If you haven’t read biographies of Russian classics since high school, get ready. It’s not like the teachers told us. The romantic Lermontov was a narcissist, Dostoevsky was suspected of pedophilia, and Leo Tolstoy, with his moralizing, turned out to be an abuser and domestic tyrant. Details in the article.
Mikhail Lermontov
Narcissism
At literature lessons, we read his poems and sorted out “what the author wanted to say.” In textbooks, biographers described the unhappy childhood of the poet, who grew up without a mother with an authoritarian grandmother.
Our imagination drew another genius who opposed himself to a hypocritical secular society. A kind of lonely romantic hero. However, it wasn’t quite like that. Or even not at all.
Lermontov’s mother died of consumption when the boy was 2 years old, and his strong-willed and narcissistic (which is confirmed by the memoirs of contemporaries) grandmother raised him.
Obviously, her “upbringing”, which included either detached coldness or indulging the whims of her grandson, could not but affect his psyche. He also grew up with a narcissistic personality and did not differ in kindness of character.
The poet treated women with hostility and treated them quite cruelly, upsetting marriages, fomenting conflicts and destroying reputations. His obscene poems have come down to us, in one of which he described a scene of gang rape.
Another disrespectful remark by Lermontov became the reason for his duel with Martynov, in which the poet was killed.
Fedor Dostoevsky
gambling addiction
The fact that the author of the novel “The Gambler” was addicted to gambling, we were told at school. But they didn’t explain that partnership with such a person (codependency) could not be called a healthy relationship.
The second wife of the writer, Anna Grigorievna, spoke with respect of her husband and considered his addiction to the game “some humiliation, unworthy of his exalted character” and illness. Today’s mental health experts would agree with her.
The letters show that Dostoevsky and his wife played out a scenario familiar to all co-dependent people. A person succumbs to temptation, then suffers from guilt and turns to a partner for support (both moral and material). The partner readily “rescues” him. The addict tries to hold on, but soon feels the attraction to the object of his addiction again … The circle closes, and the scenario repeats itself from time to time.
There was nothing to do … I went to roulette at 2 o’clock and – that’s it, I lost everything
For example, his wife sends money to Dostoevsky for the journey home from Hamburg, where the writer plays and plays to the nines every day. The letter, in which the writer, who has lost all his money, asks her for help, ends with dramatic lines: “Do not think of somehow, not trusting me, to come to me yourself. This incredulity that I will not come will kill me. I give you my word of honor that I will go immediately, no matter what … “
In order to “save” her husband once again, the wife pawns some of the valuables she has left (Dostoevsky had many children, the family lived in poverty and was mired in debt). But, again in the classic co-dependency scenario, the spouse doesn’t show up and sends another letter home.
In it, he shifts responsibility to another: “And all because the scoundrel did not wake up the footman, as I ordered, to go to Geneva at 11 o’clock. I slept until half past eleven. There was nothing to do, I had to leave at 5 o’clock, I went to roulette at 2 o’clock and – that’s it, I lost everything … “
Suspicions of pedophilia
The name of the writer is also associated with the story of the seduction of an underage girl – this story appears in several of his novels.
According to one version, Dostoevsky once came to Turgenev, with whom he had a strained relationship. He confessed that he had “molested” a six-year-old girl, and, wanting to punish himself for “this heinous act,” made such a confession to his enemy.
According to another version, the story was an invention of an exalted writer who, like a theater actor, “tried on” the roles of his own characters and tried to live their story. Perhaps self-slander and strange self-deprecation were simply the trick of an unbalanced and mentally unhealthy person.
According to the researchers, most likely, the monstrous story actually happened to a nine-year-old girl, a childhood friend of Dostoevsky. Her terrible fate and death after the violence experienced so impressed the future writer that this image haunted him “as the most terrible sin, for which there is no forgiveness and cannot be.”
Lev Tolstoy
The statements and thoughts of the great writer about morality and morality (including chastity) have been researched and quoted for a hundred years. However, Tolstoy himself lived a rather turbulent youth. In his diaries, he admits that addiction to sex is “no longer a temperament, but a habit of debauchery.” Among the writer’s mistresses were other people’s brides and married women.
He experienced a passionate affair with a peasant woman, Aksinya, who bore him an illegitimate child. And the seduction of a girl who served in the house of his aunt, Tolstoy himself would later call his crime. The “dishonored”, deflowered maid was kicked out and died. The writer admitted that it was she who became the prototype of Katyusha Maslova from his novel Resurrection.
Whether trying to be honest, or under the influence of his own narcissistic traits, the writer before the wedding gave his diaries to his future wife, eighteen-year-old Sofya Andreevna. Stories about his adventures made a heavy impression on the girl and subsequently provoked many marital conflicts.
Abuse and codependency
Tolstoy demanded from his wife that she devote herself entirely to him and his literary genius. After the wedding, he fired the manager. Sofya Andreevna was supposed to manage the affairs of the estate, bookkeeping, housekeeping, and sometimes cook. There were also children on it. And in the evenings she would sit down in beautiful handwriting to copy over what her husband had composed during the day.
It is difficult to say whether this is due to reading Tolstoy’s diaries, but intimate relationships for his wife became notorious marital duties that did not bring pleasure: “Lyova is increasingly distracted from me. He plays a big role in the physical side of love. It’s horrible; I have none, on the contrary.
Tolstoy later recognized sex in marriage only if its purpose was procreation. But he, apparently, did not think about giving up sex, but he was quite ready to put the health of both his wife and future children at risk. After the sixth birth, the doctors told Sofya Andreevna that her body was not ready for further pregnancies. But this annoyed the writer: “If you don’t give birth anymore, why do I need you at all?”
He is yesterday and always against freedom and the so-called equality of women.
The next four children died, which the doctors warned about. And the mother, mourning everyone and losing her health, continued to take care of her elders, serve her husband, support her family – Tolstoy, carried away by the ideas, gave part of her income to the needs of the poor and schools. But the rights to publish his literary heritage, each line of which was rewritten by Sofya Andreevna more than once by hand, Tolstoy left to his eldest daughter and his friend.
Misogyny
The classic treated women with disdain. His statements confirm this: “A woman does a great job: she gives birth to children, but does not give birth to thoughts, this is done by a man”, “The mental fashion is to praise women, to assert that they are not only equal in spiritual abilities, but higher than men, very nasty and harmful fashion”.
And here is the memoir of the writer’s wife: “Yesterday, and always, he is against freedom and the so-called equality of women; yesterday he suddenly said that a woman, no matter what business she is engaged in – teaching, medicine, art – she has one goal: sexual love. As she achieves it, so all her studies fly to dust.
Personality and creativity
Can we separate the personality of a writer from his literary heritage? Disputes about this do not stop. But, having learned such facts from the biography of the author, it is already difficult not to think about them when reading his works.
How to perceive the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva today, who is accused of the death of her own daughter? Is it possible to believe the beautiful lines of Antoine de Saint-Exupery about humanity and dignity, if in the memoirs of his wife he appears as a daffodil and an abuser? And is it possible to stop loving the cat Matroskin, Uncle Fyodor and Cheburashka after the daughter of Eduard Uspensky called him a domestic tyrant and accused him of psychological abuse?
Perhaps each reader will have to answer these questions independently.