The private lives and personal habits of the great Russian writers

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From The Literary Hub:

The private lives and personal habits of the great Russian writers are fascinating to me. They are held up as these great geniuses with their lofty thoughts and doorstop novels. But it turns out they are just like us. Tolstoy had to eat boiled pears to ease his digestive troubles. Bulgakov was obsessed with having enough pairs of socks. And Chekhov made his own creosote vapor inhalations.

. . . .

Anna Akhmatova, impeccably dressed thrower of shade

Russia’s great poet of the 20th century Anna Akhmatova endured unimaginable personal hardship to survive the Stalin era and continue writing. This culminated in the masterpiece “Requiem,” a cycle of poems dedicated to the women who spent their lives waiting in line outside prisons and camps waiting for news of their loved ones. Akhmatova had very little money (as she was not allowed to work officially as a writer) and was constantly under surveillance. Despite this, she conducted herself sartorially like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, wearing pre-revolutionary embroidered black silk dressing gowns to poetry readings in the late 1930s. (The critic Vitaly Vilenkin noted: “The silk was in places quite threadbare.”)

Despite a life that would depress the most optimistic of people, Akhmatova also had a knack for cultivating close friendships with people with an excellent sense of humor. When she and her friend Nadezhda Mandelstam were living in semi-exile in Tashkent, they realized the NKVD had “visited” their apartment while they were out. A lipstick had been left out on a table, next to a mirror moved from another room. Nadezhda Mandelstam sniffed in her diary that she and Akhmatova knew the lipstick couldn’t be theirs because it was “of a revoltingly loud shade.”

. . . .

Ivan Turgenev, everybody’s favorite wacky uncle

The author of Fathers and Sons and A Month in the Country was easily the most colorful and hedonistic figure in Russian literary history. He had a longtime mistress who was an opera singer he followed around Europe. He was grumpy, volatile, and camp. He threw an inkwell at his mistress when she annoyed him and told the actress Sarah Bernhardt that she reminded him of a toad. One time, when he forgot to turn up to a tea party he wrote in his letter of apology that he couldn’t come because his thumbs were too small.

He had a love-hate friendship with Tolstoy. When they were on good terms he was well-known amongst Tolstoy’s children for being the fun uncle. He would entertain them by dancing jigs for them and by impersonating a chicken whilst he was eating soup. (I say this but I am also in the throes of a violent argument with the Russian translator of my book about whether Turgenev was impersonating the chicken whilst he was eating the soup or whether he liked to do impressions of soup-eating chickens. Either way, Turgenev could be fun.) When he got ill, he went one better than Chekhov’s creosote concoction and attempted to cure himself of cancer of the spinal cord by drinking “nine or ten glasses of milk” a day. That, my friends, is optimism. (It didn’t work.)

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub