third gonorrhea at the age of twenty-two”, some “trips to the nymphomaniac”, etc. The poet asserted the correctness of his behavior in his diary (1898): “My youth is the youth of a genius. I lived and acted in such a way that only great deeds can justify my behavior”.

Over the years, Bryusov's personality changed, acquired a schizoid character, and one feature appeared that repelled many: the almost absolute closeness of his personality, which he himself was aware of and which he often weighed down. The poet Andrei Bely wrote about him as follows:

The look is sad. The jacket is buttoned.

Proud, serious, slender, dry.

(A. Bely. "Creator". 1904)

Poetess Zinaida Gippius recalls the theorist of Russian symbolism in these words: “The fact is that Bryusov is a man of absolute, absolutely mad ambition … There was a rather long break in our meetings, almost a year and a half. We briefly heard that Bryusov was ill, recovered, but got nervous, leads a rather stormy life and greatly abuses drugs. … no one had so many “necrophilic” poems as Bryusov did."

“In Urbi et Orbi, in the“Ballads”cycle, he has selected a whole collection of all possible sexual perversions - sadism, all types of incest, same-sex love … In the poem“Underground Dwelling”(1910), all types of narcotic intoxication are given. In "The Mirror of Shadows" (1912) - all methods of suicide "(Blagoy DD, 1929).

Russian poetess Nina Petrovskaya “made Bryusov a morphine addict, and that was her real, albeit unconscious revenge … Since 1908, it seems, he was a morphine addict. I tried to get rid of it, but I couldn't. In the summer of 1911, Dr. GA Koyransky managed to distract him from morphine for a while, but in the end, nothing came of it. He needed morphine. I remember that in 1917, during one conversation, I noticed that Bryusov was gradually falling into a kind of numbness, almost falling asleep. Finally he got up, briefly went into the next room - and returned rejuvenated. In 1919, I happened to change it at one of the services. Looking into an empty drawer of his desk, I found a syringe needle and a piece of newspaper with blood stains. In recent years, he often fell ill, apparently due to intoxication”(Khodasevich V. F., 1991).

After forty years, Bryusov changed not only externally, but also characterologically in full accordance with the clinical picture of morphinism: "He turned gray, thinned, often ill, and began to resort to heroin to excite the weakened energy … Every day he became more passive and indifferent to his surroundings." (Pogorelova B. M., 1993). Creative productivity has dropped noticeably. Bryusov celebrated his 50th birthday “in a state of severe depression. He acutely felt literary loneliness, wrote frankly weak, artificial poetry. … it is with Bryusov that eroticism begins in Russian poetry, before him this simply did not exist. He is a poet of unprecedented frankness, by the way, he is incredibly frank in correspondence too”(DL Bykov, 2007).

It can be assumed that the pathological features of Bryusov's personality were the reason for his addiction to morphine. Bryusov did not manage to finally get rid of the drug. In his premature death from pneumonia, morphine, which lowers the body's immune reactivity, played an important role

Sources:

• Akifiev A. P. Genetics and fate. M.: Tsentrpoligraf, 2001.
• Blagoy D. D. Bryusov // Literary encyclopedia. T. 1. M.: Publishing house of the Communist Academy, 1929. S. 593–606.
• Brachev V. Occult origins of the revolution. Russian masons of the twentieth century. M.: Publisher Bystrov, 2007.
• Bryusov V. Ya. Diaries. 1891-1910. M.: Publishing house of M. and S. Sabashnikovs, 1927.
• Bryusov V. Ya. From my life. My youth. Memory. M.: Publishing house of M. and S. Sabashnikovs, 1927.
• Bykov D. L. Boris Pasternak. 4th ed. M.: Young Guard, 2007.
• Volkov S. History of Russian culture of the twentieth century from Leo Tolstoy to Alexander Solzhenitsyn. M.: Eksmo, 2008.
• Gippius Z. N. Living Faces. L.: Art, 1991.
• Ivanova E. V. Foreword // Ashukin N. S., Shcherbakov R. L. Bryusov. M.: Molodaya gvardiya, 2006. pp. 5–17.
• Pogorelova B. M. Valery Bryusov and his entourage // Memories of the Silver Age. M.: Republic, 1993. S. 24–45.
• Rudnev V. P. Polyphonic body. Reality and schizophrenia in the culture of the twentieth century. M.: Gnosis, 2010.
• Stepanyan V. N. Life and death of famous people. M.: AST; Zebra E, 2007.
• Khodasevich V. F. Necropolis. Memories. M.: Soviet writer, 1991.