Why Soviet child prodigies were unsuccessful in adult life

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

How can you not admire a little girl who still does not know how to write, but reads her own poems with inspiration, or a young grandmaster who can beat serious adult chess players? These children quickly get used to fame and general delight in their address, and then they turn out to be completely unprepared to face the realities of life. In our today's review, we will focus on the tragic fate of the most famous wunderkinds in the USSR.

Pasha Konoplev

The young prodigy became famous in the 1980s, having managed to surprise with his phenomenal abilities not only ordinary people, but also scientists. At the age of three, Pasha had already read and solved rather complex examples in his mind, at the age of five he began to play the piano masterfully, and at 8 he mastered almost the entire school curriculum in physics.

Pasha was only 15 when he entered a technical university, and by the age of 19 he was already in graduate school and became a program developer for the first Soviet computer. But the young body did not cope well with the hardest loads. Moreover, Pasha did not know how to rest and was not very good at building relationships with peers. Already in the 1990s, the young genius began to show outbursts of aggression and psycho-emotional breakdowns, he even tried to commit suicide, which is why he ended up in a psychiatric clinic. In addition, the young man had problems with being overweight, which he tried to solve with the help of endocrinologists in the hospital. But a detached blood clot caused the death of Pasha Konoplev at the age of 29.

Nadia Rusheva

Drawings of five-year-old Nadya Rusheva were able to surprise even her own father, artist Nikolai Konstantinovich Rushev. The most interesting thing is that no one specially studied with the girl, she even learned to read and write at school. Then she began to draw daily, devoting no more than half an hour a day to her hobby. She never came up with a plot and did not imagine in advance what her creation would be. According to Nadia herself, the drawings seemed to show through on paper, like watermarks, and she just outlined them.

She could draw 36 illustrations for Pushkin's "The Tale of Tsar Saltan" in one evening, just by listening to her father read the work to her. Or draw the ballet Anna Karenina, which will be staged only after the death of Nadia Rusheva. Unfortunately, life measured out very little time for the young artist: at the age of 17, the girl died due to a hemorrhage caused by a ruptured congenital aneurysm of the brain. Nadya Rusheva left behind about 12 thousand drawings, including illustrations for many works.

Sasha Putrya

She began painting at the age of three thanks to her artist father. Her drawings turned out to be bright, colorful. She generously gave them to all friends and acquaintances of the family, creating impromptu postcards, often signing them with poems of her own composition. Sasha Putrya did not let go of her hand even after she was diagnosed with acute leukemia. The girl painted for 8-10 hours a day, trying to forget about pain with the help of creativity. Her struggle with a terrible disease lasted 6 years. At 11, the life of the little artist ended.

Maxim Troshin

Born into an Orthodox family, Maxim Troshin suffered from severe asthma from the age of two. Only singing helped him to get rid of attacks of suffocation. That is why the boy became interested in music from early childhood. He sang in the choir at the church, was a bell ringer and subdeacon, and at the age of 9 he began to write music to his own texts and to the verses of famous Russian poets.

The young musician performed a lot together with populist artists and independently, performed both his own works and folk songs. In early 1995, the young man lost his father, to whose memory he dedicated his song "Funeral Bell", which became the last in Maxim's work. The body of Maxim Troshin was found in a river in Bryansk in the summer of 1995, two weeks before his 17th birthday.

Nika Turbina

The young poetess, who at the age of four began to dictate poetry to her mother, was known all over the world. Her works were unusually mature and thoughtful, but at the same time they showed an undisguised tragedy. She was only 9 years old when the first collection of her works was published, later translated into 12 languages, and at 12 she received the main award of the Venice Poetry Festival - "Golden Lion".

But Nika, enjoying the fame and attention, often admitted: poems are heard in her almost all the time, they do not let her sleep. But the girls' relatives only dismissed them when they were advised to show their young talent to a psychologist. Nika Turbina grew up, the public lost interest in her, and the poetess could not come to terms with it.

She became addicted to alcohol, began to lead a bohemian lifestyle, entered VGIK, but left her studies. Later she was enrolled in the Institute of Culture, but she had to transfer to the correspondence department due to constant disruptions. At the age of 27, Nika Turbina died tragically, falling from the fifth floor. She loved to sit on the windowsill with her legs hanging down …

The name of Nika Turbina was well known, she was written about in newspapers and shown on TV, Yevgeny Yevtushenko contributed to the publication of a book of her poems when the girl was only 9 years old. In the 1990s, she was forgotten: the genius child grew into an ordinary teenager. Nika Turbina continued to write poetry, but they were no longer published.