Pathographic Portrait Of The Writer Turgenev - Great And Terrible

2023 Author: Oswald Adamson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 20:18

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818-1883) - Russian writer who had a significant impact on the development of world literature. What is the secret of this great writer? Do the personality traits of Turgenev have anything to do with his work?

The writer's father, in his moral qualities, could not serve as an example to his sons. It is believed that he “lost his mind and died” (Petinova EF, 1995). An important fact - the son did not like to remember him.

Mother suffered from "psychopathy of the affect-epileptic type" (Plesso GI, 1928). The writer recalled her as “a wild, wild, heartless and cruel woman whom he never loved and who also despised him. She often whipped her son and treated him so cruelly that he even tried to run away as a child”(Segalin GV, 1925). One more stroke of her personality can be cited: she examined her rich estate, in which 5000 serfs lived, in "a stretcher with glass (from infection!)" And "after a brutal flogging in the stable" she made the courtyard speak French (Moleva N. M.., 2008).

Turgenev studied in Moscow at the Faculty of Literature of the University, then at the Faculty of Philosophy of St. Petersburg University. At the age of 20, he studied at the University of Berlin and did a lot of self-education. He began his literary career, like many other writers, with poetry.

Our task is not to review Turgenev's work, but to get acquainted with his personal characteristics and their possible influence on the creative process.

Features of the personality of the famous writer

Memoirs of Guy de Maupassant: “Bringing his modesty almost to humility, he did not want to be written about in the newspapers, and more than once it happened that articles in which he was praised were perceived by him as an insult … And he really was incredibly naive, this genius novelist, who traveled all over the world, who knew all the great people of his age, who read everything that a person could only read, and who spoke all the languages of Europe as fluently as his own”(Maupassant G. de, 1983).

Turgenev often announced that he was "very sick", and always imagined some unusual sensations in himself: now something inside his head is "ripping off", then "some forks are pushing out his eyes." The slightest ill health plunged him into despair. At the same time, the writer led a moderate life and was not a lover of either wine or cards. And his hypochondria reached such an extent that during the St. Petersburg cholera he fell ill from a single imagination so that he survived all the clinical signs of this disease (Nikitin MA, 1973). Turgenev also experienced olfactory hallucinations, about which he told the writer Edmond Goncourt.

Memoirs of the literary historian and contemporary of the writer Pavel Annenkov: “Before receiving the inheritance in 1850, he made up for the participation in the ordinary life of his rich friends with loans for future benefits, taking money from the editor for still unwritten works - in a word, he led the life of a bohemian of noble origin, aristocratic begging "(Annenkov P. V., 1983).

The writer of the Silver Age Boris Zaitsev believed that “among the Turgenev wormholes there was one that tormented him very much, - he noticed it behind him in his childhood: incomplete truthfulness. Whether his imagination was vivid, whether he wanted to “shine,” “show himself,” whether the fluidity and fickleness of nature itself, he was sometimes deceitful. This alienated many from him … created the impression of a poseur and a person who could not be relied on (and really could not be relied on!)”(Zaitsev B. K., 1991).

Modern psychiatrists state: "By the type of his personality he is close to pseudologists-science fiction writers" (Lange-Eichbaum W., Kurth W., 1967), "hysterical personality traits" (Kotsovsky D., 1959).

Stormy sex life has borne fruit

The following data testify to the physical inferiority of Turgenev, a tall and very strong man. “My skull bones are so thin (says Turgenev) that if any of my comrades slaps me on the head, I feel bad.” Later, as an adult, he said to Polonsky: "Touch my crown - I still have not grown the bones of the skull." After death, it was confirmed that "the bones of the skull … when pressed, bent under the fingers, like a thin plate" (Segalin GV, 1926). From birth, Turgenev was distinguished by a disproportionately large head (hydrocephalus?): The weight of his brain was 2,012 grams, which is 600 grams more than the weight of an average person.

Beginning from 1874-1875, the writer's contemporaries in subsequent memoirs described his various ailments, “especially those where it comes to some kind of urogenital disease that requires cauterization and bougienage of the urethra. Apparently, the stormy and not very choosy sexual life of the writer has borne fruit”(Gindin V. P., 2005).

It can be assumed that the writer was infected with syphilis, which was very common at that time. In this case, it is easier to explain his brain disease, proceeding with psychotic disorders in the last decade of his life, which could be caused by neurosyphilis. In the same years, Turgenev was treated by the famous French psychiatrist and neurologist Jean Martin Charcot.

Love is not a feeling at all, but a disease

Turgenev was negative about marriage. “There was a moment in his life when the marriage could have taken place. We are talking about Tatiana Bakunina, the sister of the famous theorist of anarchism”(Volkogonova O. D., 2013). But, thinking about his relationship with the singer Pauline Viardot, Turgenev stated (1855): “Love is not even a feeling at all. She is a disease, a well-known state of mind and body …"

The writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky believed that in connection with such a worldview, “he, who, one might say, all his life did nothing but agonize over the issue of sex, had an amazing absence of the issue of childbirth and motherhood. Turgenev women and girls seem to be unable to give birth”(Merezhkovsky DS, 2007). However, Turgenev had a connection with the "seamstress" Avdotya Ivanova, which led to the birth of a daughter who lived in the family of Pauline Viardot.

I. S. Turgenev was dying of a spinal cord tumor that destroyed three vertebrae. He was in great pain and understood the hopelessness of his condition. The physical suffering was aggravated by mental disorders: “vague notions of persecution, passionate hostility towards all those around him, systematic distrust of his most devoted friends. From time to time, the patient has thoughts of suicide and even homicide."

In May 1883, Turgenev told the doctor about his conviction, “that the reason for his illness was that he was poisoned, he told a long, very fantastic and absurd story of poisoning, and to all arguments and objections he repeated:“Believe me, this is so, I really I know”” (Volfson B. Ya., 1927). Pauline's daughter Viardot suggested that the constant use of morphine - and what else could at that time reduce pain? - reflected on his psyche.

According to other sources, Turgenev died of lung cancer, since the last 20 years of his life he had hemoptysis, which the writer reported in letters to Afanasy Fet.

Features of the creative process

Features of the creative process of Turgenev are replete with curious psychological and psychopathological features.

So, “while working on my work, I got so used to the image of my hero that I kept a diary on his behalf every day, for example, on behalf of Bazarov” (TI Ivanyuk, 2006). Turgenev confessed: "When I wrote the final lines of Fathers and Sons, I was forced to bow my head so that tears would not drip onto the manuscript."

Testimonies dating back to the time of his stay in Baden: “he took up the pen almost always under the influence of an internal need, regardless of his will … Images evoked by personal memories, pictures preserved in his memory, appeared in his fantasy, no one knows why and from where, and more and more besieged him and forced him to paint as they appear to him, and write down what they say to him and among themselves. I often heard him, during these working hours, under the influence of an irresistible need, lock himself in his room and, like a lion in a cage, walk and groan there”(Gruzenberg SO, 1923).

In the mid-sixties of the 19th century, Turgenev developed an interest in the mysterious phenomena of the human psyche, which resulted in his "strange stories." Something pushed the writer to the secrets of madness. Is it not your own experience of psychopathological experiences? In 1863-1864, Turgenev suffered oneiric syndrome (a dreamy clouding of consciousness), which he vividly described in his story "Ghosts". This type of hallucinatory disorder is characteristic of organic brain damage. In Father Alexei's Story, Turgenev described with clinical accuracy the classic development of progressive schizophrenia. Since the mid-seventies, the writer periodically had attacks of hallucinatory (visual and auditory) disorders.

We have every reason to suppose that the writer developed an organic process in the brain (brain tumor or neurosyphilis?), Which worsened in the last decades of his life.

The attitude of this lyric writer to love is interesting. Poet and writer Daniil Andreev writes: “Either because of a peculiar, flawed personal fate … Turgenev, more than any other writer of his generation, understood and loved love only in its initial period: he is a genius poet of“first dates”and“first explanations”. The further course of events leads each time to a catastrophe, and this catastrophe occurs even before the destinies of the lovers have united”(Andreev DL, 1992). It can be assumed that Turgenev's personal life experience did not provide him with material for a different development of romantic history.

Presumptive diagnosis

Mosaic warehouse of personality. The core syndrome is depression with hypochondriacal and phobic experiences. There are also hysterical traits - a tendency to pseudology, demonstrativeness and flirtatiousness, manifested in ladies' society. Hallucinatory symptoms as a result of brain damage (neurosyphilis?) Were reflected in his other works: "Enough," "Dog," "Knock … Knock … Knock!", "Sleep" and others.

Sources:

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