Anamnesis morbi et vitae

The scientist was born after a normal pregnancy on October 15, 1844. The early years of his life were not distinguished by any peculiarities; at school he studied mediocrely.

Subsequently, Nietzsche studied at the Universities of Bonn and Leipzig, at the age of 24 (1869) he was appointed professor of philology at the University of Basel, that is, even before completing his doctorate. The thinker retired in 1879 due to illness and began to lead the life of a "wandering philosopher" in various areas of the Italian Riviera, the Swiss Alps, and in 1888-1889. — in Turin.

As a child, he was diagnosed with myopia and anisocoria. In the autumn of 1887 (at the age of 43), ophthalmoscopy revealed central chorioretinitis. Nietzsche's school medical card repeatedly mentions rheumatism, rheumatic pains in the neck, headaches, diarrhea and congestion. Mobius gave a detailed account of his migraine attacks, with a characteristic "fortifying" aura, sometimes lasting for several days. The thinker himself said that sometimes his migraine headaches lasted up to a total of 118 days throughout the year.

There is evidence of a burdened psychiatric history in his family (aunt, sister Elizabeth). Two maternal aunts suffered from mental illness, one of them committed suicide. One of the maternal uncles also became mentally disturbed after the age of 60, the second probably died in an insane asylum. The philosopher's father passed away at the age of 35. He suffered from unusual "states" during which X Although Nietzsche used to dress very elegantly, during that period of his life he stopped caring about his appearance. At the same time, the philosopher does not lose his creative inspiration and in December 1888 he reworks his treatise “Essay Homo”. Although his handwriting has deteriorated, he continues to play the piano virtuoso.

Subsequently, painful ideas of greatness become apparent. The Thinker calls his book “Thus Said Zarathustra” “the most fundamental in the world culture”. The essence and tone of his epistolary legacy from October 1888 to January 1889 reflect the growing signs of megalomania when he signs correspondence with the names "Phoenix", "Antichrist" and "The Beast". The letters become increasingly anti-German and anti-religious, and in December Nietzsche writes personal messages to Kaiser Wilhelm and Chancellor Bismarck. His ideas at that time were not of a melancholy nature, but rather became increasingly irrational. At the beginning of 1889, the scientist considers himself the organizer of the Congress of European Monarchs and sends an invitation to the Italian King Umberto II, the secretary of Pope Moriani and the Dukes of Baden. He becomes agitated and disoriented, he talks loudly to himself, sings and plays the piano, loses his understanding of the value of money, writes fantastic letters, signing the names "Crucified" and "Dionysus". His friend Overbeck very emotionally describes the changes in the behavior of the scientist, while mentioning the presence of delirium. At the railway station, Nietzsche wants to hug everyone, but calms down when the escorts tell him that such behavior is not worthy of a respected person.

Nietzsche was admitted to the Basel Psychiatric Hospital on January 10, 1889.

Survey at Basel (January 10, 1889)

On neurological examination, the patient's right pupil was wider than the left, but the reaction to light was not lost and symmetrical. On the part of other cranial nerves, converging strabismus and slight smoothing of the right nasolabial fold were also noted. Tendon reflexes are increased.

The mental state of the patient remained far from normal. The thinker feels a great uplift and considers himself unwell for only the last 8 days. There is no criticism of one's own illness. The subject is somewhat disoriented and verbose, in the morning he has episodes of excitement and loud singing. Appetite is good. At night, the patient does not sleep and constantly talks, while there is a jump in ideas. Nietzsche calls himself the "tyrant of Turin". He takes off his vest and cloak, throws them on the floor, falls on them, screams and sings. On January 18, 1889, he was transferred to a psychiatric hospital in Jena.

Examination during admission to a psychiatric hospital in the city of Jena (January 18, 1889)

Physical examination revealed a small scar to the right of the frenulum and a slight increase in inguinal lymph nodes. Neurological symptoms were limited to a slight narrowing of the left palpebral fissure compared to the right, but with an arbitrary contraction they were symmetrical. The pupils are asymmetrical, with the right pupil being wider. The left pupil responded when checking the pupillary reflex and accommodation, while the right pupil did not respond to the consensual pupillary reflex with preserved accommodation. The right corner of the mouth was slightly lowered, there was a deviation of the tongue to the right, there was no pathology from the other cranial nerves. When walking, the patient raised his left shoulder and lowered his right shoulder, while turning he waved his arms, but the Romberg test remained without features. Physiological reflexes were generally interpreted as brisk, foot clonus was noted on the left, and no pathological foot reflexes were observed.

Psychiatric symptoms looked like this. The patient majestically entered the room and thanked everyone present for the "stunning welcome." He often bowed, did not orient himself in space (he thought he was in Turin or Naumburg), but recognized others. There is no criticism of one's own illness. Nietzsche gesticulated a lot, spoke in an upbeat tone, confused French and Italian words, repeatedly tried to shake hands with the attending physician. There was a marked leap of ideas, the patient spoke of his non-existent pieces of music and servants, his appetite was greatly increased.

During his stay in the clinic from January 18, 1889 to March 24, 1890, the thinker was not oriented in time and space. He made a lot of noise, he is often isolated. The patient demands the performance of his musical compositions, sometimes suffers from fits of anger, during which he pushes other patients, and insomnia, stopped by amylene hydrate and chloral hydrate. Nietzsche considers himself Friedrich Wilhelm II, Duke of Cumberland or the Kaiser, often calls the orderly Bismarck. Sometimes he urinates in his own shoes, from time to time he claims that they want to poison him, at other times he breaks a window, allegedly seeing a cannon behind it. In the heat of the moment, the patient breaks a glass of water in order to “protect himself with fragments,” hides paper and other small things from time to time, and also suffers from coprophagia.

Last years

On March 24, 1890, the scientist was discharged under the supervision of his mother. At that time, he did not even recognize his friends, including Deussen. The latter described the sick man sitting thoughtfully for a long time on the veranda, sometimes talking to himself about the faces and situations of his school years. Köselitz, in a letter to Overbeck dated February 17, 1892, writes that Nietzsche is basically apathetic, responding to external verbal stimuli only with a smile or a slight nod of his head. He lost his musical abilities and memory, while he was guided by the events of today and had no desires. The patient cannot get up from the chair on his own, however, outside help is not required while walking. After visiting the school where he studied, the patient did not recognize the place, however, his physical condition was very good. In 1894, Deussen notes that the philosopher looks good, but he does not recognize anyone and his speech has worsened. Nietzsche's sister, who cared for him, wrote that from 1897 he only sat quietly in an armchair. The thinker died on August 25, 1900.

Where and when Nietzsche contracted syphilis remains a matter of conjecture. Mebius refers to his own information, according to which the thinker allegedly got infected in a brothel in Leipzig or Genoa. Janz questioned this, given the fact that the scientist often consulted doctors about his health problems and the very fact of infection would have been detected quite early. The same author expresses doubts about the sexual orientation of the philosopher, in his opinion, he probably had no sexual contact with women at all, including prostitutes. Nietzsche told Deussen, who happened to find him in one of the Cologne brothels, that he had only gone there to play the piano. Thus, the evidence for a primary infection with syphilis remains conflicting.

Delusions (often the first manifestation of FTD) may be about jealousy, somatization, religion, be quite bizarre, but never related to persecution. With this disease, delusions of exposure and auditory hallucinations are not observed. If the philosopher had them, they were predominantly religious in nature (he called himself “Antichrist”, “Dionysus” and “savior of the world”) or did not fit into any patterns at all (break a glass of water to “defend with fragments”). At the same time, the mood is predominantly euphoric, accompanied by inadequate playfulness, increased self-esteem and anxiety, which resembles hypomania (records during Nietzsche's hospitalization).

For 8 months, the thinker wrote 6 treatises, in particular “Nietzsche against Wagner”, “Desire for Power” and “Essay Homo”.

Abbreviated Statement . M. Orth, M.R. Trimble
Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 2006: 439-445

NIETZSCHE FRIEDRICH (1844-1900), German philosopher and poet, representative of irrationalism; professor at the University of Basel (1869-1879); created a contradictory and not subject to any unity system of philosophy.

"Too far I flew into the future: horror seized me."

HEREDITY

(Father) “was obsessed with some kind of nervous (organic-nervous) disease ... he died after a series of insanity and debilitating suffering ... The philosopher himself says about his father’s illness that he inherited ... “Eine schlimme Erbschaft »» (Segalin, 1925: 77).

“Nietzsche’s father died at the age of thirty-six from a mental illness that may have been hereditary and which became one of the probable causes of his son’s insanity” (Gomez, 2006: 25).

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PERSONALITY

"There are two of us - me and loneliness."

F. Nietzsche. Diary entry.

“Nietzsche was also born a sick child, both physically and mentally. The fact that for 2.5 years the Nietzsche child uttered only the first word speaks not only of the child’s belated development, but also of Nietzsche’s severe hereditary illness, which subsequently caused the catastrophe of his mental life. From childhood, Nietzsche is a nervous child. He suffered from severe headaches. These severe headaches were extremely painful and long lasting: they seemed to last for 1/2 year (according to Möbius)" (Segalin, 1926: 89).

“At the age of six, Friedrich was sent to a public school. Closed, taciturn, he kept aloof ... At the age of ten, Friedrich already composes didactic treatises and gives them to fellow students, writes dramas on ancient themes for staging at the Theater of Arts, founded with two associates ”(Garin, 2000: 29-30).

"He was only capable of either a brothel, or a completely platonic friendship with women" (Loewenberg, 1950: 927).

“Nietzsche’s notes contain a shocking admission that he was close to his sister not only spiritually, but also physically. It all started with the fact that she climbed into his bed ... (Friedrich was 6 years old, and Lizbeth was 5th) ... My sister got into the habit of playing with her brother's intimate "toy". Until the end of his life, Nietzsche remembered her "wonderful fingers", for which he had a strong association with sexual satisfaction. The love games of brother and sister continued for several years” (Bezelyansky, 2005: 71-72).

“In order not to be distracted by worldly fuss, Friedrich Nietzsche does not read newspapers at all. He lives like an angel, intrepidly looking from a height at the vanity of mankind and its passions ... None of the biographers of the philosopher mentions any physical connections between Nietzsche and women. It is possible that this was another internal problem of the scientist, which oppressed him throughout his life” (Badrak, 2005: 210, 216-217).

“The rare guests who visited Nietzsche had such an impression of him:“ This is a man that causes pity. Nietzsche lived so merged with his heroes that at times he looked like a madman. Zarathustra whispered in his ear... The period from 1885 to 1886 proved to be especially difficult for Nietzsche. He lived in poverty and was not recognized by anyone. He traveled in bad conditions and could not afford to fulfill any of his whims, moreover, he had to deal with the publication of his writings. And in addition, it cannot be denied that Nietzsche was haunted by many fears... When Nietzsche arrived in Venice in the spring of 1885, he wore short white linen trousers and a black jacket; he was unusually far from the real world to care about the opinions of others” (Gomez, 2006: 137-138).

“... there is no such diabolical torture that would not be lacking in this murderous pandemonium of diseases: headaches, chaining him to the couch and bed for whole days, stomach cramps with bloody vomiting, migraines, fevers, lack of appetite, fatigue, attacks of hemorrhoids, constipation, chills, cold sweat at night - a cruel cycle. In addition, there are also “three-quarters blind eyes”, which swell and begin to water at the slightest exertion, allowing a person of mental labor “to use the light for no more than an hour and a half a day.” But Nietzsche neglects hygiene and works ten hours at his desk. The overheated brain takes revenge for this excess with frenzied headaches and nervous excitement: in the evening, when the body asks for rest, the mechanism does not stop immediately and continues to work, causing hallucinations, until the insomnia powder stops its rotation by force. But this requires ever larger doses (for two months, Nietzsche consumes fifty grams of chloral hydrate to buy this handful of sleep), and the stomach refuses to pay such a high price and rises in revolt. And again - circulus vitiosus - spasmodic vomiting, new headaches requiring new remedies, inexorable, indefatigable competition of excited organs, in a cruel game tossing the ball of suffering to each other. Not a moment of rest in this perpetuum mobile, not a single smooth month, not a single brief period of calm and self-forgetfulness; in twenty years it is impossible to count even a dozen letters in which a groan would not break through ... Thanks to illness, he was spared military service and devoted himself to science; thanks to illness, he did not get stuck forever in science and philology; illness threw him from the Basel university circle to the “boarding school”, to life, and returned him to himself. He owes his eye disease to "liberation from books", "the greatest boon I have done for myself" ... Even the external events of his life reveal a direction of development opposite to the usual. Nietzsche's life begins with old age. At twenty-four, when his peers are still indulging in student amusements, drinking beer at corporate parties and organizing carnivals, Nietzsche is already an ordinary professor ... rank of state councilor, and Kant and Schiller - the department, Nietzsche has already abandoned his career and with a sigh of relief left the department of philology ... At thirty-six, Nietzsche - an outlaw philosopher, immoralist, skeptic, poet and musician - is experiencing a than in his actual youth. .. Incredible, unparalleled pace of this rejuvenation. At forty, Nietzsche's language, his thoughts, his whole being contains more red blood cells, more fresh colors, courage, passion and music than at seventeen... ).

(Letter dated April 10, 1888) “In the end, the disease brought me the greatest benefit: it singled me out from the rest, it returned my courage to myself ...” (Svasyan, 1990: 7).

“The artist is born by exceptional circumstances, they are deeply related to painful phenomena and are associated with them; so, apparently, it is impossible to be an artist and not be sick” (F. Nietzsche).

ON THE QUESTION OF MENTAL ILLNESS

"Not only the mind of millennia -

but their folly is manifested in us.

It's dangerous to be an heir."

F. Nietzsche. "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"

“Specialists attributed his mental disorder not only to severe mental fatigue, but also to the harmful effects of chloral on brain function. “Personally, I consider this last circumstance extremely aggravating,” said Professor Louis Levin. Nietzsche's brain worked so feverishly that he could not sleep at night. Then the doctors attributed chloral as a medicine, referring to the absurd argument that this drug is completely harmless. He used it, however, in huge quantities, thus accelerating the process of destruction of his mental abilities. The abuse of narcotic substances pays dearly"" (Baboyan, 1973: 73).

“According to some reports, between September and October 1882, Nietzsche attempted suicide three times. No, he wanted not so much to get rid of suffering, but to prevent madness, equal to death for him” (Garin, 2000: 119).

(1856-1857) "Nietzsche begins to have headaches and sore eyes" (Gomez, 2006: 209).

(1865) "Nietzsche suffers an acute attack of rheumatism and presumably becomes infected with syphilis" (ibid.: 210).

(1883) "Visual hallucinations became more frequent and threatened Nietzsche with madness" (ibid.: 117).

“Final diagnosis: schizophrenia-like, expansive form of progressive paralysis. Infection with syphilis - in mid-June 1865. From the end of 1888, the disintegration of the psyche begins with an increase in dementia and pronounced mental disorders ”(Lange-Eichbaum, 1948: 37-38).

(1888) "The first clear signs of a mental disorder..." (Svasyan, 1990: 826).

“He no longer felt sick. And moreover, he was convinced that women were staring at him, he felt that they admired him, and therefore he decided not to wear glasses on the street ... The genius admitted that he was possessed by strong passions and that he was kept in his right mind only by faith in that that the fate of mankind is in his hands” (Gomez, 2006: 163-164).

(1889) “January 3rd. Apoplexy in the street and the final stupefaction. Sending crazy postcards until January 7th ... January 10th the patient is admitted to a psychiatric clinic ... Willie's diagnosis: "Paralysis progressiva". This diagnosis, for the confirmation of which the hypothesis of a syphilitic infection will be invented, will subsequently be subjected to a decisive refutation by a number of prominent psychiatrists. Dr. C. Hildebrandt: "There is not a trace of evidence that Nietzsche contracted syphilis in 1866." Dr. G. Emanuel: "According to the current state of clinical psychiatry, the data known to us from Nietzsche's medical history are not sufficient to positively conclude the diagnosis of paralysis progressiva." Dr. O. Binswanger: "The anamnesis data concerning the origin of Friedrich Nietzsche's illness are so incomplete and fragmentary ... that a final judgment on the etiology of his illness is not possible." On January 17, a mother with two attendants takes her sick son to a psychiatric clinic at the University of Jena” (Svasyan, 1990: 826).

“His madness was manifested in the crazy letters that he wrote to the German emperor (“that purple idiot,” as Nietzsche calls him by the color of his uniform)” (Gomez, 2006: 173).

(January 8, 1889) “The next minute he became extremely excited and had a convulsive attack. They tried to calm him down with bromine, but he spoke incessantly. He recognized everyone, but apparently did not recognize himself. Something seemed to him, he writhed in convulsions, sang, played the piano, called himself the successor of the dead god, danced and from time to time gesticulated madly. He finally lost his mind" (ibid.: 175).

“But in the future, the disease proceeded more rapidly. Nietzsche suffered from constant insomnia, sang Neapolitan songs day and night or shouted out incoherent words, experienced constant excitement and was distinguished by a monstrous appetite ”(Garin, 2000: 168).

“Crazy and paralyzed, for the past eight years he has not been able to eat on his own” (Gomez, 2006: 17).

(1895) "Nietzsche's sister becomes his official guardian" (Ibid: 219).

Nietzsche's disease belongs to the group of schizophrenic disorders. Already long before the onset of mental illness proper, numerous signs of schizoid psychopathy with hysterical features were found. Finally, on the basis of a schizoid predisposition, paranoid schizophrenia developed with an outcome in dementia ”(Lange-Eichbaum, Kurth, 1967: 486).

“According to the latest data, the madness of Friedrich Nietzsche could be due to a brain tumor, and not syphilis, as many previously believed. After an aggravation of the disease in 1889, a psychiatric hospital in Basel diagnosed Nietzsche with an advanced stage of syphilis, which he was rumored to have picked up in a Leipzig brothel. However, Dr. Leonard Sachs from Maryland states in the Journal of Medical Biography that Nietzsche's medical history does not record the main symptoms of syphilis, but, on the contrary, there is evidence of a slowly developing brain tumor ”(http://www.humanities.edu.ru/db /msg/21275).

FEATURES OF CREATIVITY

“Of everything written, I love only that

that a man writes with his own blood...

Pain makes chickens and poets cackle."

F. Nietzsche. "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"

“His special way of working was that he wrote down his thoughts in notebooks and on separate sheets, of which many accumulated at moments of inspiration. Then he had only to organize this chaos, digging for months in piles of scribbled papers, sketches and notes made on anything. ... in ten days - from February 1 to February 10, 1883 - I was able to write the first part of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." ... he will also write in ten days, from June 26 to July 6, 1883, the second part of Zarathustra, which will be published in September ”(Gomez, 2006: 47-48, 117, 123).

“Aphorism No. 51 says: “... my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book - what everyone else does not say in a whole book ...” (ibid.: 161).

“Let's try to look at the work of the philosopher through the chronological prism of the development of his nervous illness. So, July 1865 - early syphilitic meningitis. 1872 - Nietzsche writes his first work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. 1873 - tertiary syphilis of the brain; in the same year Untimely Reflections were published. In 1878, Nietzsche publishes Human, All Too Human. 1880 - Beginning of progressive paralysis with euphoria and expansiveness. 1881 - "Morning Dawn", 1882 - "Merry Science". From 1880 to 1883 - the first attack of paralysis with delusions and hallucinations, proceeding according to the type of schizophrenia-like illness. In 1883-1884. Nietzsche writes his famous book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In 1885, syphilitic damage to the brain progresses, visual impairment sets in. 1886 - He finishes Beyond Good and Evil. The end of 1887 - the beginning of the second attack of paralysis with a progressive deterioration of the psyche. In 1888, Nietzsche created his last philosophical work, The Anti-Christian” (Shuvalov, 1992: 16).

“Already in the spring of 1888, any restraining beginnings disappeared from him: the texts become more and more cynical and destructive ... Zarathustra. According to one of the critics, the author of this poem is not Nietzsche, but chloral hydrate, which excited the poet's nervous system and deformed his vision of life. The pathological features of the work are the absence of restraining centers, over-exaltation, spiritual orgasm, signs of megalomania, an abundance of meaningless exclamations, etc. The illness did not affect the intellectual power of the “last disciple of Dionysus” at all. Maybe even aggravated it” (Garin, 2000: 141, 256, 108).

“The most brilliant ideas came to him in a state of pathological excitement. That is why many of his works are written in the form of aphorisms and paragraphs” (Galant, 1926: 251).

“A particularly bold flight, bolder than ever, distinguished his thought at the beginning of 1876 ... This was the moment when Nietzsche almost reaches the maximum height of his philosophical thinking, but buys it at the cost of his mental and physical overwork: he resumed migraines, pains in the eyes and stomach... During January and February 1875, Nietzsche writes nothing; he feels a total loss of energy. “Very rarely, 10 minutes in two weeks I write “Hymn to Loneliness”.” ... he knew how to enjoy the spectacle of his suffering and listened to them like the stirring sounds of a symphony; at such moments he did not feel any moral pain, but with some mystical pleasure he contemplated the entire tragedy of his existence” (Halevi, 1911: 102-104, 127, 130).

(In 1880, Nietzsche confesses to his doctor Dr. Eiser) “Existence has become a painful burden for me, and I would have done away with it long ago if the ailment that torments me and the need to limit myself decisively in everything did not give me material for the most instructive experiments and observations on sphere of our spirit and morality” (Mann, 1961: 353).

“The pathological in Nietzsche in the last ten years has occasionally had a very clear effect on his creative output, but before that his negative tendency contributed to a positive one ... contrast, evoke life-affirmation and emphasize the optimism of one’s worldview” (Reibmayr, 1908: 278, 235).

“He gives his books different more or less pretentious titles, but all these books are, in essence, one book. You can replace one with the other while reading and not notice it. This is a whole series of incoherent thoughts in prose and clumsy rhymes without end, without beginning. Rarely do you find any development of thought or several pages in a row connected by a consistent argument. Nietzsche obviously had a habit of feverishly putting down on paper everything that came to his mind, and when enough paper accumulated, he sent it to the printer, and thus a book was created ”(Nordau, 1995: 261).

“His philosophy is the philosophy of physical and spiritual health. That which was so lacking for the creator losing his mind. It is an inadequate reaction to oneself: weakness, overstrain, a premonition of madness, compassion gave rise to their opposite - the heroism of vitality and strength, and paranoid remission gave them a dramatic reflection of the ingeniously insane (“Paralysis was yeast to the dough from which Nietzsche was mixed”) ... If we study the spiritual development of Nietzsche from a natural-science, medical point of view, then here we can see the process of paralytic disinhibition and rebirth of various functions, in other words, the process of rising from the level of normal giftedness into the cold spheres of nightmarish grotesque, deadly knowledge and moral loneliness.. .” (Garin, 1992: 203-204, 242).

“... Nietzsche's philosophy is inseparable from his spiritual life and has a deeply personal character, making his texts a kind of spiritual self-portrait ... Madness, to a certain extent, saved Nietzsche from "finality", from "negotiating to the end." All his books are unfinished, philosophical testament is not written. The illness that struck him at the age of thirty deprived Nietzsche of the possibility of systematically thinking through his own ideas, which have come down to us in a state in statu nascendi. He himself was well aware of this, admitting that he never went beyond attempts and daring, promises and all kinds of preludes. This, perhaps, is the main charm of Nietzsche - "the magical charm of originality." A “combed”, systematized Mythmaker would be unnatural: the disease was not a punishment, but a “gift of God” - thanks to it, Nietzsche’s texts “float”, breathe, vibrate today” (Garin, 2000: 16, 25).

“The same thing happens to a person as to a tree. The more he aspires upward, towards the light, the deeper his roots go into the earth, down, into darkness and depth - to evil ”(F. Nietzsche).

Nietzsche provides one of the clearest examples of the influence of mental disorder on creativity. Moreover, the influence is far from ambiguous: in some ways positive, in some negative. We emphasize once again that the genius (talent) was primary, had to exist BEFORE the onset of the destructive stage of the disease. Mental illness in its first stages gave his work precisely that originality and that individuality, thanks to which Nietzsche gained popularity, and then the glory of a genius.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baboyan, D. (1973) Ticket to hell. Abbr. per. with rum. Moscow: International relations.

Badrak, V. (2005) An Anthology of Genius. Kyiv: Publishing house "KVIC".

Bezelyansky, Yu. N. (2005) Beautiful madmen. literary portraits. M.: JSC Publishing house "Rainbow".

Galant, I. B. (1926) Euro-endocrinology. (Endocrinology of Genius) // Clinical Archive of Genius and Giftedness (Europathology). Issue. 4. T. 2. S. 225-261.

Halevi, D. (1911) Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Per. from French A. N. Ilyinsky. SPb-M.: Ed. T-va M. O. Wolf.

Garin, I. I. (2000) Nietzsche. M.: "TERRA".

Garin, I. I. (1992) Resurrection of the spirit. M.: "TERRA".

Gomes, T. (2006) Friedrich Nietzsche. Per. from Spanish A. Prishchepova. M.: "AST"; "AST MOSCOW"; "Transit book".

Mann, T. (1961) The Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner. Dostoevsky - but in moderation. Philosophy of Nietzsche in the light of our experience. Sobr. op. in 10 vols. T. 10. M .: Goslitizdat.

Nordau, M. (1995) Degeneration. M.: "Republic".

Svasyan, K. A. (1990) Friedrich Nietzsche: Martyr of Knowledge // F. Nietzsche. Works in 2 volumes. T. 1. M .: "Thought". pp. 5-46.

Svasyan, K. A. (1990) Chronicle of Nietzsche's life // F. Nietzsche. Works in 2 volumes. T. 2. M .: "Thought". pp. 813-827.

Segalin, GV (1925) Pathogenesis and biogenesis of great and remarkable people // Clinical Archive of Genius and Giftedness (Europathology). Issue. 1. T. 1. S. 24-90.

Segalin, G. V. (1926) To the pathology of the childhood of great people // Clinical Archive of Genius and Giftedness (Europathology). Issue. 2. T. 2. S. 83-94.

Zweig, St. Casanova. (1990) Friedrich Nietzsche. Sigmund Freud. Moscow: Interpraks.

Shuvalov, A. V. (1992) Crazy facets of talent // Medical newspaper. No. 54 (10.07). S. 16.

Lange-Eichbaum, W., Kurth, W. (1967) Genie, Irrsinn und Ruhm. Genie-Mythus und Pathographie des Genies. 6. Aufl. Munich-Basel: Reinhardt.

Loewenberg, R. D. (1950) Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum and "The problem of genius" // Amer. J. Psychiatrist. V. 106. No. 12.

Reibmayr, Al. (1908) Die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Talentes und Genies. 2. B. München: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag.

Perhaps the world would never have seen the great philosopher if Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche had lived a happy and healthy life. Sadly, the philosopher wrote his main, fundamental works during periods of respite between acute attacks of a terrible illness. Eight months of periodic agony immortalized the name of Nietzsche. Although, the disease accompanied him throughout his life.

Nietzsche began his life as a mediocre and sickly child; even then, records of myopia, anisocoria, and rheumatism appeared in the hospital record. At the University of Basel, by the age of twenty-four, the young man received the position of professor of philology. Ten years later, due to illness, he left this post and set off on wanderings in Europe. Nietzsche never left the migraine. He counted the days of the headache, and he got no more, no less - a third of a year.

It is quite appropriate to talk about Nietzsche's bad heredity. The history of his family has data on mental disorders of one of the uncles and two aunts (one committed suicide). His father died before he was forty, and also suffered from disorders. Since 1889, the philosopher's condition has deteriorated much. In fits of megalomania, he writes letters to Kaiser Wilhelm, Chancellor Bismarck, the Italian king. His ideas are melancholic. Nietzsche signs as "Antichrist", "Beast" or "Crucified". In an extremely excited state, he sings, plays the piano and talks to himself. Its orientation in space is disturbed. He is sent to a psychiatric hospital in Basel.

Nietzsche did not consider himself mentally ill. He behaved freely with the doctors. But the disease was already clearly demonstrating itself: asymmetrical pupils, impaired reflexes. He was transferred to the Jena hospital, where he behaved restlessly and noisily, called himself the Kaiser, demanded that his fictitious pieces of music be performed, and smashed windows. During the sleepless nights he talked to himself. The philosopher is overcome by an influx of ideas. In addition, Nietzsche was found to have syphilis. Doctors could not understand how the disease had not been diagnosed earlier, because the philosopher often turned to doctors. Nietzsche's connections with women were generally questioned.

In March 1890, Friedrich Nietzsche was discharged from the clinic. His mother looked after him. The philosopher became apathetic and almost motionless. He lost his memory, did not recognize friends and acquaintances, native places. Nietzsche continues to talk to himself, remembers his school years, but, being brought to the old school, does not recognize her.

During the last eight months of madness, Nietzsche managed to write six treatises, including The Desire for Power, Nietzsche Against Wagner, and Essay Homo.

Nietzsche's life is a long death, which slowly killed not only the body, but also the human consciousness. The disease walked next to the philosopher throughout his life. Was it the cause of the crushing stream of thoughts and ideas that made Nietzsche a cult philosopher? Do we really admire the works of a madman? Perhaps genius and madness are really two sides of the same coin.

The unusual that outstanding talents create suggests a very fragile organization that allows them to experience rare feelings and hear heavenly voices. Such an organization, coming into conflict with the world and the elements, is easily vulnerable, and one who, like Voltaire, does not combine great sensitivity with outstanding endurance, is subject to prolonged morbidity.
J. W. Goethe - J. P. Eckerman:

... Nietzsche's genius was inseparable from illness, closely intertwined with it, and they developed together - his genius and his illness - and on the other hand, also by the fact that for a brilliant psychologist, anything can become the object of the most merciless research - only not your own genius.
T. Mann

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who made the broad generalization about the connection between his genius and disease, which gave his followers reason to consider genius as a disease. Nietzsche expressed this idea as follows: “Exceptional circumstances give birth to an artist, they are deeply related to painful phenomena and are associated with them; so it seems impossible to be an artist and not be sick.”

There is a section of Nietzsche studies, founded by Dr. P. Möbius, depicting the spiritual evolution of F. Nietzsche as a case history of a progressive paralytic. While agreeing that certain overtones of Nietzsche's texts are due to morbid states, I categorically reject the underlying allusions to the psychopathological underpinnings of his ideas. Euphoria - yes! Trembling, vibration, trembling, clearly distinguishable in the texts - yes! But not meaningful, "ontological", "epistemological" value! Even if genius is a disease, then a disease of clairvoyance, then an illness that awakens a dormant intuition, then a “phenomenon” of patriarchs, messengers and prophets! Yes, and the "seducer" himself associated genius with inspiration, inner trembling, ecstasy, challenge: "Not a single thing succeeds if enthusiasm does not take part in it."

Nietzsche never doubted his own genius, the sign of which he considered precisely this enthusiasm, this inner trembling, this exaltation, this morbid agitation. A genius, he believed, is a man whose ecstatic inspiration does not prevent him from remaining sober.

Ecstasy is necessary for a genius for revelations, but ecstasy should not take him into the world of dreams, beautiful-hearted fantasies, soft-hearted decisions. Exaltation, inspiration, visionary, obsession, pathos, creative passion - ways to comprehend the truth of life, life's tragedy.

From the mysteries of the Orphic teachings, Friedrich Nietzsche drew the idea: "the world is deeply mired in evil", but categorically rejected another: "The body is the grave of the soul." The cleansing of the soul from everything bad was deeply alien to him: cleansing from suffering, grief, death, life is stopped. The body is the mover of life, containing in itself the "will to power", an excess of strength.

Pain, suffering, F. Nietzsche believed, are the greatest creative forces. Fragment 318 of the "Merry Science" ("People endowed with a prophetic gift") says that this gift is derived from suffering, that "a feeling of pain becomes a prophet!"

"There is as much wisdom in pain as there is in pleasure: pain, like pleasure, is one of the most important forces aimed at preserving the family. If she did not fulfill this role, she would have disappeared from the face of the earth long ago; and the fact that she causes suffering, cannot be a convincing argument against it: such is its essence.

The great martyrs and tormentors of mankind, discovering new things in suffering, are the main force contributing to the preservation of the race and its development, “even if they achieve this only by not accepting any peace and comfort and do not hide their disgust for this kind of happiness” ( it's about myself).

Nietzsche turned his own suffering into an object of observation and analysis, into an instructive experiment on the sphere of the spirit. In 1880, he confessed to his doctor, Dr. Eiser:

“Existence has become a painful burden for me, and I would have put an end to it long ago if the ailment that torments me and the need to limit myself decisively in everything did not give me material for the most instructive experiments and observations on the sphere of our spirit and morality ... Constant debilitating suffering ; many hours of nausea, such as occur with seasickness; general relaxation, almost paralysis, when I feel that my tongue is being taken away from me, and, on top of all, the most severe seizures, accompanied by uncontrollable vomiting (the last time it lasted three days, without a minute relief. I thought I could not stand it. I wanted to die) ... How can I tell you about this hour-long torment, about this incessant headache, about the heaviness that presses on my brain and eyes, about how my whole body goes numb from head to toe!"

Among the many prophecies and forebodings of the philosopher Cassandra was an early sense of one's own chosenness, a rare and amazing gift to live in the great and sublime - in spite of all the baseness and vices of the surrounding life. "Who does not live in the sublime, as at home, he perceives the sublime as something terrible and false." It can be said that he was the only inhabitant of a country created by himself, surrounded by barbarians. Isn't this the source of this Pascal feeling of the abyss underfoot? - Ich bin immer am Abgrunge (I am always at the abyss (German)

The leitmotif of Nietzsche's life and work was Pindar's "become who you are" - do not hide, but demonstrate your own creative power, do not be afraid of slander and slander of the mob, be lonely, outcast - but remain yourself! And most importantly - do not measure your speeches with the expectations of "human sand".

"... It was precisely in this that all the unique specificity of Nietzsche's phenomenon was concentrated, the integrity and consistency of his character, loyalty to himself; here he went to the end, reached the end, sowing confusion around and covering his life path with endless breaks: first with philologists, then with Wagner, metaphysics, romance, pessimism, Christianity, the closest and dearest ... "

The unbridledness, clearly manifested in the latest creations of the Hermit of Sils-Maria, was originally inherent in Nietzsche: he always preferred coldness and rigor (correctness) to “flying on a broomstick”, the ability to surrender undividedly to the air current that carries up at the moment. Nietzsche did not care about "fruits" - only conception. Don Juan needed the knowledge of the "thousand and one" in order not to close himself in the shell of the first and last truth. “What is clarified ceases to exist” - such is another leitmotif of creativity and epistemology of the ascetic of infinite inexhaustible truth. Characterizing the work of "sick" geniuses, Nietzsche, in essence, characterized himself:

"These great poets - Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol - were what they should have been: people of the moment, enthusiastic, sensitive, childishly naive, frivolous and fragile in their suspicion and gullibility; forced to hide some a hole in one's soul; often by their writings seeking an opportunity to avenge the shame experienced; in their soaring, striving to free themselves from the reminders of too good a memory; trampling in the mud, almost in love with it ... often struggling with an eternal disgust for life, with the ghosts of disbelief constantly returning to them ... what a torment these great artists and these great people in general are for the one who once figured them out.
Suffering, pain were for Nietzsche a necessary condition for creativity, depth: "Suffering does not make a person better, it makes him deeper."

A special merit of works written in moments of unbearable suffering, he considered his own ability "of a suffering and suffering deprivation to speak as if he were not suffering and suffering deprivation."

Friedrich Nietzsche managed not only to stoically follow his own call of amor fati, but to turn suffering into a source of the highest spiritual activity. Zarathustra is a human reaction to fate, to pain, to endless suffering. Nietzsche was deeply imbued with the mystical idea that suffering is the most reliable way to comprehend the highest truths of being. Only by reaching the extreme point of exhaustion is the mystic able to find within himself the source of liberation and consolation. One of Nietzsche's discoveries: pain, suffering do not leave the ascetic the right to defeat. Even human weakness should be transformed into strength - the strength of the spirit.

The thinker admitted more than once that his whole philosophy is the fruit of the will to live, the will to power, that he ceased to be a pessimist precisely in the years of his "least vitality." In this context, one should understand what he said about this book: “In order to understand anything in my Zarathustra, it is necessary, perhaps, to be in the same conditions as I am, to stand with one foot on the other side of life.”

It is no exaggeration to say that Nietzsche's books were fashioned out of his suffering. His path to perfection ran through suffering. “Zarathustra” is literally fashioned out of pain: he wrote it in a state of acute illness and, worse, in a state of mental depression caused by a general misunderstanding of what came out from under his pen: “For many of my thoughts, I did not find anyone mature enough ; The example of Zarathustra shows that it is possible to speak with the greatest clarity and yet not be heard by anyone. All the more amazing is the masterpiece created in an atmosphere of suffering and general indifference. Lou Salome testifies:

“The motive for this inner loneliness to merge as completely as possible with the outer loneliness was to a large extent his physical suffering, which removed him from people and made even communication with a few close friends possible only with long breaks.”

Suffering and loneliness - these are the two main principles of life in the spiritual development of Nietzsche, and they affect more and more as the end approaches.

Just as Nietzsche's bodily suffering became the cause of external solitude, so in his mental suffering one must look for the source of his highly intensified individualism, his sharp emphasis on the word "separate" in the sense of "lonely." Nietzsche's understanding of the "separateness" of a person is fraught with a history of illness and cannot be compared with any general individualism: its content does not mean "satisfaction with oneself", but rather "enduring oneself." Following the painful ups and downs in his spiritual life, we read the history of so many self-violations, and a long, painful, heroic struggle lurks behind Nietzsche's courageous words: “This thinker does not need anyone to refute him; he satisfies himself in this respect!

Nietzsche wanted, especially in his last years, when he was most ill, that his illness should be understood in this sense, that is, as a story of recovery. This powerful nature managed to find healing and new strength in its ideal of cognition amidst suffering and struggle. But having achieved healing, she again needed suffering and struggle, fever and wounds. She, who herself has achieved her healing, again causes illness: she turns against herself, and, as it were, boils over in order to again fall into a diseased state.

With the infinite energy of his nature, Nietzsche fought his way through painful intervals to his former health. As long as he could still overcome pain and felt the strength in himself to work, suffering did not affect his tirelessness and self-consciousness. As early as May 12, 1878, he wrote in a cheerful and cheerful tone in a letter from Basel: “My health is precarious and inspires fear, but I just want to say: what do I care about my health.”

In order to achieve a powerful development of his self-consciousness, his spirit needed struggle, suffering, upheavals. His soul needed to be torn away from that peaceful state in which he naturally found himself, spending time in the parsonage of his parents - because his creative power depended on the excitement and ecstasy of his whole being. Here, for the first time in Nietzsche's life, the thirst for suffering, characteristic of the "decadent nature", is manifested.

Nietzsche developed an apology for suffering long before he fully experienced pain. Already during the period of work on The Birth of Tragedy, he wrote: “In suffering and tragedy, people created beauty, they must be immersed deeper in suffering and tragedy in order to keep a sense of beauty in people.” L. Shestov testifies:

"In Nietzsche, under every line of his writings, a tortured and tormented soul beats, which knows that there is not and cannot be mercy for it on earth."

No one can measure the depth of the inner torment of a person whose physical pain may have given way to spiritual suffering - the suffering of a genius experiencing age-old metaphysical, religious and moral truths. Pascal's abyss was transformed by Nietzsche into life on the edge of the abyss: "one has to be on the edge of death in order to understand that this is a serious matter."

I found in him a figurative feeling of such a state - a shepherd, to whom a snake crawled into his mouth: “The heaviest, blackest entered the soul ...”

Friedrich Nietzsche was destroyed not only by illness, but by constant creative tension, an ecstatic state of genius that causes fever, inner trembling, trembling, euphoria. Still - spiritual anguish, self-crucifixion, constant stay "at the limit" ...

Perhaps, even at the moment of his Arzamas horror, L. N. Tolstoy did not survive those sufferings caused by the sudden contemplation of his own sinfulness, which Nietzsche happened to experience from a constant collision with his own exacting spirit - his courage to always be against everyone, to search in the forbidden zones of the soul, to speak people about what they prefer to remain silent.

Overwhelmed by the complex of a prophet, messenger, orchid, Nietzsche painfully experienced his obscurity, unrecognizedness. Of course, he knew the price of his own books, which he could not find a publisher, which, for the most part, he had to publish at his own expense, he foresaw the tragic consequences of his thoughts, longed for fame, but silence surrounded him. In his own words, in Germany he was "taken for something strange and absurd, which there is no need to take seriously." Unsatisfied ambition also undermined him, pushed him to the frenzy of indefatigable self-praise, in which faith in genius was mixed with the bitterness of universal misunderstanding.

“It is amazing that this lonely “hunter of riddles”, who drank to the bottom the cup of non-recognition and was forced, despite extreme poverty, to print miserable editions of his own works at his own expense, never had to doubt at least once the aere perennius of each line he wrote.

Ecstasy and euphoria are only screens for Nietzsche's inner outsiderness and alarmism. As E. Trubetskoy wrote, deep sadness shines through Nietzsche's cheerfulness, which forms the basis of his mood. Rejecting the pessimism of A. Schopenhauer, he repeats: “Happiness in life is impossible; the highest that man can achieve is an existence filled with heroism. Heroism was the rejection of the generally accepted, heroism was the “no!” thrown to one’s own time, heroism was one’s own quixoticism and one’s own self-overcoming (“My strongest property is self-overcoming”). The heroism was the transformation of suffering into a driving force, a loud “no” - pain: “To suffer from reality is to be an unsuccessful reality yourself.”

“There is no way! .. The abyss gapes around!”.
You yourself wanted it!.. Not free of charge?
Come on, stranger! Here or nowhere!
You will die thinking about trouble.

Already in prose, he wrote: “Only great pain leads the spirit to the last freedom; only it allows us to reach the last depths of our being, and the one for whom it was almost fatal can proudly say about himself:“ I know more about life because so often he was on the verge of death.

D. Alevi testifies: “Nietzsche endures his illness as a test, as a spiritual exercise, and compares his fate with the fate of other people, great in misfortune, for example, with Leopardi. But Leopardi was not courageous; suffering, he cursed life. Nietzsche discovered a harsh truth for himself: a sick person has no right to be a pessimist.Christ experienced a moment of weakness on the cross: "My Father, why did you leave me!" he exclaimed. Nietzsche has no God, no father, no faith, no friends; he deliberately deprived himself of all support, but still did not bend under the weight of life. The most fleeting complaint would testify to defeat. He does not confess his sufferings; they cannot break his will. On the contrary, they educate her and fertilize his thoughts."

And here is the testimony of F. Nietzsche himself: “Straining our mind to fight suffering, we see things in a completely different light, and the inexpressible charm that accompanies each new illumination of the meaning of life is sometimes enough to overcome the temptation of suicide in our soul and find desire to live. The sufferer looks with contempt at the dim, pitiful well-being of a healthy person and with contempt treats his former hobbies, his near and dear illusions. In this contempt is all his pleasure. It supports him in the struggle with physical suffering and how it is for him in this struggle is necessary! His pride is indignant as never before; he joyfully defends life against such a tyrant as suffering, against all the tricks of physical pain that restore us against life. To defend life in the face of this tyrant is an incomparable temptation.

Nietzsche's heroic ideal is the combination of the greatest suffering with the highest hope. "The painful consciousness of his own imperfection drew him to this ideal and his tyranny over himself."

Friedrich Nietzsche is a unique phenomenon of the victory of the spirit over the flesh, an attempt to turn ill health itself into creative power. Based on the premise that philosophical pessimism is the result of an illness, he proved to himself the possibility of healing through faith - faith in health. He longed to be an optimist in order to become healthy, strong, indestructible.

"I myself took control of myself, I myself made myself healthy again: the condition for this - every physiologist will agree with this - is to be fundamentally healthy. A typically morbid being cannot become healthy, and still less can make himself healthy; for a typically healthy, on the contrary, illness can be an energetic stimulus to life, to the prolongation of life This is how this long period of illness actually appears to me now: I kind of rediscovered life, included myself in it, I found a taste in all good and even insignificant things, while others they cannot easily find a taste in them - I made my philosophy out of my will to health, to life ... Because - and this should be noted - I ceased to be a pessimist in the years of my least vitality: the instinct of self-restoration forbade me the philosophy of poverty and despondency ".

F. Nietzsche wrote to one of his correspondents: “It is always so hard for me to hear that you are suffering, that you lack something, that you have lost someone: after all, for me, suffering and deprivation are a necessary part of everything and do not constitute, as for you, superfluous and meaningless in the universe."

The great gift of the Basel professor, which distinguished him from other professors and allowed him to see many things that they could not and did not want to see, consisted in the ability to turn history, philosophy, morality into a personal destiny, into one's own pain: is the result of personal suffering.

"The upbringing of suffering, great suffering - don't you know that only this upbringing has up to now elevated man in everything?.. In man, the creature and the creator are united together: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos but in man there is also a creator, a sculptor, the hardness of a hammer, a divine spectator and the seventh day - do you understand this contradiction? And do you understand that your compassion refers to the "creature in man", to what must be molded, broken forged, torn, burned, tempered, cleansed, to that which suffers of necessity and must suffer? effeminacy and weakness?

Nietzsche was not a neurasthenic, however, apparently, he had a hereditary predisposition to neuropathology. Having inherited from his father a strong physique and a natural mind, he ran away from the specter of brain disease all his life. The father and his two sisters did suffer from migraines, but the cause of the death of Carl Ludwig Nietzsche remained unclear. Nietzsche's mother was distinguished by an increased tendency to fantasies and exaltations, but was considered mentally normal. But two of her sisters had obvious deviations: one went crazy, the other committed suicide. Psychopathological deviations were also observed in her brothers.

The first manifestations of migraine appeared in Friedrich Nietzsche in 1858. Headaches especially intensified in 1879 - 1880, sometimes causing semi-paralytic conditions, making it difficult to speak. In 1880, severe unbearable headaches did not let him go for a third of the year, but when the pain subsided, the workaholic prone to books with even greater fury pounced, again plunging himself into states of deep depression and irritability.

Of course, the disease left its mark on his work: abrupt mood swings, jumps from one extreme to another, risky passages, intoxication with unprecedented possibilities, one-sidedness, radicalism - all this is evidence of a weakening of the processes of inhibition, self-control. It is impossible not to take Nietzsche's illness into account when analyzing his work, which could well take on completely different (not necessarily better) forms in a healthy person. That is why the task of the researcher is to protect Nietzsche from his sick double, to protect his alter ego.

“He corrected his thoughts himself, but did not speak about it directly. At other moments he completely forgot about what had already been achieved and started all over again. rose again - completely open to other possibilities. He was always ready to instantly overturn the newly erected mental structure. "

One must be well prepared in order not to succumb to his temptations. Karl Jaspers, with good reason, urged, when reading the militantly aggressive texts of Friedrich Nietzsche, not to allow yourself to be stunned by the roar of weapons and military cries: “Look for those rare quiet words that are invariably, though not often, repeated - right up to the last year of his work. And you will find how Nietzsche renounces these very opposites - all without exception; how he makes his starting principle what he declared to be the essence of Jesus' "Good News": there are no more opposites.

F. Nietzsche himself warned about the danger of a literal understanding of his texts, and about the need to look for their own ways and interpretations. In the quatrain "Interpretation", placed in the "Merry Science", we read:

Interpreting myself, I do not understand myself,
the interpreter in me has long fallen silent.
But who walks his own path,
he brings my image to the clear light.

A clear evidence of the depressive states of the Hermit from Sils Maria was the frequent, almost rhythmic mood swings associated with the course of the disease. Suffering brought him to exhaustion, but sometimes it seems that he himself was looking for them, longing for pain and the fever in which his ideas were born. Masochism, the search for suffering - that's what feeds his creative spirit.

"With a proud exclamation:" What does not kill me, makes me stronger! he tortures himself - not to complete exhaustion, not to death, but just to the fevers and wounds that he needed. This search for suffering runs through the whole history of Nietzsche's development, forming the true source of his spiritual life. He best expressed it in in the following words: "The spirit is life, which itself inflicts wounds on life: and its own sufferings increase its understanding - did you already know this before? And the happiness of the spirit lies in being anointed and doomed to the slaughter - did you already know this ?.. You only know the sparks of the spirit, but you don’t see that it is at the same time an anvil, and you don’t see the ruthlessness of the hammer!”

Signs of a painful state of the psyche are the lack of a sense of proportion, a passion for exaggeration, an extreme degree of partiality of assessments. Sometimes he is completely ruthless in his judicial verdicts and extremely unfair, reminiscent of Tolstoy's partiality.

A philosopher should not take on the role of a judge at all. Nietzsche's verdicts testify to Tolstoy's callousness of judging, inherent in manic geniuses. Tolstoy and Nietzsche felt a deep inner need to "debunk" their idols, throw unfair and cruel accusations in their face, completely disregarding the generally accepted assessments and feelings of the "defendants".

Friedrich Nietzsche did not know the middle: the feeling of reverence was easily and without good reason transformed into heartless blasphemy, merciless and cold criticism. With a “blasphemous blow”, he repeatedly destroyed the image that he had recently prayed for (Kant, Wagner, Schopenhauer).

The analysis of Nietzsche's texts conducted by T. Ziegler revealed noticeable changes in style, the appearance of heavy periods and a change in the tone of controversy, starting with The Gay Science (1885), although obvious painful manifestations are already noticeable in the works of 1882-1884.
According to some reports, Nietzsche attempted suicide three times between September and October 1882. No, he wanted not so much to get rid of suffering, but to prevent madness, equal to death for him.

The result of the crisis was the decision to leave writing for ten years. Silence seemed to him necessary for the cure. Also - to test a new philosophy close to mysticism, the herald of which he dreamed of speaking at the end of the vow. However, he did not fulfill his decision: it was in the eighties that he wrote his main works, before falling silent forever due to the madness that really overtook him.

Tracing Nietzsche's trajectories in the decade leading up to madness is no easy task. In winter and autumn - Capri, Stresa, Genoa, Rapallo, Messina, Rome, Nice, Ruta, Turin, in summer - Sils Maria, Naumburg, Basel, Lucerne, Grunewald, Leipzig, boarding houses, attics, peasant houses, the cheapest taverns, trattorie , shabbily furnished cold rooms…

"... Rare lonely walks that saved terrible remedies from insomnia - chloral, veronal and, possibly, Indian hemp; constant headaches; frequent stomach cramps and vomiting spasms - this painful existence of one of the greatest minds of mankind lasted 10 years."

To this should be added - a beggarly existence, forcing him to be content with the cheapest rooms and the cheapest food, which also could not but affect his health. But the finances were often not enough for this ...

"And here he is again in a small, cramped, uncomfortable, sparsely furnished chambre garnie; the table is littered with countless sheets, notes, manuscripts and proofs, but there are no flowers or decorations on it, there are almost no books, and only occasionally come across letters. in the corner a heavy, clumsy chest containing all his belongings - two changes of linen and a second, worn suit.And then - only books and manuscripts, and on a separate table, countless bottles and flasks with potions and powders: against headaches, which for whole hours deprive his ability to think, against stomach cramps, against emetic spasms, against lethargy of the intestines ... A formidable arsenal of poisons and drugs - his saviors in this deserted silence of a strange house, where his only rest is in a brief, artificially induced dream. (the stove smokes and does not heat), with numb fingers, almost pressing his double glasses to the paper, with a hurried hand for hours he writes words, which then his weak voice can hardly decipher. rhenium. So he sits and writes for hours on end, until his inflamed eyes refuse to serve: a happy occasion rarely falls when an unexpected helper appears and, armed with a pen, offers him a compassionate hand for an hour or two.
And this chambre garnie is always the same. The names of the cities change - Sorrento, Turin, Venice, Nice, Marienbad - but the chambre garnie remains, foreign, rented, with meager, tedious, cold furnishings, a desk, a sick bed, and with boundless loneliness. And for all these long years of wandering, not a minute of invigorating rest in a cheerful friendly circle, and at night not a minute of closeness to a naked and warm female body, not a glimpse of glory as a reward for thousands of drunken silence, hopeless nights of work.

From now on, Nietzsche's health was in a state of extremely precarious balance: every thought, every page excited him, threatened him with the danger of a breakdown. What he treasured most now were the few good days, the vacations his illness had afforded him. He perceived each such day as a gift, as salvation. Already in the morning he wondered what the new sun would bring him.

In the last works of Nietzsche, the cult of spirituality was replaced by the cult of energy, will, and instinct. Late Nietzsche, according to A. Riehl, falls into the baroque: the ornament obscures thought. Nietzsche elevates the morbid state to the category of the fullness of life and creativity. The disease progresses, but he, in a state of euphoria, feels convalescent, intoxicated with recovery.

It is in this state that Zarathustra was written. According to one of the critics, the author of this poem is not Nietzsche, but chloral hydrate, which excited the poet's nervous system and deformed his vision of life. The pathological features of the work are the absence of restraining centers, over-exaltation, spiritual orgasm, obvious signs of painful megalomania, an abundance of meaningless exclamations, etc.

He called the great malice the oppressive silence that surrounded the prophet, the silence ringing with loneliness, irresistible, terrible in its isolation: “Loneliness has seven skins; nothing gets through them. You come to people, you greet your friends: a new desert, not a single glance greets you. At best, this is a kind of indignation at you. Such indignation, but to a very different degree, was experienced by me and from almost everyone who stood close to me ... ”Everything great really opposes its bearers to contemporaries, isolates, dooms to suffering. Having completed Zarathustra, Nietzsche not only suffered - he overstrained himself, wilted, fell seriously ill. The defensive forces were finally broken, the spirit itself was weakened.

To this it should be added that the publication of Zarathustra was not without incidents that had become habitual: the publisher was in no hurry, postponing the circulation month after month and giving preference either to Sunday school hymns or to some pamphlets. To the aching loneliness of Friedrich Nietzsche was added a bitter feeling of despair, uselessness, rejection.

Mental pathology intensified after 1885, when F. Nietzsche lost friends one by one, he himself breaks ties, not enduring the slightest sign of contradiction. Depressions become more and more deep, their duration increases. In 1887, signs of progressive paralysis appear: movements become difficult, speech becomes heavy, with frequent stammering. Nevertheless, this almost does not affect his creative productivity: in two years (1887-1888) - a dozen works. The pathological characterization given at that time to R. Wagner turns out to be an exact copy of the diagnosis of Nietzsche himself.

In "Twilight of the Idols" we find clear signs of the author's own delusion. The events of his own life are presented here in a hyperbolically boastful tone. The megalomania shows itself in an autobiography written on April 10, 1888 - at the request of Georg Brandes, the man who became the discoverer of Nietzsche. Brandes was shocked that no one in Scandinavia knows such a great thinker and decided to prepare a course of lectures on his philosophy for the University of Copenhagen. In this regard, he asked Nietzsche to send him an autobiography and the last photograph, because, being a physiognomist, he wanted to look through the eyes into the inner world of a stranger.

In December 1889, the irreparable happened: for two days Nietzsche lay motionless and speechless, then there were obvious signs of a mental disorder: he sang, shouted, talked to himself, wrote meaningless phrases...

The official medical diagnosis determined the illness of the great thinker as progressive paralysis, which is unlikely, because after the Turin catastrophe, Nietzsche lived another eleven years and died of pneumonia.

Nevertheless, the prominent Leipzig neuropathologist P. Yu. Möbius insisted on such a diagnosis, finding traces of mental disorder in the texts of the philosopher, written long before the Turin disaster. The diagnosis of “paralytic euphoria” made by Möbius had a negative impact on many researchers of Nietzsche’s work, who explained his non-conforist views with a mental disorder.

Nietzsche's madness was often - especially by Russian authors - interpreted as retribution for blasphemy, for the "death of God", for the "Antichrist": "... In this struggle, the hero dies. His mind is troubled - the curtain falls. Of course, Nietzsche's nihilistic ecstasies affected his health, perhaps even hastening the tragic denouement. But it was not a "retribution" - the disease progressed, the brain was affected long before the "blasphemy" and only time (and not books) determined the tragedy.

I do not believe in Nietzsche's anguish connected with the opposition to the world, in the fact that he paid with madness for the rebelliousness of the inquiring thought. The disease developed in him on its own and, quite possibly, with creative explosions of gigantic power, he only postponed his end. It was not duality that clouded his spirit and deadened his mind, not the loss of the ability to defend himself from himself, but the purely physiological process of destruction by illness.

Nietzsche's life is not only a series of creative ups and downs, but also successive breaks - with idols, friends, people. The disease destroyed the poet's brain from the inside, non-recognition, vulnerability, outsiderness - from the outside. Heaven and earth took up arms against the great man in an effort to destroy him, although a gust of damp wind, one stinging word was enough ... Is it any wonder at the mental breakdown of a person who “suddenly becomes furious and beats the dishes, overturning the set table, screaming, berserk, and, finally , stepping aside, ashamed and angry at himself, "- this is how Nietzsche himself in allegorical form described his state at the time of writing The Wagner Case.

Nietzsche felt his megalomania as the hour of triumph. In a letter to A. Strindberg, he wrote: "I am strong enough to split the history of mankind into two parts." But - with his usual skepticism - he doubted whether the world would ever recognize his brilliant prophecies, his reassessment of all values.

Obsessed with the pathos of "overthrowing" idols, Nietzsche overthrew the bearers of "modern ideas", lining up a number of contemporaries - Mill, Renan, Sainte-Beuve, George Eliot, George Sand, the Goncourt brothers, Carlyle, Darwin ... Although Nietzsche's biting characteristics are not always fair, sometimes painful , perhaps explainable by illness, the train of thought is quite understandable: behind the masks of modernity, they all somehow hide the Jesuit inside, cowardice and indecision, pseudo-objectivity, vindictiveness, internal depravity ...

Nietzsche's letters from Turin are saturated with euphoria, but tragedy is already visible through the joyful excitement - the Hyperborean himself uses this word several times. The mortally wounded saint, with his characteristic insight, anticipates two events - the approach of the much-desired glory and the clouding of consciousness. It is in this state of tragic expectation that he works on his latest creation, Esse Nomo. This is evidenced by the title of the book, a clear reminiscence of the theme of Christ, and its shocking content, and summing up, and the titles themselves: “Why am I so wise?”, “Why do I write such good books?”, “Why am I a rock? ”, “Glory and eternity”.

Nietzsche, who considered himself a fate, experienced all his life the tragedy of human fate, the last mockery of which made itself felt on the verge of madness. Fate, which never spared the ambition of this great man, did not allow him to enjoy fame: madness struck the Hyperborean just when this anemone stood on the threshold ... Georg Brandes was already about to publish his lectures on Nietzsche's work, August Strindberg sent him a warm letter ("on the first since I received a world and historical response,” he wrote to P. Gast), in Paris, Hippolyte Taine found him an editor and publisher of Bourdo, in St. Petersburg they were going to translate a book about Wagner, one of his old friends gave him 2,000 francs from an unknown admirer who wished to sign for the publication of his books. For the same purpose, one of Nietzsche's old friends sent a thousand francs to Nietzsche ... We can say that recognition came to Nietzsche on the verge of madness, perhaps pushed him to it.

Obvious signs of insanity appeared at the end of 1888. He began to see nightmares emanating from the military power of the German Empire. In his last books, he challenged the Hohenzollern dynasty, Bismarck, German chauvinists and anti-Semites, the church ...
On January 6, J. Burckhardt received a letter from Nietzsche, from which it is clear that the former colleague went crazy: “I am Ferdinand Lesseps, I am Prado, I am Chambige, I was buried twice during the autumn ...” (Names of people, at that time not descended from the pages of the tabloid press.)
By the end of his life, the great thinker turned into a helpless child... This is how K. Bernoulli described the visits of Nietzsche's mother with her sick son to friends:

"When Madame Nietzsche visited the Gelzers, she used to come along with her son, who followed her like a child. To avoid disturbance, she led him into the living room and seated him near the door. Then she went up to the piano and took a few chords, which is why, having plucked up courage, he slowly approached the instrument himself and began to play, at first standing, and then on a chair where his mother sat him in. Thus he "improvised" for hours, while Madame Nietzsche could leave her son in the next room unsupervised and be calm for him for exactly as long as the piano playing continued.

A. Bely testifies: “The last years of his life, Nietzsche was quietly silent. Music brought a smile to his exhausted lips ... Nietzsche, the inventor of explosives, sat for fifteen years on the balcony of a quiet villa, with a torn brain. And now passers-by are shown that place on the balcony, where the mad Nietzsche sat for hours."

Where did he go? Who will say?
One thing is clear: he found death.
The star went out in the desert area:
deserted area...

At the end of August 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche fell ill with pneumonia. He died quietly at noon on August 26 of the last year of the century. The philosopher and poet who heralded the new ways of the human spirit, a man of tragic fate, whose creative heritage has become the subject of many falsifications, has left. Cornered in life, he was perverted and slandered in death. Fate turned out to be merciless not only to him, but also to his work.

An excerpt from I. Garin's book "Unrecognized Geniuses"

Reviews

Review by Eduard Igoryu.

Hello IGOR. I read about NIETZSCHE and I am very glad that I did it.
As you already know, I quite sincerely regard myself, at best, as an average person, of whom the majority are naturally.

I cannot boast that I have read all the works of Nietzsche, but naturally I have heard and know very well about his existence, as befits those to whom I rank myself.

Why am I glad to read, and why do I have the right to believe YOU?
If I just took any author and read his thoughts about someone known to many, but personally not known to me deeply, but only heard, then I would not have the right, reading this author, and take his personal attitude for myself (HIS) as his own.
Well, something like that, I haven’t read it, I haven’t seen it, but I completely AGREE with everything that the party said.

But now, knowing YOU, it is your views on life, I have the right to trust YOU, and even after reading the reviews of others about this work of yours, I did not get enough doubt NOT to trust YOU.

What happens, exactly about this work of yours?
You definitely didn't waste your time.
You have made it possible for people like me, and their "dark darkness", to find out what they may never know.
The only "BUT" in this whole story, any reader must decide IN ADVANCE how great his personal trust is in YOU, as a person with certain OUTLOOKS on life.

I know and agree with YOUR views, they coincide with mine. So what prevents me from believing YOU and getting into my BAGGAGE ready-made knowledge about NIETSCHE, which I am unlikely to study myself so thoroughly.

Here is some explanation of why I am writing THANK YOU, and very grateful to YOU.
By the way, it is possible that what you read may intrigue and even encourage you to read NIETZSCHE himself. And this is another positive factor for writing such a work.

Edward, thank you for your trust, but I adhere to the stupid thesis "trust, but verify." When at a young age I started working in special stores, I quickly realized what a huge amount of shit teachers and ideologists feed us. Actually, everything I write about has only one goal: to remove tons of "noodles" from the ears of my readers, who are turned into blockheads by diabolical propaganda from early childhood to old age. This does not mean that I am "objective" (for me this is a dirty word) - it means that I write, having studied hundreds and thousands of sources of the smartest authors and state MY opinion on the problem based on gigantic information. The worst thing for me is to be a redneck, zombified by a "box". Alas, occasionally looking at publications on Russian websites, I am horrified at what the "intellectual majority" can be turned into...

Eduard's answer to Igor.

It's not just that I decided to trust IGOR.
I also check it, but not with scientific works, but with the view that I PERSONALLY HAVE.
Well, as for NIETZSCHE, I think you can BELIEVE indiscriminately (this is in my opinion), this does not affect my CONVINCES in any way.

ZOMBING is to impose VIEWS, and it is to impose, and not EXPLAIN for your personal CONCLUSION.
Personally, I do not even want someone to take my views without thinking.

Personally, I do not have a very good mechanical memory since childhood, so everything that requires a CONCLUSION, I remember easily, for example, geometry, but I simply cannot memorize it at all.

Everything that is LOGICAL - there are no problems, I will remember for the rest of my life IMMEDIATELY.
Once I saw how a man cut a tomato obliquely, but in HALF, and the whole stalk remained on one half of the tomato, never again cut ITSELF in the middle of the stalk - it’s STUPID to cut like that, a whole extra action, so I don’t cut it.
And the one from whom I spied it cuts IN THE MIDDLE, it turns out that he accidentally cut like that and forgot everything. I was amazed when he cut in the old way, and when I told him, he did not even understand what I was talking about.

The daily audience of the Proza.ru portal is about 100 thousand visitors, who in total view more than half a million pages according to the traffic counter, which is located to the right of this text. Each column contains two numbers: the number of views and the number of visitors.

Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849, American writer and poet

Diagnosis."Mental disorder", the exact diagnosis is not established.

Symptoms. Fear of the dark, memory lapses, persecution mania, inappropriate behavior, hallucinations.

In Julio Cortazar's article "The Life of Edgar Allan Poe" there is a heart-rending description of one of the writer's bouts of illness: Mary Devereaux, the same girl whose uncle Edgar had once whipped. Mary was married, and Edgar had an absurd desire to find out if she loved her husband. He had to cross the river several times back and forth on the ferry, asking everyone he met for Mary's address. But he still got to her house and staged an ugly scene there. Then he stayed to drink tea (it is easy to imagine the faces of Mary and her sister, who, against their will, had to endure him, since he entered the house in their absence). At last the visitor departed, but first he chopped up some radishes with a knife and demanded that Mary sing his favorite song. Only a few days later, knocked down, Mrs. Klemm managed, with the help of sympathetic neighbors, to find Edgar, who wandered in the surrounding forests in complete confusion of mind.

Disease history: From the late 1830s, Poe suffered from frequent depressions. In addition, he abused alcohol, which affected his psyche not in the best way: under the influence of the drunk, the writer sometimes fell into a state of violent insanity. Opium was soon added to the alcohol.

The serious illness of his young wife significantly worsened Poe's state of mind (he married his cousin Virginia at the age of thirteen; after seven years of marriage, in 1842, she fell ill with tuberculosis, and died five years later).

After the death of Virginia - for the remaining two years of his own life - Poe fell in love several more times and made two attempts to marry. The first failed due to the refusal of the chosen one, frightened by his next "breakdown", the second - due to the absence of the groom: shortly before the wedding, Poe got drunk and fell into an insane state. He was found in a cheap Baltimore pub five days later (the man who called the doctor to him described Poe as "a gentleman, very badly dressed"). The writer was placed in a clinic, where he died five days later, suffering from terrible hallucinations. One of Poe's main nightmares - death alone - despite all his "precautions", came true: many of whom he took a promise "to be with him at the last hour", but at three o'clock in the morning on October 7, 1849, none of his relatives did not have. Before his death, Poe desperately called for Jeremy Reynolds, an explorer of the North Pole.

How did he infect us? Two of the most popular modern literary genres.

The first is a horror novel (or short story). Hoffmann had a great influence on Edgar Allan Poe, but Poe's Hoffmannian gloomy romanticism for the first time condensed to the consistency of a genuine nightmare - viscous, hopeless and very sophisticated ("The Accusatory Heart", "The Fall of the House of Escher").

The second genre is detective. It was Monsieur Auguste Dupin, the hero of Edgar Poe's stories (Murder on the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roger), who became the forerunner of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes with his deductive method.

Patient 2

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche 1844-1900, German philosopher

Diagnosis. Nuclear "mosaic" schizophrenia (a more literary version, designated in most biographies - obsession), possibly against the background of syphilis.

Symptoms. Delusions of grandeur (he sent out notes with the text: “In two months I will become the first person on earth”, demanded to remove paintings from the walls, because his apartment is a “temple”); clouding of mind (hugging with a horse in the central city square, interfering with traffic); severe headaches; inappropriate behaviour. In Nietzsche's medical record, in particular, it was said that the patient drank his urine from his boot, emitted inarticulate cries, mistook the hospital watchman for Bismarck, tried to barricade the door with fragments of a broken glass, slept on the floor by the bed, jumped like a goat, grimaced and stuck out his left shoulder.

Disease history. Nietzsche suffered several apoplexy; suffered from a mental disorder for the last 20 years of his life (it was during this period that his most significant works appeared - for example, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"), 11 of them he spent in psychiatric clinics, his mother took care of him at home. His condition was constantly deteriorating - at the end of his life, the philosopher could only compose simple phrases, for example: "I'm dead because I'm stupid" or "I'm stupid because I'm dead."

How did he infect us? The idea of ​​a superman (paradoxically, it is this man who jumped like a goat and stuck out his left shoulder that we associate with a free, overmoral, perfect person existing on the other side of good and evil).

The idea of ​​a new morality(“master morality” instead of “slave morality”): a healthy morality should glorify and strengthen the natural human desire for power. Any other morality is sickly and decadent.

The ideology of fascism: the sick and weak must perish, the strongest must win (“Push the falling one!”).

Assumption: "God is dead."

Patient 3

Ernest Miller Hemingway 1899-1961, American writer

Diagnosis. Acute depression, mental disorder.

Symptoms. Suicidal tendencies, persecution mania, nervous breakdowns.

Case History In 1960, Hemingway returned from Cuba to the United States. He was tormented by frequent depressions, a feeling of fear and insecurity, he practically could not write - and therefore voluntarily agreed to undergo treatment in a psychiatric clinic. Hemingway underwent 20 electroshock sessions, he said about these procedures: “The doctors who gave me electric shock don’t understand writers ... What was the point in destroying my brain and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and throwing me on edge of life? It was a brilliant treatment, only they lost a patient.” Upon leaving the clinic, Hemingway was convinced that he still could not write, and made his first suicide attempt, but his relatives managed to stop him. At the request of his wife, he underwent a second course of treatment, but did not change his intentions. A few days after being discharged, he shot himself in the head with his favorite double-barreled shotgun, having previously loaded both barrels.

How did he infect us? Disease of the Lost Generation. Hemingway, like his fellow Remarque, had in mind a specific generation, ground by the millstones of a specific war, but the term turned out to be too seductive and convenient - since then, every generation has found reasons to consider itself lost.

A new literary device, the "iceberg method", when a mean, concise, colorless text implies a generous, heartbreaking subtext.

"Machismo" of a new type, embodied both in creativity and in life. Hemingway's hero is a stern and taciturn fighter who understands that the struggle is useless, but fights to the end. The most uncompromising Hemingway macho was perhaps the fisherman Santiago (“The Old Man and the Sea”), into whose mouth the Great Ham put the phrase: “Man is not created to suffer defeat. Man can be destroyed, but he cannot be defeated." Hemingway himself - a hunter, soldier, athlete, sailor, fisherman, traveler, Nobel laureate, whose body was completely covered with scars - to the great disappointment of many, did not fight “to the end”. However, the writer did not change his ideals. “A man has no right to die in bed,” he used to say. “Either in battle, or a bullet in the forehead.”

Patient 4

John Forbes Nash b. in 1928 American mathematician, Nobel laureate. The general public is known for the film Ron Howard's "A Beautiful Mind"

Diagnosis. paranoid schizophrenia.

Symptoms. Mania of persecution, obsessions, delusions, difficulties in self-identification, conversations with non-existent interlocutors.

Disease history. In 1958, Fortune magazine named Nash America's Rising Star in "New Mathematics". In the same year, he showed the first symptoms of the disease. In 1959, Nash was fired from his job and placed in a psychiatric clinic in the suburbs of Boston (McLean Hospital) for compulsory treatment. After a course of chemotherapy, his condition improved somewhat, he was discharged from the hospital and, together with his wife Alicia Lard, went to Europe, where he tried to settle in the status of a "political refugee". Nash was denied political asylum, after some time he was deported from France to the United States. The family settled in Princeton. John Nash didn't work; his illness progressed rapidly.

In 1961, he was admitted to Trenton State Hospital in New Jersey, where he underwent insulin therapy. However, after being discharged, Nash again fled to Europe, leaving his wife and child (in 1962, Alicia filed for a divorce, but continued to help her ex-husband).

Upon his return to the United States, Nash began taking antipsychotics regularly, and his condition improved so much that his colleagues got him a job at Princeton University. However, after a while he refused treatment, fearing that the drugs could damage his mental abilities and scientific work - another exacerbation happened.

For many years, Nash paid visits to Princeton, writing down incomprehensible formulas on the boards and talking with “voices” ... Students and professors had already become accustomed to him, as to a harmless ghost, when in the mid-80s Nash, to everyone's surprise, came to his senses and took up mathematics again.

In 1994, 66-year-old John Nash (together with Reinhard Selten and John Harsani) received the Nobel Prize in Economics "for his analysis of equilibrium in the theory of non-cooperative games."

In 2001, Nash remarried to Alicia Lard.

How did he infect us? With a new scientific approach to game economics and the so-called mathematics of competition: Nash abandoned the standard "winner-loser" scenario and constructed a mathematical model in which both competing parties only lose from the continuation of the rivalry. This scenario has received the conditional name "Nash equilibrium": the players remain in equilibrium, because any change can worsen their position. Nash's research in the field of game theory was actively used by the Americans during the Cold War.

Patient 5

Jonathan Swift 1667-1745 Irish writer

Diagnosis. Pick's disease or Alzheimer's disease - experts argue.

Symptoms. Dizziness, disorientation in space, memory loss, inability to recognize people and surrounding objects, to capture the meaning of human speech.

Disease history. Gradual increase in symptoms up to complete dementia at the end of life.

How did he infect us? A new form of political satire. Gulliver's Travels is certainly not the first sarcastic look of an enlightened intellectual on the surrounding reality, however, the innovation here is not in the look, but in the optics. While other scoffers looked at life through a magnifying glass or telescope, the Dean of St. Patrick made a lens with a very curved glass for this. Subsequently, Nikolai Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin used this lens with pleasure.

Patient 6

Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1778 French writer and philosopher

Diagnosis. Paranoia.

Symptoms. Persecution mania.

Disease history. As a result of the writer's conflict with the church and the government (early 1760s, after the publication of the book "Emil, or On Education"), the suspicion inherent in Rousseau acquired extremely painful forms. Conspiracies seemed to him everywhere, he led the life of a wanderer and did not stay anywhere for a long time, believing that all his friends and acquaintances were plotting against him or suspecting him of something (for example, Rousseau once decided that the inhabitants of the castle in which he was staying, believe his poisoner of the deceased servant, and demanded an autopsy of the deceased).

How did he infect us? pedagogical reform. Modern manuals for raising children repeat "Emil ..." on many points: 1) instead of the "repressive" method of raising children, Rousseau proposed a method of encouragement and affection; 2) he believed that the child should be freed from the mechanical hardening of dry facts, and everything should be explained using living examples, and only when the child is mentally ready to perceive new information; 3) Rousseau considered the task of pedagogy to be the development of talents inherent in nature, and not the correction of personality; 4) punishment, according to Rousseau, should be a natural consequence of the behavior of the child, and not a manifestation of the power of the strong over the weak; 5) Rousseau advised mothers to feed their children on their own, and not to trust their nurses (today's pediatrics believes that only mother's milk has a positive effect on the health of the child); 6) Rousseau even spoke out against swaddling, which restricts the baby's freedom of movement.

A new type of literary hero and new literary trends. The beautiful-hearted creature born of Rousseau's fantasy - a tearful "savage", guided not by reason, but by feeling (however, a feeling of high morality) - further developed, grew and aged within the framework of sentimentalism and romanticism.

The idea of ​​a legal democratic state(directly following from the work "On the Social Contract").

revolution(It was the Social Contract that inspired the fighters for the ideals of the Great French Revolution; Rousseau himself, paradoxically, was never a supporter of such radical measures).

Patient 7

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol 1809-1852 Russian writer

Diagnosis. Schizophrenia, periodic psychosis.

Symptoms. Visual and auditory hallucinations; periods of apathy and lethargy (up to complete immobility and inability to respond to external stimuli), followed by bouts of excitement; depressive states; hypochondria in an acute form (the great writer was convinced that all the organs in his body were somewhat displaced, and the stomach was located “upside down”); claustrophobia.

Disease history. These or other manifestations of schizophrenia accompanied Gogol throughout his life, but in the last year the disease progressed noticeably. On January 26, 1852, the sister of his close friend (Ekaterina Mikhailovna Khomyakova) died of typhoid fever, and this death caused the writer to have a severe attack of hypochondria (“Fear of death came over me,” he complained). Gogol plunged into unceasing prayers, practically refused food, complained of weakness and malaise, and claimed that he was mortally ill, although the doctors did not diagnose him with any illness, except for a slight gastrointestinal disorder. On the night of February 11-12, the writer burned his manuscripts (the next morning he explained this act by the machinations of the evil one), then his condition constantly worsened. Treatment (not very professional, however: leeches in the nostrils, wrapping in cold sheets and dipping the head in ice water) did not give positive results. February 21, 1852 the writer died. The true causes of his death remained unclear, there are various hypotheses - from mercury poisoning to the fulfillment of contractual obligations in relation to the enemy of the human race. However, most likely, Gogol simply brought himself to complete nervous and physical exhaustion - it is possible that the timely help of a psychiatrist could save his life.

How did he infect us? Specific love for a little man(to the layman) consisting half of disgust and half of pity.

A whole bunch of surprisingly accurately found Russian characters. Gogol developed several "role models" (the most striking are the Bashmachkin and Chichikov models), which are still quite relevant today.

Patient 8

Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893 French writer

Diagnosis. Progressive paralysis of the brain.

Symptoms. Hypochondria, suicidal tendencies, violent fits, delusions, hallucinations.

Disease history. All his life Guy de Maupassant suffered from hypochondria: he was very afraid of going crazy. Since 1884, Maupassant began to have frequent nervous attacks and hallucinations. In a state of extreme nervous excitement, he twice tried to commit suicide (once with a revolver, the second with a paper cutter, both times unsuccessfully). In 1891, the writer was placed in the clinic of Dr. Blanche in Passy - where he lived, in a semi-conscious state, until his death.

How did he infect us? Physiologism and naturalism (including erotic) in literature.

The need to tirelessly fight against the soulless consumer society(The living French writers Michel Houellebecq and Frederic Beigbeder are diligently recreating original clones of "Dear Friend", our Sergey Minaev is also trying to keep up).

Patient 9

Vincent Willem van Gogh 1853-1890 Dutch painter

Diagnosis. Schizophrenia.

Symptoms. Visual and auditory hallucinations, delirium, bouts of gloom and aggression, followed by unmotivated joyful excitement, suicidal tendencies.

Disease history. In the last three years of his life, the artist's illness progressed greatly, her attacks became more frequent. During one of these attacks, the artist performed the famous surgical operation: he cut off his left earlobe and the lower part of the ear (he packed the cut fragment in an envelope and sent it to his beloved as a keepsake). Van Gogh was placed in a hospital for the mentally ill in Arles, then in Saint-Remy and in Auvers-sur-Oise. The artist was aware of his illness (“I must adapt without evasions to the role of a lunatic,” says one of his letters). Until his death, he continued to work, despite the complete lack of interest in his works on the part of buyers, led a beggarly lifestyle, starved (according to some evidence, he sometimes ate his paints while working). It was during the period of "clouding" that the paintings "Night Cafe", "Red Vineyards in Arles", "Road with Cypresses and Stars", "Landscape at Auvers after the Rain" were created ... On July 27, 1890, Van Gogh mortally wounded himself with a pistol shot.

How did he infect us? Animation. Van Gogh's creative style (bright colors, dynamic plots, grotesquely distorted reality, the atmosphere of a nightmare or, on the contrary, a happy childhood dream) formed the basis of many works by contemporary animators.

Understanding that the artistic value of any work is a very relative thing: a beggar madman, painting crooked sunflowers and sipping absinthe, posthumously became the champion of auction sales.

Patient 10

Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin 1895-1925, Russian poet

Diagnosis. Manic-depressive psychosis (MDP).

Symptoms. Persecution mania, sudden outbursts of rage, inappropriate behavior (the poet publicly destroyed furniture, broke mirrors and dishes, shouted insults).

Anatoly Mariengof described several cases of Yesenin's stupefaction not without gusto in his memoirs. Here is one of them: “In my room, on the wall, there is a Ukrainian carpet with large red and yellow flowers. Yesenin looked at them. The seconds crawled ominously, and Yesenin's pupils spread even more ominously, devouring the iris. Narrow rings of proteins filled with blood. And the black holes of the pupils - a terrible, naked madness. Yesenin got up from his chair, crumpled up a napkin and, handing it to me, croaked in my ear:

- Wipe their noses!

- Seryozha, this is a carpet ... a carpet ... and these are flowers ...

Black holes sparkled with hatred:

- Ah! .. You are cowardly! ..

He grabbed an empty bottle and gritted his jaws:

“I’ll smash… into blood… noses… into blood… I’ll smash…”

I took a napkin and began to run it over the carpet - wiping red and yellow faces, blowing my crazy noses. Yesenin wheezed. My heart is cold…”

("A novel without lies").

Disease history. Due to the frequently repeated attacks of MDP, provoked, as a rule, by excessive drinking, Yesenin was treated several times in neuropsychiatric clinics - in France and in Russia. The treatment, unfortunately, did not have a beneficial effect on the patient: a month after being discharged from Professor Gannushkin’s clinic, Yesenin committed suicide by hanging himself on a steam heating pipe in the Angleterre Hotel in Leningrad (in the 1970s, there was also a version of the poet’s murder, followed by staged suicide; this version has not been proven).

How did he infect us? New intonations. Yesenin made hysterical, with tears and sobs, love for the countryside and the village dweller a stylistic norm (his direct followers, not in the stylistic, but in the ideological sense, are “villagers”).

Yesenin, who worked a lot in the genre of urban hooligan romance, in fact, set the canon of modern Russian chanson.

Illustrations: Maria Sosnina