Talented and mentally ill people It's like two sides of the same coin. It is not for nothing that non-standard-minded, extraordinary, special people are called abnormal and crazy, and artists whose paintings do not fit into the generally accepted framework and remain incomprehensible to the viewer are advised to take a course of medication and psychotherapy. Of course, you can blame the narrow-mindedness and narrow-mindedness of such "advisers" as much as you like, but in some ways they are right. And to be convinced of this, one has only to look at the pictures that paint patients of neuropsychiatric clinics and dispensaries.
Before you are drawings of an 18-year-old girl named Kate, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia a year ago. She sees strange hallucinations, which she then draws to try to sort out her thoughts. Kate decided to show everyone what she has to live with and accompanied her drawings with explanatory comments.
"Over the years I have been given multiple diagnoses. At 17, I was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia when my parents realized that my mental health was deteriorating."
"I draw a lot of my hallucinations because drawing helps me deal with it."
"Inanimate objects will look like a Van Gogh painting: twisted and harsh."
"It's a bird, she sings to me."
"This is a quote from an artist named Jory and that was what spoke to me. My depression makes me feel worthless like a fly. These illustrations reflect my illness."
"This person crawls out of a vent in my ceiling and makes a clicking sound, or I see him crawl out from under things."
"It's a self-portrait."
"Here is an example from the disembodied eyes that I see. They appear in mounds or on my walls or floors. They deform and move."
"My self-esteem is at its lowest point and I feel insignificant. I would always like to turn into a 'beautiful' person."
"Organization, communication, paranoia, depression, anxiety and managing my emotions - they are fighting a big fight for me."
“What I live with is not easy and it can be exhausting, but I don’t live on the streets screaming about alien abductions. "who just sit at home, locked in their room. It's a spectrum of symptoms with varying degrees of severity. Each person's experience is unique."
The fact that Van Gogh and Camille Claudel suffered from mental disorders is easily remembered. And which of the Russian artists was given the same sad diagnosis? No, these are not Kandinsky or Filonov, who hypnotize with their painting, but artists whose canvases were sometimes quite realistic. We study together with Sofia Bagdasarova.
MIKHAIL TIKHONOVICH TIKHONOV (1789–1862)
YAKOV MAKSIMOVICH ANDREEVICH (1801–1840)
A nobleman of the Poltava province and an amateur artist, Andreevich was a member of the Society of United Slavs and one of the most active Decembrists. During the uprising of 1825 he served at the Kiev Arsenal. He was arrested in January of the following year, and during the analysis of the case it turned out that he called for regicide, raised military units to revolt, and so on. Andreevich was convicted among the most dangerous conspirators, in the first category, sentenced to 20 years of hard labor. The brilliant lieutenant was sent to Siberia, where over time he went crazy, and after 13 years of exile he died in a local hospital - apparently from scurvy. Very few of his works have survived.
ALEXANDER ANDREEVICH IVANOV (1806–1858)
The future author of "The Appearance of Christ to the People" arrived in Italy as a 24-year-old young man who won a retirement trip. In these warm lands, he remained for almost his entire life, constantly resisting orders to return. For more than 20 years he stubbornly painted his canvas, lived in isolation, behaved gloomily.
Rumors about his mental illness circulated among the Russian diaspora. Gogol wrote: "It was pleasing to some to proclaim him mad and spread this rumor in such a way that he could hear it with his own ears at every step." The artist's friends defended him, claiming that this was slander. For example, Count Fyodor Tolstoy reported in his report that the artist Lev Kiel, after the emperor’s arrival in Italy, “used all the intrigues to prevent the sovereign from visiting the workshops of our artists, and especially Ivanov does not tolerate and exposes him as a crazy mystic and has already managed to inflate this into Orlov’s ears , Adlerberg and our envoy, with whom he is mean to disgust, like everywhere and with everyone.
However, Ivanov's behavior clearly shows that these rumors still had some basis. So, Alexander Turgenev described the depressing scene when, together with Vasily Botkin, they somehow called the artist for dinner.
“No, sir, no, sir,” he repeated, turning more and more pale and lost. - I will not go; I'll be poisoned there.<…>Ivanov's face took on a strange expression, his eyes wandered...
Botkin and I looked at each other; a feeling of involuntary horror stirred in both of us.<…>
- You don't know Italians yet; this is a terrible people, sir, and clever at it, sir. He will take it from behind the side of the tailcoat - in such a manner he will throw a pinch ... and no one will notice! Yes, they poisoned me everywhere, wherever I went.
Ivanov clearly suffered from persecution mania. The artist's biographer Anna Tsomakion writes that the suspiciousness that was characteristic of him before gradually grew to alarming proportions: fearing poison, he avoided dining not only in restaurants, but also with friends. Ivanov cooked for himself, took water from the fountain and sometimes ate only bread and eggs. Frequent severe pains in the stomach, the causes of which he did not know, inspired him with confidence that someone periodically managed to pour poison into him.
ALEXEY VASILIEVICH TYRANOV (1808-1859)
The former icon painter, who was recruited by Venetsianov and taught realistic painting, later entered the Academy of Arts and received a gold medal. From a retirement trip to Italy, he returned in 1843 on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as they say - because of an unhappy love for an Italian model. And the next year he ended up in a St. Petersburg psychiatric hospital. There they managed to put him in relative order. He spent the next few years at home, in Bezhetsk, and then worked again in St. Petersburg. Tyranov died of tuberculosis at the age of 51.
PIMEN NIKITICH ORLOV (1812-1865)
Fans of Russian art of the 19th century remember Pimen Orlov as a good portrait painter who worked in the manner of Bryullov. He successfully graduated from the Academy of Arts and won a retirement trip to Italy, where he left in 1841. He was repeatedly ordered to return to his homeland, but Orlov lived well in Rome. In 1862, 50-year-old Orlov, by that time an academician of portraiture, fell ill with a nervous breakdown. The Russian mission placed him in an asylum for the mentally ill in Rome. Three years later he died in Rome.
GRIGORY VASILIEVICH SOROKA (1823–1864)
The serf artist turned out to be one of the most talented students of the private school of Venetsianov. But its owner, unlike the owners of many other Venetians, refused to give Magpie freedom, forced him to work as a gardener and limited him as best he could. In 1861, the artist finally received his freedom - from Alexander II the Liberator, along with the whole country. In the wild, Soroka defended his community by writing complaints against the former master. During one of the conflicts, the 41-year-old artist was summoned to the volost board, which sentenced him "for rudeness and false rumors" to a three-day arrest. But due to illness, Magpie was released. In the evening he went to the pottery shed, where he hanged himself. As it is written in the protocol - "from immoderate drunkenness and the sadness that came from that and with insanity of mind as a result of the acquired business."
ALEXEY FILIPPOVICH CHERNYSHEV (1824–1863)
At the age of 29, this native of the "soldier's children" received the Big Gold Medal and retired from the Academy of Arts in Italy. There, the first symptoms of his illness, which in the 19th century was called softening of the brain, appeared. His nervous breakdown was accompanied by eye disease, rheumatic pains, blurred vision and, of course, depression. Chernyshev tried to be treated in Austria, France and Switzerland, but his situation only worsened. Seven years after his departure, he returned to Russia, and his successes were still so great that Chernyshev received the title of academician. But the degradation continued, and as a result he was placed in the Stein institution for the mentally ill, where he died three years after returning at the age of 39.
PAVEL ANDREEVICH FEDOTOV (1815–1852)
When the author of The Major's Matchmaking and other textbook paintings turned 35, his state of mind began to deteriorate rapidly. If earlier he painted satirical paintings, now they have become depressing, full of a sense of the meaninglessness of life. Poverty and hard work with a lack of light led to poor vision and frequent headaches.
In the spring of 1852, an acute mental disorder began. A contemporary writes: "By the way, he ordered a coffin for himself and tried it on, lying down in it." Then Fedotov came up with some kind of wedding for himself and began to squander money, preparing for it, went to many acquaintances and got married in every family. Soon the Academy of Arts was informed by the police that "a madman is kept at the unit who says that he is the artist Fedotov." He was placed in a private institution for mentally ill Viennese professor of psychiatry Leidesdorf, where he banged his head against the wall, and the treatment consisted of being beaten with five whips by five people to pacify him. Fedotov had hallucinations and delusions, and his condition worsened.
The patient was transferred to the hospital "All Who Sorrow" on the Peterhof road. His friend wrote that there "he screams and rages in a rage, rushes with his thoughts in the celestial space with the planets and is in a hopeless position." Fedotov died the same year from pleurisy. Our contemporary psychiatrist Alexander Shuvalov suggests that the artist suffered from schizophrenia with a syndrome of acute sensual delirium with oneiroid-catatonic inclusions.
MIKHAIL ALEKSANDROVICH VRUBEL (1856–1910)
The first symptoms of the disease appeared in Vrubel at the age of 42. Gradually, the artist became more and more irritable, violent and verbose. In 1902, the family persuaded him to see the psychiatrist Vladimir Bekhterev, who diagnosed him with "incurable progressive paralysis due to a syphilitic infection", which was then treated with very cruel means, in particular mercury. Soon Vrubel was hospitalized with symptoms of an acute mental disorder. He spent the last eight years of his life intermittently in the clinic, becoming completely blind two years before his death. He died at the age of 54, deliberately catching a cold.
ANNA SEMENOVNA GOLUBKINA (1864–1927)
The most famous of the female sculptors of the Russian Empire, while studying in Paris, twice tried to commit suicide because of unhappy love. She returned to her homeland in a deep depression, and she was immediately admitted to the psychiatric clinic of Professor Korsakov. She came to her senses, but throughout her life she had bouts of inexplicable longing. During the revolution of 1905, she threw herself on the harness of the horses of the Cossacks, trying to stop the dispersal of the crowd. She was brought to trial as a revolutionary, but released as a mentally ill. In 1907, Golubkina was sentenced to a year in a fortress for distributing revolutionary literature, but due to her mental state, the case was again dismissed. In 1915, a severe bout of depression again put her in the clinic, and for several years she could not create because of her state of mind. Golubkina lived to 63 years.
IVAN GRIGORYEVICH MYASOYEDOV (1881–1953)
The son of the famous Wanderer Grigory Myasoedov also became an artist. During the Civil War, he fought on the side of the whites, then ended up in Berlin. There he applied his artistic skills to survive - he began to forge dollars and pounds, which he learned in Denikin's army. In 1923, Myasoedov was arrested and sentenced to three years, in 1933 he was again caught counterfeiting and went to prison for a year.
In 1938, we see him already at the court of the Principality of Liechtenstein, where Myasoedov becomes a court painter, portrays the prince and his family, and also makes sketches of postage stamps. However, in the principality he lived and worked on a fake Czechoslovak passport in the name of Yevgeny Zotov, which eventually turned out and led to trouble. His wife, an Italian dancer and circus performer, whom he married back in 1912, stayed with him all these years, helping him survive troubles and sell fakes.
Prior to that, in Brussels, Myasoedov painted a portrait of Mussolini, during the war he was also associated with the Nazis, including from the Vlasovites (the Germans were interested in his ability to counterfeit allied money). The Soviet Union demanded that Liechtenstein extradite collaborators, but the principality refused. In 1953, the spouses, on the advice of Boris Smyslovsky, the ex-commander of the RNA of the German Wehrmacht, decide to move to Argentina, where 71-year-old Myasoedov dies of liver cancer three months later. The artist suffered from a severe form of depressive disorder, which can be seen in the paintings of his last period, full of pessimism and disappointment, for example, in the cycle of "historical nightmares".
SERGEI IVANOVICH KALMYKOV (1891-1967)
The 20th century is the time when artists appear who have not gone crazy, but, on the contrary, have become artists, already being crazy. Interest in primitivism, "outsider art" (art brut) makes them very popular. One of them is Lobanov. At the age of seven, he contracted meningitis and became deaf and dumb. At the age of 23, he ended up in the first psychiatric hospital, six years later - in the Afonino hospital, from where he did not leave until the end of his life. At Afonino, thanks to the guidance of psychiatrist Vladimir Gavrilov, who believed in art therapy, Lobanov began to paint. In the 1990s, his naïve works in ballpoint pen ink began to be exhibited, and he gained great fame.
VLADIMIR IGOREVICH YAKOVLEV (1934-1998)
One of the most memorable representatives of Soviet non-conformism almost lost his sight at the age of 16. Then schizophrenia began: from his youth, Yakovlev was observed by a psychiatrist and from time to time went to psychiatric hospitals. His vision was preserved, but due to the curvature of the cornea, Yakovlev saw the world in his own way - with primitive contours and bright colors. In 1992, the almost 60-year-old artist at the Institute of Eye Microsurgery Svyatoslav Fedorov partially regained his sight - curiously, this did not affect the style. The works remained recognizable, only more elaborate. For many years he did not leave the psycho-neurological boarding school, where he died six years after the operation.
