10 great writers with their secret weaknesses and vices

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

“Genius and villainy are two incompatible things,” assured Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. But reality makes it clear that "genius is not without blemish." Today it is no secret that among the greatest writers there were alcoholics, drug addicts, and gay people. But for loyal readers, the presumption of innocence in relation to favorite authors works non-stop. In our roundup of 10 great writers with their secret passions and vices.

1. Vladimir Nabokov

Butterflies were the fiery passion of the writer and philologist Vladimir Nabokov. He caught them, studied, drew, made up their descriptions and gladly talked about the subject of his hobby to friends and acquaintances. The butterfly even became something of his personal brand name.

2. George Gordon Byron

The great British poet George Byron - a lame, fat and unattractive man - was extremely loving. During the year of his life in Venice, he made 250 ladies happy with himself. He rented the Mosenigo Palace and turned it into a real house of tolerance. It is known that he managed to seduce Lady Caroline Lam, who spoke of him as the most dangerous and unkind of all her known people, and then Byron seduced both her cousin and his own half-sister. Of course, one could count that Byron lied, talking about 250 mistresses, if not for one thing. He left a memory about each of his mistresses - a lock of pubic hair, which he put in an envelope with the name. These envelopes have already been discovered in our time in his house in the library.

Byron's other passion was diet - he tried his best to throw everything off and achieve a "noble pallor." To do this, he drank vinegar diluted with water. As a result, Byron began to lose weight, and in addition got nausea, diarrhea and died in his prime.

3. Charles Dickens

Once Charles Dickens confessed: "Some invisible force is drawing me to the morgue." It was about a Parisian morgue, where unidentified bodies were put on public display in the 19th century. Dickens was so captured by corpses that in this institution he could spend days on end, watching dead bodies brought in, dissected, prepared for burial. The feeling that gripped him, he called "the attraction of the disgusting."

4. Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe can be considered the most inveterate alcoholic writer of the 19th century. He has been in the hospital more than once with bouts of delirium tremens, where he fiercely swore and fought with ghosts. Even into another world, he departed in an alcoholic intoxication. Poe drank all the booze that was brought to him on election day for agreeing to participate in them as a dummy candidate. He was found in a ditch, taken to the hospital, where he died of a stroke. Since 1949, at the grave of the writer in Baltimore, someone has regularly left a bottle of Martel or Hennessy.

5. Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov collected a collection of tickets for all the performances he attended. But along with this innocent hobby, he also had a serious vice - his passion for morphine. "There are things worse than morphine, but not better," the writer argued.

Leonid Karum, husband of Bulgakov's sister, said in his book: “Mikhail was a morphine addict, and sometimes at night after an injection that he gave himself, he felt bad, he died. By the morning he was recovering, but he felt bad until the evening. But after dinner he had a reception, and life was restored. Sometimes nightmares crushed him at night. He jumped out of bed and chased ghosts. Maybe that's why I began to mix real life with fantasy in my works”.

6. Alexandre Dumas

Alexander Dumas Sr. became famous not only for his fascinating novels. Contemporaries knew him as a tireless seducer and lecher. Throughout his life, he did not remain faithful to any woman, including his wife. He boasted that he had given birth to 500 illegitimate children, but officially recognized the paternity of only three. When Dumas-father dropped in to visit Dumas-son, a real commotion began in the house. Dumas, the elder, rushed about the estate, trying to hide the numerous half-dressed young ladies somewhere.

7. Honore de Balzac

Honore de Balzac's contemporaries recalled that he passionately loved coffee, preferred it to all other drinks and drank it at any time of the day. Balzac could drink more than 20 cups a day. Simple arithmetic allows us to calculate that while working on his most ambitious work, The Human Comedy, Honore de Balzac drank at least 15,000 cups of his favorite coffee.

8. Nikolay Gogol

The author of Dead Souls and Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka had a passion for needlework - he cut dresses for his sisters, knitted on knitting needles, sewed scarves and weaved belts. And Nikolai Vasilyevich adored miniature publications. Although he did not know and did not like mathematics, he subscribed to a mathematical encyclopedia only because it was printed in the sixteenth part of a sheet (10, 5 × 7, 5 cm). Gogol's culinary passion was not only dumplings, but also goat's milk. Gogol cooked it in a special way, adding rum to it.

9. Johann Goethe

The famous thinker and poet Goethe adored violets with every fiber of his soul. He not only admired them, he bred them, and in a very original way. Walking around the outskirts of Weimar, he always took violet seeds with him and sowed flowers everywhere. A few years later, the suburb of Weimar was strewn with blue fragrant flowers, which are still called "Goethe flowers" there.

10. Truman Capote

Truman Capote, author of Breakfast at Tiffany's and Murder in Cold, said about himself: “I'm an alcoholic. I am a drug addict. I am a homosexual. I'm genius…"

Who can give better advice than a person who has seen life. 10 great tips from the works of the intelligent satirist Mikhail Bulgakov will be interesting even to those who are indifferent to Bulgakov's work.