The wife of a genius is a profession, a calling and hard work. Vera Pavlova described her duties with exhaustive accuracy: “The muse inspires when she comes, the wife inspires when she leaves, the mistress inspires when she doesn’t come. Do you want me to do it all at the same time?” Actually, the wife of a genius should not do anything else. It’s all about simultaneity. You need to be able to constantly be there and not get bored.
Talking about the wives of geniuses is difficult precisely because genius is different for genius: mathematical — one thing, artistic — completely different, musical — the third. It is desirable for artistic natures that their wives understand and share their delights on their own account, and also cast out doubts to which any genius is highly subject. It is not at all necessary for a mathematician that his wife delve into his subtle constructions; moreover, he is almost always sure that this is none of her business. Physicists are not arranged at all like mathematicians, and they prefer to marry their graduate students or students — so that the girl knows at least a little what her husband is doing. Because mathematics is a game of the mind, and physics is a whole worldview, and a mathematician easily gets along with an ordinary person, and a physicist feels best with a physicist. Composers prefer to marry performers — musicians, singers, dancers — and such unions are the most long-term, because they are pragmatic. Something like a contract, although not without feelings. Finally, the geniuses of commerce and business, as well as big politicians, are forced to choose not so much a wife as a showcase, which does not always mean a harmonious union, but harmony in marriage is the tenth thing for such people. For their eternal expansion, they need the rapid and most often incidental satisfaction of a burdensome and obsessive sexual need: a flight attendant on an airplane, a waitress in a bar — this is their ideal companion.
Genius for genius
The main question for any genius is whether he should marry another genius? In other words, should a wife be intellectually equal to her husband? Experience suggests that in no case should it be, since genius is not only patience and work, but also psychopathology, and egocentrism, and jealousy. Living with a genius is very difficult: a woman is still capable of it, a man, due to his dominance, almost never.
This does not mean that a genius should marry a fool. Ideally, he should marry a smart, subtle, understanding woman, but completely devoid of creative abilities. The ideal connoisseur. Such marriages turn out to be much more durable: the poet Robert Rozhdestvensky lived all his life with Alla Kireeva, Leonid Latynin — with Alla Latynina, director Anatoly Efros — with theater critic and theater expert Natalia Krymova. It is generally better for a genius to marry a historian, critic or theater critic. That is, on the one who understands well the full measure of his greatness, but does not claim his own. I know of a case of a long and happy marriage between two talented sculptors, but it was overshadowed by rather unpleasant incidents. For example, they are exhibited together in the Manege. My wife has some very successful jobs. The husband goes and on the night before the opening day re-sticks labels under them, appropriating the most successful things for himself. To make it clear who is the boss in the house and the leader in the pair. Let me remind you that Auguste Rodin suppressed Camille Claudel in every possible way, which is why she eventually went crazy — and after all, she was a wonderful sculptor, if not of his level, but clearly of the highest class!
There are, however, special cases: the wife is a technical assistant. These are the cases of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and partly of Salvador Dali. A stenographer’s wife (not devoid of artistic taste), a copyist’s wife (the notorious seven times — that’s how many editions the epic «War and Peace» had, and the same number of times Sofya Andreevna rewrote it from beginning to end), wife-sitter (Galina Dyakonova, which Dali wrote for almost forty years). This is much more important than the ideal housewife, cook, laundress, etc.: the artist appreciates the one who helps him in his work. The same applies to a physicist who needs the help of a laboratory assistant, and a writer who loves to dictate. True, creativity is an intimate process and not everyone is allowed to go there, therefore a wife-model and a wife-stenographer are an ideal collaborator. By the way, a good model is not always a beauty. Good is the one who correctly «sits» (lies) and maintains a conversation at the same time. “Portrait of the Artist’s Wife” is the most widespread genre in the world of fine arts (there is also “Portrait of the Artist’s Mistress”, but the artist, as a rule, does not admit this).
Not a single life
Some believe that the wife of a genius is obliged to create «comfort and dryness» for her husband. Alas, this is not enough. Boris Pasternak first fled from his mismanaged and absent-minded first wife to his second, economic and thrifty one, but then fled to an even more disorderly and chaotic being: judging by the letters to Olga Ivinskaya, he only loved her in life with all the self-forgetfulness of a mature passion. A well-established life has not yet made anyone happy, although lifelessness is often disgusting: let’s not forget that the legend about the indifference of geniuses to everyday life is just as unfounded as the version of their egocentric passion for convenience and peace. A genius for that and a genius to be able to perfectly optimize the creative process himself: Landau, whose wife was proud of an excellent apartment and complete order in it, claimed that he only needed a pencil for work (and, he sometimes added, a favorite pillow — he liked to calculate and fantasize reclining). Clutter annoys the genius — but he goes to his place, where there is always order, because a serious master always has a minimum of things on his desktop and in his room: he personally monitors his workplace and tries not to let anyone near him. Even if you lick the whole kitchen, even cook a roast of nightingale tongues in a 1975 Bordeaux sauce — a genius will eat and not feel that he ate such a thing. And she will run away to the attic to her mistress, where she will reverently eat a liverwurst sandwich prepared by her carelessly. The thing is that without love it is good to live only with mediocrity. Superprofessionals, creators, pioneers are so indifferent to people if they are not part of their field of activity that no cooking can keep them close to another person — only love in its purest and unadulterated form. Genius, after all, is the embodiment of injustice: talent overshadows the head of a madman, an idle reveler, while an honest hard worker, a clever, classy specialist works nearby in the sweat of his brow. Genius is redundant and unfair. Like a pimple that jumps up wherever it wants (this comparison seems to belong to Faina Ranevskaya). So is love: is love for high spiritual qualities? Love is even more unfair than talent: next to you, the unloved is suffering from a real illness or deep depression, and you rush through the whole city to your loved one, who cut his finger or fell into anguish from an unfriendly review. Where’s the justice?! I don’t have her. Love is like genius: whomever it wants, it overshadows. That is why they are so drawn to each other: a genius is always in love and will not even sleep without love with anyone. They, superhumans, have a fine mental organization and in bed everything turns out only by strong passion.
It is not true that the wife of a genius must be a gray mouse who has renounced secular life and know for herself that she keeps a hearth. If a wife wants to be a muse, she must remain inaccessible at least in some way: only the feeling of her complete power over her companion makes a genius truly bored. He cannot bear the situation in which the wife ceases to be the object of general desire. Oddly enough, the ideal muse was the wife of Alexander Blok, whom he adored until the last day. This did not prevent the poet from cheating on her, and answering tactless questions about the number of his loves: I supposedly had two women — Lyubov Dmitrievna and all the others. At the same time, Lyubov Dmitrievna cheated on her husband much more often, openly seduced his friends and even a child, according to rumors, gave birth not at all to Blok — and Blok sympathized with his wife, who always fell into tragic, «novel» stories. This is not masochism — this is the poet’s respect for the beauty, they are always drawn to each other, which Pasternak wrote about most accurately in his «Certificate of Conduct». They are of the same nature, and they are connected, in addition to love, by a special kind of solidarity. That is why the connection between the poet and the prostitute is so common and so enduring. Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, father, Maupassant — all of them remained faithful to the frivolous girlfriends of youth for years. Blok always loved Lyubov Dmitrievna because she was destined for him, and because she never completely belonged to him. This is the main drama of all lyrics, which made Blok the greatest poet of the era.
In general, however paradoxical it may seem, a genius values beauty much more than devotion. This is due to the fact that the traditional human criteria in his case are, so to speak, blurred. He prefers to deal with the sacred monster he is. He is attracted by the exceptional — even if it is ugly, even if it is completely immoral: after all, beauty is only perfect when it has a touch of excess, pathology, the very thing that makes a genius a genius. A genius is able to fall in love with a depraved woman if she sees in depravity an end in itself and serves him with an enthusiasm that reaches holiness. Thus Wilde loved his Alfred Douglas, called Bosie, about whom he knew everything and about whom he had no illusions; so Shakespeare adored his swarthy lady, knowing that she was cheating on him with his own friends. Pushkin fell in love with Natalie precisely for what the Pushkinists hate her for: for her complete, complete insensitivity, for that perfect immorality that only stuck to marble. She was no worse wife for a genius — they were at least of the same breed: he is the highest expression of humanity, she is an equally ultimate expression of inhumanity. Even vulgarity can have its own genius, and Lilya Brik was such a genius of vulgarity, throwing herself at all the fashions of the era. Read her letters to Mayakovsky with endless lists of what to buy and bring — it’s hard to imagine great vulgarity and self-interest: but in order to exploit a genius so brazenly, one must also be a genius, only a slightly different breed. In a word, human criteria for a genius do not exist — he falls in love not with a vector, but with a scalar, not with morality, but with a scale.
Here we come to the main point. A genius is so arranged that he often has to deal with inhuman criteria, transcendent passions, icy abstractions — with everything that is so difficult for the fragile human nature to endure. Constantly fighting with it, a genius, whether he is a physicist, lyricist, humanitarian, technocrat, performer, inventor, all the time rapes himself and sooner or later falls into despair. The tasks that stand before him are only on the shoulder of the titans; he sees all the difficulties of their implementation, but he does not always feel the strength in himself. And then he needs … how to formulate it? .. Mayakovsky said: «I want to hide my ringing in soft, feminine.» But it’s not about women. The point is precisely in the human: in the only consoling word spoken at the right time. A person in a state of panic attack needs to catch one single sympathetic look to calm down: yes, I understand that you feel bad, and I will do what I can for you. A genius is obsessed with his uniqueness, he goes crazy with loneliness — this loneliness is his main, enduring nightmare. To inspire him that he is not alone on his peaks, that there is a support nearby, that they are watching him, they sympathize with him, they will not let him go to the abyss — the main function of the wife, and for this, supernatural beauty and special intelligence are useless. All it takes is an intuition, but that in itself is as rare as genius. This is why successful genius marriages are so rare. They can be listed on the fingers. This is the union of Andrei Sinyavsky and Maria Rozanova, Osip Mandelstam and Nadezhda Khazina, Bulat Okudzhava and Olga Artsimovich, Pavel Antokolsky and Zoya Bazhanova, Ilya Averbakh and Natalya Ryazantseva. All these wives of indisputable geniuses were endowed with a higher mind — they were able to explain to the genius in time that he was not alone, and thereby save him from insanity. Finding the only words and intonations for this is no easier than putting together the simplest phrase from the simplest words: “I remember a wonderful moment” …