The most abominable power: how great people of the past sinned during their lifetime
The four-hand book by writer Mark Kotlyarsky and Candidate of Psychological Sciences Elena Kiselyova is a rather original fusion of "interesting facts", sometimes of a yellowish tabloid nature, about celebrities ("Tchaikovsky's marriage lasted 19 days — Pyotr Ilyich simply ran away from his faithful") and attempts to sort out these incidents and curiosities on psychological shelves. Critic Lidia Maslova presents the book of the week, especially for Izvestia.
Mark Kotlyarsky, Elena Kiselyova
"The Club of Brilliant Psychopaths : the oddities and quirks of the great and famous"
Moscow : Eksmo, 2026. 320 p.
The enumeration of "oddities and quirks" organically combines information that, for example, British Prime Minister Smith‑Stanley, when he was working, "constantly sucked cherries soaked in vodka," and Prince Potemkin cooked fish soup in huge silver vats of "yard sterlets." Being carried away by such descriptions of the luxurious lifestyle of successful VIPs, the author's tandem sometimes deviates far from the stated theme - about the deep and inevitable connection between genius and some unusual habits in eating, family and private life, as well as in the way they handle money.
The fourth chapter, "The Man of Duty," is devoted to financial troubles and excesses, from which one can glean more or less well—known information about how Honore de Balzac hid from creditors, as well as similar information about Johann Sebastian Bach, from whom the authors did not expect such recklessness at all: "Yes, yes, Bach, whom we used to to be perceived as the pinnacle of order, could not resist the temptation of a luxurious life...> Why can't a mind that can calculate the finale of a symphony or a philosophical treatise calculate whether there will be anything left for tomorrow?" This chapter is not complete without A. S. Pushkin, who is known for his financial recklessness and has repeatedly written to friends on this topic.: "The topic of debts often flashes through the letters, while Pushkin either jokes or ignores the topic of money. Sometimes he slyly blames the state, the tsar, the country, but more often than not he simply elegantly passes by this topic, like a gentleman passing by the garbage on the side of the road."
Of course, the topic itself — how genius gets along with, if not villainy, then some qualities that are not too socially approved - resembles a catch phrase from Pushkin's letter to Vyazemsky about how the philistine crowd rejoices when learning unsightly details from the lives of famous people: "He is small, like us, he is vile, like We are! You're lying, you scoundrels: he's both small and vile — not the way you are —otherwise." However, the authors did not use this phrase, but instead two quotations serve as an epigraph, one from "Mowgli" ("He is just like us, only naked and without a tail..."), the other from Mayakovsky's poem "V. I. Lenin": "He is like you and me, The fact that geniuses suffer from the same vices and oddities as ordinary mortals who have no chance of going down in history is an important thought of the book, which also claims to become a textbook on self—development. There are even a few blank lines at the end of each "Psychologist's Comment" to answer a psychotherapeutic question, so that each reader can not only marvel at the eccentricities of celebrities, but also delve into himself, discovering if not genius, then at least similar internal injuries and fractures.
"When it gets especially hard for you, what exactly are you trying to turn off in yourself: pain, anxiety, loneliness, memory, or your own inner voice?" the psychologist asks at the end of the chapter about alcohol with the catchy title "Let's drink and pour again!". However, the authors do not approve of the addiction of some creative people to the bottle at all and rather warn the reader against romanticizing alcoholism, which, for example, Ernest Hemingway suffered from, lamenting: "What prevents a writer? Booze, women, money, and ambition. And also the lack of booze, women, money, and ambition." This quote is suddenly accompanied by a phrase from the cult TV movie "The meeting Place cannot be changed," with reference to a literary source: "Later, the Weiner brothers said it a little simpler and rougher, but no less accurately in the novel Era of Mercy: "...Women and pubs will bring him to zugunder" (referring to bandit Fox, he doesn't really pull at greatness, but his nature is certainly creative in its own way).
In general, the book by Kotlyarsky and Kiselyova suggests sad reflections that a lot can bring the fragile psyche of a genius to a zugunder. The numerous temptations of the world around us, which are difficult for a person with a delicate mental organization to resist, are grouped in the "Club of Brilliant Psychopaths" according to a thematic principle (besides alcohol and money, geniuses' relationships with food, sex, as well as with humor and laughter are also considered). "Of the two evils — chronology and subject matter," the authors explain, "we chose the lesser: subject matter, which made it possible to skillfully maneuver through a stormy sea of people and events without focusing on a strict historical sequence."
Here, however, it is not very clear why the subject is a lesser evil than chronology, and then what is "good": alphabetical order? In addition, the thematic principle chosen by Kotlyarsky and Kiselyova does not always help to navigate well in the notorious "stormy sea of people and events", where some personalities look mixed up in the category of "great" somewhat randomly, just as schematic primitivist drawings illustrating a book are arbitrarily grouped: for example, an "alcoholic" chapter for some reason They are accompanied by Angela Merkel, Freddie Mercury and singer Madonna, who are lined up in a row. At the same time, the first two are not mentioned in the book at all, and Madonna's case is considered in the context of her turbulent personal life and religious upbringing: "A Catholic girl from Michigan grew up not into a status housewife, but into the most striking cultural challenge of the XX–XXI century. <...> It seems that Madonna's husbands and lovers are part of an experimental laboratory. by studying yourself."
Singer Madonna
In principle, Kotlyarsky and Kiselyova are trying to build something like a similar laboratory, pushing the reader to self-knowledge, with varying success from their book. In the final word, they seem to reassure ordinary people without special talents and resort to consolation to ancient Jewish wisdom from the Talmud: "Anyone who is greater (more majestic in talent), he has a stronger and more pronounced tendency to bad qualities (to negativity)."
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