Being a man of art is not an easy task. Various addictions haunted the world's most prominent literary creators and somehow influenced their work.
10. Elizabeth Browning
Elizabeth Browning has become truly a cult figure in Britain, and for many she is to this day an unofficial symbol of the Victorian era. The English poetess from childhood suffered from a severe spinal injury. The damaged spine caused the girl unbearable pain from the age of 15, but in the 19th century it was still not about painkillers. Therefore, Elizabeth drowned out the seizures with the help of opium, which inevitably after a while caused addiction. By the age of 20, the same opium had severely undermined her health, but Browning was never able to refuse it. By her 40s, the poetess drank about 40 drops of tincture from opium per day.
9. Lord Byron
Lord Byron can be called the most famous rake of his time. The poet was simply obsessed with sexual relations. It is known for certain that in Venice in one year he managed to sleep with 250 girls. She was visited by Carolina Lam, who always spoke contemptuously about him, as well as her cousin Anna, whom Byron later married. The poet even seduced his half-sister. The lord was also known for his sexual relations with men. After each of his mistresses and every lover, after a stormy night, Byron cut off a lock of hair, sealed it in a signed envelope and kept it for himself. These envelopes are still preserved, they were found in the personal library of the creator.
8. Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was truly a workaholic and could write day and night. Once she complained to the doctor of chronic fatigue, after which the doctor prescribed her amphetamine as a means to combat overwork. The writer was so keen on taking the medicine that she took it for 30 years in a row. She said to her relatives and friends that this tool helps her to control her own weight. But later, familiar women noted that after taking amphetamine, she dramatically changed her mood, became irritable, but did not stop using the device.
7. Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens had a very strange addiction. He could spend a day in the morgue. The writer simply stood and watched as the corpses were brought into the room, how they were opened and carried back. Over time, pathologists even stopped paying attention to this person and did not even consider his observation to be strange, because Dickens did not harm anyone and did not bother anyone. The writer himself called his enthusiasm a repulsive craving and an attempt to study human nature by stealth. He came to the morgue for many years almost every day, and historians called it the real addiction of literary genius.
6. Honore de Balzac
Balzac was a true fanatic who drank more than 50 mugs of coffee per day. He could not live an hour without his favorite drink, he often wrote about it and discussed how coffee can change a person’s life. The writer argued that it was coffee, falling into his stomach, awakening his body to action, activating thinking, awakening the best writer's ideas and thoughts. Moreover, over time, he began to not only drink coffee, but also to eat ground dry grains. The author advised to use coffee drinks to all men without exception.
5. James Joyce
Joyce was married to a woman who suffered from flatulence. He madly loved his Nora, and over time, when he found out about her ailment, the writer really liked him. When his wife made distinctive sounds, James enjoyed gigantic pleasure. Moreover, he asked Nora to do this as often as possible. He was attracted by the sound and smell of flatulence. He wrote about her illness in letters to his wife and admitted that he was obsessed with Nora’s flatulence. In the letters to his wife there were a lot of phrases, which connoisseurs of his work recognized as a sign of true dependence on flatulence of the woman he loved.
4. Ernest Hemingway
Of course, many writers suffered from alcoholism. However, Ernest Hemingway's alcohol addiction was different from other forms. He spent almost his entire life in a drunken state. The addiction to alcohol began in the life of the writer when he received several very serious injuries as a result of a car accident. His alcohol addictions have become a true legend for literary critics and connoisseurs of Hemingway's work. It is believed that it was Ernest Hemingway who created several alcoholic cocktails, and it is known for certain that he invented the Papa Double cocktail.
3. Paul Verlaine
Dependence on absinthe played a fatal role in Verlaine's life. He met with Rimbaud, and then the latter said that he and Verlaine needed to leave. They scandalized for a very long time, and all this time Verlaine was intoxicated by the use of absinthe. And then the writer shot in the hand of his lover. Verlaine was imprisoned for 2 years. The creator had a lot of other addictions, but at the end of his life he abandoned all but absinthe. They say that even in his dying state, he still continued to slurp this alcoholic drink in large quantities.
2. William Burroughs
Burroughs' dependence on heroin was known to all its connoisseurs. For almost the entire life of the author, heroin has been his indispensable companion. It is no coincidence that heroin is mentioned in almost all of his famous works, which distinguish the autobiographical echoes and thoughts of Burroughs about harmful human habits and experiments with drugs. There was a time in the 40s of the XX century, when the writer traded heroin. True, at the end of his life he resorted to substitution therapy and instead of heroin he already consumed methadone.
1. Fedor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky himself openly recognized his love of gambling and claimed that this addiction frightened him. He began to play roulette in the mid-1860s, when he buried first his beloved wife, and then his brother. Loneliness led him to depression and large monetary debts. Roulette helped him to forget and escape from thoughts of his own misfortunes. Dependence threw him a lot of money problems, and there is a version that Dostoevsky was in a hurry to finish Crime and Punishment in order to pay off his game debts.