Secrets of great writers. Interesting facts about writers Facts about poets

William Shakespeare 1. William Shakespeare was born and died on the same day (but, fortunately, in different years) - on April 23, 1564, he was born and, 52 years later, died on the same day. 2. On the same day as Shakespeare, another great writer died - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The author of Don Quixote died on April 23, 1616. 3. Contemporaries claimed that Shakespeare was fond of poaching - he hunted deer in the domain of Sir Thomas Lucy, without any permission from this very Lucy. George Byron 4. The great poet Byron was lame, prone to obesity and extremely loving - in a year in Venice, according to some reports, he made 250 ladies happy with himself, lame and fat. 5. Byron had an amazing personal collection - strands of hair cut from the pubes of his beloved women. The locks (or perhaps curls) were kept in envelopes on which the names of the hostesses were romantically inscribed. Some researchers argue that it was possible to admire (if this word is appropriate here) the poet’s collection back in the 1980s, after which traces of vegetation were lost. 6. And the great poet Byron loved to spend time with boys, including, alas, minors. We don’t even comment on this! 250 ladies wasn’t enough for the scoundrel! 7. Well, a little more about Byron - he really loved animals. Fortunately, not in the sense that you may have put into this phrase after reading about Byron a little higher. The romantic poet adored animals platonically and even kept a menagerie in which a badger, monkeys, horses, a parrot, a crocodile and many other animals lived. Charles Dickens 8. Charles Dickens had a very difficult childhood. When his dad went to debtor's prison, little Charlie was sent to work... no, not in a chocolate factory, but in a blacking factory, where he stuck labels on jars from morning to evening. Not dusty, you say? But stick them from morning to evening instead of playing football with the boys, and you will understand why Dickens’ images of unfortunate orphans were so convincing. 9. In 1857, Hans Christian Andersen came to visit Dickens. This is not a Kharms joke, this is life itself! Andersen and Dickens met back in 1847, were completely delighted with each other, and now, 10 years later, the Dane decided to take advantage of the invitation given to him. The trouble is that over the years in Dickens’s life everything has changed a lot and become more complicated - he was not ready to accept Andersen, and he lived with him for almost five weeks! “He doesn’t speak any languages ​​except his Danish, although there are suspicions that he doesn’t know that either,” Dickens told his friends about his guest in this way. Poor Andersen became the target of ridicule from the numerous descendants of the author of Little Dorrit, and when he left, Dad Dickens left a note in his room: “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks, which seemed like years to our family.” And you also ask why Andersen wrote such sad fairy tales? 10. Dickens was also fond of hypnosis, or, as they said then, mesmerism. 11. One of Dickens’ favorite pastimes was going to the Paris morgue, where unidentified bodies were exhibited. Truly a dear person!
Oscar Wilde 12. Oscar Wilde did not take Dickens's writings seriously and mocked them for any reason. In general, contemporary critics of Charles Dickens endlessly hinted that he would never be included in the list of the best British writers. And we’ll get to Oscar Wilde later. 13. But Dickens was devotedly loved by ordinary readers - in 1841, in the port of New York, where the continuation of the final chapters of “The Antiquities Shop” was to be brought, 6 thousand people gathered, and everyone shouted to the passengers of the mooring ship: “Will little Nell die?” 14. Dickens could not work if the tables and chairs in his office were not arranged as they should. Only he knew how to do it - and each time he began work by rearranging the furniture. 15. Charles Dickens disliked monuments so much that in his will he strictly forbade him from erecting them. The only bronze statue of Dickens is in Philadelphia. By the way, the statue was initially rejected by the writer’s family. O.Henry 16. American writer O. Henry began his writing career in prison, where he was sentenced for embezzlement. And things went so well for him that everyone soon forgot about prison. Ernest Hemingway 17. Ernest Hemingway was not only an alcoholic and a suicide, as everyone knows. He also had peiraphobia (fear of public speaking), in addition, he never believed the praise of even his most sincere readers and admirers. I didn’t even believe my friends, and that’s all! 18. Hemingway survived five wars, four automobile and two air crashes. As a child, his mother also forced him to attend dance school. And over time he himself began to call himself Pope. 19. The same Hemingway often and willingly talked about the fact that the FBI was watching him. The interlocutors smiled wryly, but in the end it turned out that the Pope was right - declassified documents confirmed that this was indeed surveillance, and not paranoia. Gertrude Stein 20. The first person in history to use the word “gay” in literature was Gertrude Stein, a lesbian writer who hated punctuation and gave the world the term “lost generation.” 21. Oscar Wilde - like Ernest Hemingway - was dressed up in girls' dresses for a long time as a child. In both cases, we note, it ended badly. 22. The most famous quote from Gertrude Stein is “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Honore de Balzac 23. Honore de Balzac loved coffee - he drank about 50 cups of strong Turkish coffee a day. If it was not possible to make coffee, the writer simply ground a handful of beans and chewed them with great pleasure. 24. Balzac believed that ejaculation is a waste of creative energy, since semen is a brain substance. Once, talking with a friend after a successful conversation, the writer exclaimed bitterly: “This morning I lost my novel!” Edgar Allan Poe 25. Edgar Allan Poe was afraid of the dark all his life. Perhaps one of the reasons for this fear was that as a child the future writer studied... in a cemetery. The school where the boy went was so poor that it was impossible to buy textbooks for the children. A resourceful math teacher taught classes in a nearby cemetery, among the graves. Each student chose a tombstone for himself and calculated how many years the deceased had lived, subtracting the date of birth from the date of death. It is not surprising that Poe grew up to become what he became - the founder of world horror literature. Lewis Carroll 26. The most psychedelic writer of all time should be recognized as Lewis Carroll, a shy British mathematician who wrote fairy tales about Alice. His writings were inspired by the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Tim Burton and others. 27. Lewis Carroll's real name is Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He had the ecclesiastical rank of deacon, and in his personal diaries, Carroll constantly repented of some sin. However, these pages were destroyed by the writer’s family so as not to discredit his image. Some researchers seriously believe that Carroll was Jack the Ripper, who, as we know, was never found. 28. Carroll suffered from swamp fever, cystitis, lumbago, eczema, furunculosis, arthritis, pleurisy, rheumatism, insomnia and a whole bunch of other diseases. In addition, he had an almost constant - and very severe - headache. 29. The author of “Alice” was a passionate admirer of technological progress, and he himself personally invented a tricycle, a mnemonic system for remembering names and dates, an electric pen, and it was he who came up with the idea of ​​​​writing the title of a book on the spine and created the prototype of everyone’s favorite game Scrabble. Franz Kafka 30. Franz Kafka was the grandson of a kosher butcher and a strict vegetarian. Walt Whitman 31. The great American poet Walt Whitman had a very specific sexual orientation. He admired, however, first of all Abraham Lincoln, whom he praised in the poem “Oh, Captain! My captain!". And once Whitman met another gay icon - the sarcastic Irishman Oscar Wilde, who so disliked Charles Dickens (who, in turn, did not like Andersen, see above). Wilde told Whitman that he adored Leaves of Grass, which his mother often read to him as a child, after which Whitman kissed the “excellent, large and handsome young man” right on the lips. “I can still feel Whitman’s kiss on my lips,” the author of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” shared with his friends. Brr! Mark Twain 32. Mark Twain is the pseudonym of a man named Samuel Langhorne Clemens. In addition, Twain also had the pseudonyms Tramp, Josh, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Sergeant Fathom and W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab. By the way, “Mark Twain,” a concept from the field of navigation, means “measure two” fathoms: this is how the minimum depth suitable for navigation was noted. 33. Mark Twain was friends with one of the most mysterious people of his time - inventor Nikola Tesla. The writer himself patented several inventions, such as self-adjusting suspenders and a scrapbook with adhesive pages. 34. Twain also adored cats and hated children (he even wanted to erect a monument to King Herod). A great writer once said: “If it were possible to cross a person with a cat, the human race would only benefit from this, but the cat breed would clearly worsen.” 35. Twain was a heavy smoker (he is the author of the phrase that is now attributed to everyone: “There is nothing easier than quitting smoking. I know, I’ve done it a thousand times”). He started smoking when he was eight years old and smoked 20 to 40 cigars daily until his death. The writer chose the smelliest and cheapest cigars.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien 36. The author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, J. R. R. Tolkien, was an extremely bad driver, snored so much that he had to spend the night in the bathroom so as not to disturb his wife’s sleep, and was also a terrible Francophobe - he hated the French since William the Conqueror. Lev Tolstoy 37. On his first wedding night with Sophia Bers, 34-year-old Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy forced his 18-year-old newly married wife to read those pages in his diary, which described in detail the amorous adventures of the writer with various women, among others, with serf peasant women. Tolstoy wanted there to be no secrets between him and his wife. Agatha Christie 38. Agatha Christie suffered from dysgraphia, that is, she practically could not write by hand. All of her famous novels were dictated. Anton Chekhov 39. Chekhov was a big fan of going to a brothel - and, finding himself in a foreign city, the first thing he did was study it from this side. James Joyce 40. James Joyce was afraid of dogs and thunderstorms more than anything else, hated monuments and was a masochist. 41. When Tolstoy left home in old age, most of the reporters rushed after him, and only one, the most shrewd fellow, came to Yasnaya Polyana to find out how Sofya Andreevna was doing. Soon the editor received a telegram: “The Countess, with a changed face, is running to the pond.” This is how the reporter described Sofia Andreevna’s intention to drown herself. Subsequently, the phrase was picked up by two completely different writers - Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, presenting it to their brilliant hero Ostap Bender. William Faulkner 42. William Faulkner worked as a postman for several years until it was discovered that he often threw undelivered letters into the trash. Jack London 43. Jack London was a socialist, and also the first American writer in history to earn a million dollars through his work.
Arthur Conan Doyle 44. Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented Sherlock Holmes, was an occultist and believed in the existence of small winged fairies. Jean-Paul Sartre 45. Jean-Paul Sartre experimented with mind-expanding substances and strongly supported terrorists. Perhaps the first was somehow connected with the second.

Five writers whose life paths contain some kind of secret

Text: Mikhail Vizel/GodLiteratury.RF
Collage: Year of Literature.RF

We know Shakespeare's plays very well - but we know very little about him. Even his birthday is celebrated on the day of his death - impressive, but unlikely. But the author of Hamlet and King Lear (if this is indeed Shakespeare) is not the only famous writer whose biography has white (or black) spots. Or their whole life is one big blur.

1. Guy Valerius Catullus (c. 87 BC - c. 54 BC)

Guy Valerius Catullus (c. 87 BC - c. 54 BC). Far from being the largest, but without exaggeration, the most “promoted” poet of antiquity. Because the type that is closest and most understandable to us is a young rebel who writes daring epigrams on the almighty Caesar and dies of consumption and love for a cruel, beautiful aristocrat. Just some Arthur Rimbaud or Jim Morrison in a toga and sandals. But the thing is that all this - the insolence, and consumption, and the hard-heartedness of the beauty, we are conjecturing exclusively from the poems of Catullus himself. More precisely, according to the only manuscript of his Carmina (book of songs), found in a medieval monastery.

Even the dates of his life are arbitrary. In 54 BC he stopped writing poetry

But whether it was because he really died of tuberculosis (as the romantic philologists of the 19th century suggested) or simply finally received a grain-earning position in his native Verona, disappeared from the party of the golden youth of Rome and gave up nonsense - we will never know.

2. Author of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”

Author of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” The fate of this monument of ancient Russian literature is somewhat similar to the fate of Catullus’s “Book of Songs”:

the only late copy of this work was found almost by accident in a monastery, declared a masterpiece... after which heated debate began about the identity of the author.

The most restrained version is “a scribe of the late 13th century from the scriptorium of Sophia of Kyiv.” The most romantic is “Prince Igor himself.” (There is, however, also an “ultra-romantic” one: “Yaroslavna herself”). The most critical is “a falsifier of the 18th century from the circle of the historian Tatishchev.” But even here it is still a complete blank spot. Unless, of course, another list of “Words...” is accidentally discovered in some Putivl excavation or among the stuck together parchments.

3. Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson, 1832–1898)

The life of an Oxford mathematics professor, a participant in ceremonial department meetings and prim tea parties, seems to be all in plain sight.

But there are two spots in it - just white and dark.

White is a sudden (organized in just a week) trip to Russia in the summer of 1867.

This was Dodgson's only trip abroad. Moreover, its formal occasion was the transfer of a greeting address from the Bishop of Oxford to Metropolitan Philaret on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his pastoral ministry. And the real motive is an attempt to test the waters for rapprochement, and ideally, unification of the Russian Orthodox and Anglican churches. It sounds fantastic, but 35-year-old Dodgson was then “on the verge of fantasy.” The fairy tale about “Alice” has just come out and gained fame. Dodgson is on the verge of fame - and seems to be hesitating whether he should change his life dramatically. Nothing came of the attempt to bring the churches closer together - and the exotic voyage remained a separate episode: Dodgson is not the person to conduct secret negotiations and “resolve issues.”

And this, perhaps, is precisely connected with the “dark spot” in his biography. He was known to stutter. What is less known is that five more of his 11 sisters and brothers had the same speech impediment. But stuttering is not red-haired or even left-handed; it is not inherited.

Only God knows what features were hidden in the privacy of the cozy home of the rural priest Dodgson!

4. Agatha Christie (1890–1976)

As in the case of Carroll, the outer life of the “detective’s grandmother” is that of a measured and orderly life of an English lady of means. And at the same time, there is a skeleton in it that clatters with bones, which she herself preferred to hide deeper in the closet. It concerns Agatha's 11-day disappearance in December 1926, shortly after her first husband, Colonel Christie, announced that he was in love with another woman and was asking for a divorce.

Agatha reacted in a peculiar way: she simply disappeared.

Her car with her belongings was found on the road, but she herself was not.

Since by this time Mrs. Christie was already a famous writer, the Home Secretary joined the search, newspapers announced a reward - and the missing writer was found in a small spa hotel, where she lived quietly, registering under the name of the woman to whom her husband was planning to leave .

What it was remains unclear. According to one version, Agatha, already depressed by the recent death of her mother, suffered an attack of a mental disorder known as dissociative fugue, and she actually forgot who she really was. According to another, she quite rationally (albeit naively) wanted to “set up”, in the spirit of her novels, her husband and mistress, so that they would be accused of her murder. Be that as it may, the matter ended in nothing: the Christies divorced in 1928, and two years later Agatha married again and never again remembered this strange episode of her youth.

5. Leonid Dobychin (1894–1936?)

Unfortunately, the biographies of many Soviet writers of the 30s are full of white and black spots. We do not know the details of the participation of Bulgakov and Vaginov in the civil war - they probably fought mainly not on the winning side, and carefully hid it. The circumstances of death and the exact place of Mandelstam’s burial. The fate of the later manuscripts of Vvedensky and Babel (it is possible that they will someday surface in Lubyanka). Fate turned out a little differently. After a “discussion” that took place in March 1936 at the Leningrad Writers’ Union on the topic “On the fight against formalism and naturalism,” in which the main object of “elaboration” was Dobychin’s just published novel “The City of En” (it must be admitted that this avant-garde prose Indeed, if you wish, you can solder on the stigma of “formalism”), its author has disappeared.

The author has disappeared. Like Agatha Christie. But it was never found. It was probably suicide.

But there is no evidence. Which gave the modern writer Oleg Yuryev a reason to conjecture in his book “Unknown Letters” the secret life of Dobychin under an assumed name right up to Perestroika.

In the second half of the 20th century, in the era of total control and complete transparency, it seemed that any blind spots were no longer possible. Writers mythologized their biographies, like Hemingway and Limonov, but did not try to hide anything in them.

In the 21st century, with the advent of “true story literature,” the trend resumed.

Creativity, being a mystery, is impossible without mystery. And readers never tire of repeating after Pushkin: “Ah, it’s not difficult to deceive me, I’m happy to be deceived myself!”

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Escaped Agatha Christie and spiritualist Conan Doyle

Have you ever wondered that two of England's greatest deductive minds lived and worked at the same time? Moreover, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an active participant in the search operation during the disappearance of Agatha Christie. In 1926, the writer’s husband asked her for a divorce, since he was already in love with someone else. This was a huge blow for the creator of the mustachioed Poirot. And she disappeared. Rumor has it that Christie wanted to commit suicide and fabricate evidence against her unfaithful husband.

And among the volunteers from all over the country who helped find the literary diva, Sir Conan Doyle himself turned out to be. True, all his help consisted in the fact that he took Agatha’s glove to a famous medium. You won’t believe it, but the man who invented the most pragmatic and atheistic character of all time was an ardent supporter and promoter of spiritualism, and simply believed in all otherworldly forces. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the medium did not help the search operation in any way, and the writer was found 10 days later in a small spa hotel outside the city, where she calmly registered under the name of a careless homewrecker and drank cocktails for the entire 10 days. By the way, no one knows when, how and why Agatha Christie ended up in that hotel. The writer herself claims that she had short-term amnesia. But we are girls, we guess...

Lord Byron or Casanova?

Byron's love affairs are legendary. Biographers clearly include in his biography the fact that once in one year of Venice, Byron had the good fortune of “communicating” with more than 250 ladies. And this despite the fact that the poet definitely limped and was extremely prone to being overweight. Moreover, the pride of all England had a rather strange collection. He collected strands of hair from the most intimate places of his mistresses. The curls, and at that time there probably were some, were lovingly kept in envelopes, where the poet himself wrote out the names in his own hand: “Countess Guiccioli”, “Carolina Lamb”... In the 80s, to the great regret of literary scholars, the collection was lost and no trace of it has been found to this day por.

But the most common gossip revolves around George Byron's love for youths and animals. If the first is exactly what you thought, then the second is platonic love. In the poet’s personal mini-pet one could find crocodiles, badgers, horses, monkeys and many different animals. And the great English romantic poet became furious at the sight of an ordinary salt shaker. Rumor has it that such people were never present at the lavish festivities with the lord. The secret of such fierce aggression towards the salt shaker remained unsolved.

Papa Hem and his cats

Everyone has heard about the cat lover, alcoholic and suicide Hemingway. He really did suffer from a severe form of paranoia, he really did endure a number of sophisticated psychiatric techniques, and towards the end of his life he stopped writing. And when Hemingway died, American intelligence services confirmed what the great writer had been saying all his life - he was indeed being monitored.

But there is another side to the coin. The ideal man, life-fighter and womanizer, American dad Hem loved Cuban mojitos, beautiful journalists and honesty in everything. One day, while sipping a friendly cocktail, another giant of American literature, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, complained to Hemingway that his wife Zelda considered his “manhood” to be relatively small. To which the writer took him to the toilet, gave him a control check, and then reassured poor Fitzgerald that everything was fine. He already knew.

But as for cats, Hemingway’s favorite pet was Snowball, who has a small defect - six toes on soft paws. Now you can meet the descendants of Snowball, who continue to pay tribute to the genius of literature, and live in the house-museum of Uncle Hem in Florida.

Charlie and the Bax Factory

Being just a child, the future pride of England, Charles Dickens, had a very hard time. The writer's father ended up in debtor's prison, and little Charlie had to go to work, unfortunately, not at a chocolate factory, but at a real waxing factory, where the young talent had to stick labels on jars of polish all day long. No football with slingshots, no hulabud on a tree. That is why Dickens's images of unfortunate orphans were so realistic.

In general, one can write and write about the oddities of Charles John Dickens. The most famous of them says that the writer could not sit at the table or go to bed with his head not facing north. Charlie wrote his brilliant works in precisely this direction.

Legend has it that Dickens was an avid hypnotist and mesmerist (telepathic communication between humans and animals), and even went into trances at random. During this state, the writer fiddled with his hats, which very quickly wore out after the attacks. Later I even had to give up hats altogether. Well, among other things, the English prose writer’s favorite pastime was going to the morgue. Especially in those sections where unidentified bodies were exhibited. A wonderful time, I must say!

Antosha Chekhonte

A domestic example of a writer’s difficult childhood is everyone’s favorite Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, whose father ran a tailor’s shop and forced his youths to work in it. Little Anton managed to study and sing in the church choir, but he never saw his childhood.

Another extremely interesting fact about the great satirist: Chekhov kept more than 50 original pseudonyms in his arsenal: Champagne, My Brother’s Brother, The Man Without a Spleen, Arkhip Indeykin, and of course, Antosha Chekhonte - only part of Chekhov’s boundless imagination.

But Stanislavsky describes such a story in his memoirs. One day, while Anton Pavlovich was visiting him, a friend came to him. During the conversation, Chekhov was silent and only looked intently at the newcomer. When the guest left, the master of the short genre said: “Listen, he is a suicide,” to which Stanislavsky only laughed, because he had never met a more joyful, happy and optimistic person than this friend. Imagine the director’s amazement when a few years later the “cheerful” guest was poisoned.
And yet, contemporaries describe Chekhov as the kindest person on Earth. With the light hand of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russia became richer in schools, hospitals and shelters for those who have nowhere to go.

Coffee instead of sex

Once a thief broke into the apartment of a young, not yet very successful, writer. When he began to rummage through the drawers in the only chest of drawers in the apartment, he heard loud laughter behind him. Honore de Balzac, that was the name of the aspiring writer, loudly remarked that it was unlikely that a thief would be able to find money where he had not been able to find it himself for a long time.

The author's contemporaries claim that it was a sharp sense of humor that helped Balzac survive in sorrow and poverty. Humor and coffee. The famous Frenchman could drink about 50 cups of extremely strong coffee per day. Someone even calculated that during the writing of The Human Comedy, Balzac drank 15,000 cups of aromatic liquor. And this is without the beans that the coffee lover loved to chew when it was not possible to brew his favorite drink.

And Honore de Balzac believed that sex is tantamount to one good novel. A man's seed, in his competent opinion, is nothing more than particles of brain tissue. After a night of love, he even bitterly admitted to one of his friends that he had probably lost a brilliant work.

From comet to comet

Another lover of pseudonyms, Mark Twain, came up with more than a dozen of them. And “Mark Twain” itself meant “by the mark twain,” that is, the safe immersion of a ship in two fathoms. In his youth, the creator of Tom Sawyer worked for a long time on a ship somewhere in the waters of the Mississippi.

Few people know that Samuel Clemens, that is the writer’s real name, was born two weeks after Halley’s Comet passed over the Earth. And in 1909, Twain wrote: “I was born with Halley, and I will leave with her.” On April 20, the comet circled the planet again, and the next day the genius was gone.

Probably, it was precisely this fact that Mark Twain predicted such an unreal life, full of secrets. One of the prose writer's best friends was the mysterious Nikola Tesla. Together with him, Twain participated in the development of mysterious inventions and even patented several, including an album with adhesive pages for photos and an original self-regulating suspenders.

And the world-famous American hated children (despite our favorites - Tom and Huck), but adored cats and tobacco. He started smoking when he was only 8 years old, and until the last day of his life he smoked 30 cigars daily. Moreover, Twain chose the cheapest and most smelly varieties.

Among other things, Mark Twain was one of the most famous American Freemasons. Little is known about his activities in the lodge. His initiation took place in 1861 in the small town of St. Louis and he quickly moved up the “career ladder.”

Looking for a green stick

Well, the last hero of our article is a writer, whose image has become legendary throughout Mother Russia. We have studied the life of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy from school inside and out. But do you know what influenced the writer’s ideas about universal peace, love and harmony? As a child, little Levushka’s brother told him many times a story about a magic green wand that can be found on the outskirts of that same Yasnaya Polyana and with its help make the world a much better place. It was this fairy tale that influenced the entire subsequent life and worldview of the great novelist and teacher.

But in her youth, the future star of Russian literature suffered from a common disease - gambling. In one card game with his neighbor, the landowner Gorokhov, Tolstoy lost the house in which he grew up, and all in the same Yasnaya Polyana. Gorokhov, without thinking twice, dismantled the building brick by brick and moved it to his estate.

Tolstoy's oddities do not end there. On his wedding night, Lev Nikolaevich forced 18-year-old Sofia Bers to re-read his entire diary, especially devoting moments to love affairs. Tolstoy wanted to be honest with the woman he took as his wife, and told her about all his mistresses, including his affairs with countless peasant women. They say that what should happen between husband and wife did not happen that night.

You can find a huge amount of information about famous writers - how they lived, how they created their immortal works. And we want to bring to your attention interesting and unusual facts from the lives of famous writers. When reading an interesting book, the reader usually does not think about the characteristics of the character and lifestyle of the writer who wrote it, but some facts of his biography or the history of the creation of a particular book are sometimes very entertaining and even smile-inducing.

One day at Francois Rabelais there was no money to get from Lyon to Paris. Then he prepared three bags with the inscriptions “Poison for the King”, “Poison for the Queen” and “Poison for the Dauphin” and left them in a visible place in the hotel room. Upon learning of this, the hotel owner immediately reported to the authorities. Rabelais was captured and convoyed to the capital directly to King Francis I so that he could decide the writer’s fate. It turned out that the packages contained sugar, which Rabelais immediately drank with a glass of water, and then told the king, with whom they were friends, how he solved his problem.

Charles Dickens I drank half a liter of champagne every day. It all started when, in 1858, Dickens, in order to raise his popularity to a new level, decided to give lectures. His performances were extremely successful, and he traveled all over England and then went to America. And where there is a lecture, there is a subsequent meeting with readers! How can we live here without champagne! In addition, the writer Charles Dickens always slept with his head facing north. He also sat facing north when he wrote his great works.

Franz Kafka was the most humble person. He practically did not publish everything that he wrote, but he always read it aloud to his three Prague friends. Being seriously ill, he asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his works after his death, including several unfinished novels. Brod did not fulfill this request, but, on the contrary, ensured the publication of the works that brought Kafka worldwide fame.

Ilf and Petrov They avoided cliché thoughts in a very original way. They discarded ideas that came to both of them at once.

Marie-François Arouet (Voltaire) simultaneously wrote several works. Sitting down at his desk, depending on his mood, he took the manuscript and continued to work on it.

Kir Bulychev- this is the final pseudonym of Vsevolod Mozheiko, but in general he changed them every month, especially when he worked in the magazine “Around the World”. He once signed himself "Sarah Fan" but was accused of anti-Semitism. We decided to simply put “S. Fan,” but this was considered an attack against the Korean people. Then Bulychev signed: “Ivan Shlagbaum.” Alexandre Dumas the father(1802-1870), whose green collection of works in fifteen volumes occupies the bookshelves in many apartments, did not write all these adventure novels himself. A whole staff of “literary blacks” worked for Dumas - at other times their number reached 70 people. More often than others, Dumas collaborated with the writer Auguste Macquet (1813-1888), who wrote, in particular, significant parts of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Montecristo. From the correspondence between Dumas and Macke it follows that the latter’s contribution to the beloved novels was very significant.

The main plot of the immortal work N. V. Gogol“The Inspector General” was suggested to the author by A. S. Pushkin. These great classics were good friends. Once Alexander Sergeevich told Nikolai Vasilyevich an interesting fact from the life of the city of Ustyuzhna, Novgorod province. It was this incident that formed the basis of the work of Nikolai Gogol. Throughout the time he was writing The Inspector General, Gogol often wrote to Pushkin about his work, told him what stage it was in, and also repeatedly announced that he wanted to quit it. However, Pushkin forbade him to do this, so “The Inspector General” was still completed. By the way, Pushkin, who was present at the first reading of the play, was completely delighted with it.

The stable phrase “lost generation” came to us from the works Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway's lost generation are young people who found themselves at the front at an early age (for Hemingway, primarily the period between the two world wars), often not yet graduating from school, undecided in life, but who began to kill early. After returning from the war, such people, morally or physically crippled, often could not adapt to peaceful life, many committed suicide, some went crazy. The “Lost Generation” also began to be called a literary movement that united such famous writers as Ham himself, James Joyce, Erich Maria Remarque, Henri Barbusse, Francis Scott Fitzgerald and others.

Darya Dontsova, whose father was the Soviet writer Arkady Vasiliev, grew up surrounded by the creative intelligentsia. Once at school she was asked to write an essay on the topic: “What was Valentin Petrovich Kataev thinking about when he wrote the story “The Lonely Sail Whitens”?”, and Dontsova asked Kataev himself to help her. As a result, Daria received a bad grade, and the literature teacher wrote in her notebook: “Kataev was not thinking about this at all!”

Belarusian poet Adam Mickiewicz was also a science fiction writer. In the novel “The History of the Future,” he wrote about acoustic devices with the help of which, sitting by the fireplace, you can listen to concerts from the city, as well as about mechanisms that allow the inhabitants of the Earth to maintain contact with creatures inhabiting other planets.

Honore de Balzac I wrote in the dark, so even during the day I closed the curtains and lit candles. Starting to work on a new piece, Balzac locked himself in a room for one or two months and closed the shutters tightly so that no light could penetrate through them. He wrote by candlelight, dressed in a robe, for 18 hours every day.

U Lord Byron there were four pet geese that followed him everywhere, even at social gatherings. Despite being overweight and having a rather severe clubfoot, Byron was considered one of the most energetic and attractive people of his time.

To his close relatives he was Ronald, to his school friends he was John Ronald. At Oxford University, where he first studied and then taught, he was called “Tollers.” This is about John Ronald Rowan Tolkien. By the way, in Denmark there is The Tolkien Ensemble - an ensemble named after Tolkien. This is a Danish symphony orchestra that performs musical pieces based on the works of Tolkien. He has the support of Queen Margaret II, a great fan of Tolkien's books, who herself illustrates his books.

Frankenstein- this is not the name of the famous monster at all. In Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818, this same monster was simply called the “Monster.” Victor Frankenstein was the name of a young student scientist from Geneva who created a living creature from non-living material.

Mark Twain was a good inventor. Among his developments are a notebook with tear-off leaves for journalists, a wardrobe with sliding shelves, and also the most ingenious of his inventions - a tie-tying machine!

Real name Daniel Defoe, was not de Fo, indicating noble origin, but simply Fo. By the way, he wrote not just one book, but more than 300. Moreover, among his works are a lot of scientific works on history, economics, geography, as well as a series of books on demonology and magic. He even wrote a book about the history of the reign of Peter I. One of the most prolific writers of all times was a Spaniard Lope de Vega. In addition to “Dog in the Manger,” he wrote another 1,800 plays, all of them in verse. He never worked on a single play for more than 3 days. At the same time, his work was well paid, so Lope de Vega was practically a multimillionaire, which is extremely rare among writers.

The life and work of the world's literary luminaries is rich in all sorts of interesting things. For example, Russian poets and writers came up with many new words: substance, thermometer (Lomonosov), industry (Karamzin), bungling (Saltykov-Shchedrin), fade away (Dostoevsky), mediocrity (Severyanin), exhausted (Khlebnikov). In our library you can plunge into the fascinating world of masterpieces of world literature, as well as increase your erudition by becoming familiar with a lot of new information. We are waiting for you in our library!

The lifestyle of writers can sometimes be no less provocative and interesting than the book itself. The habits and phobias of some writers can cause quite mixed reactions among fans of their work. Somerset Maugham, for example, was a practicing bisexual, Mark Twain loved cats and hated children, and James Joyce was afraid of dogs, lightning and water. This side of a writer’s life is in many ways much more interesting than dry summaries from a literature textbook.

Honore de Balzac

At fifty a man is more dangerous than at any other age, for he has costly experience and often fortune.

Balzac and the thief
One night a thief broke into Balzac's apartment and began rummaging through his desk drawers. Suddenly the thief heard loud laughter:
“My friend, you are looking in vain in the dark for something that I cannot find during the day.”

Balzac and the master
One day, a master who was renovating and improving his apartment came to Balzac and began to demand money for the work done. Balzac replied that now he did not have a centime, and asked the master to come another time. He became indignant and began to shout: “Every time I come to you for money, you are either not at home or you have no money.” To this Balzac said: “Well, that’s quite understandable! If I had money, I probably wouldn’t be at home now.”

Balzac and sex
Honore de Balzac loved coffee - he drank about 50 cups of strong Turkish coffee a day. If it was not possible to make coffee, the writer simply ground a handful of beans and chewed them with great pleasure.
Balzac believed that ejaculation is a waste of creative energy, since semen is a brain substance. Once, talking with a friend after a successful conversation, the writer exclaimed bitterly: “This morning I lost my novel!”

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys are just better than others.

“A writer is a born liar, and if a man cannot “compose,” he will never become a writer,” said Faulkner. And to confirm this, he himself composed numerous “episodes” of his biography. Among these myths: while a cadet at a flight school, he landed a plane on the roof of a hangar (and even upside down and, moreover, managed to immediately drink whiskey, although he was hanging upside down), was shot down over France, was professionally and skillfully engaged in the production and sale of moonshine, received a serious wounded in the head and the doctors were forced to put a silver plate on him, etc.

Faulkner's longest sentence is forty-nine pages long.

William Faulkner worked as a postman for several years until it was discovered that he often threw undelivered letters into the trash.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

Goblins are not villains, they just have a high level of corruption.

The author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, J. R. R. Tolkien, was an extremely bad driver, snored so much that he had to spend the night in the bathroom so as not to disturb his wife’s sleep, and was also a terrible Francophobe - he hated the French since William the Conqueror.

Even as a child, John and his friends came up with several languages ​​to communicate with each other. This passion for learning existing languages ​​and constructing new ones remained with him throughout his life. Tolkien is the creator of several artificial languages: Quenya, or the language of the High Elves; Sindarin is the language of the gray elves.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

There is only one thing that upsets me in this world - that I need to become an adult.

During his entire piloting career, Saint-Exupéry suffered 15 accidents.

Saint-Exupery mastered the art of card trick perfectly.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Don't try so hard, the best things happen unexpectedly.

In one of his interviews, in particular to Playboy magazine, Marquez told a very delicate fact of his autobiography, it turns out that he lost his virginity at the age of 13, and since then he has had close friendships with the priestesses of love.

At the time when Marquez was just starting his career as a writer, he often did not have enough money for his own place, so he often had to live in brothels.

The well-known and extremely popular “Farewell Letter to Humanity” on the Internet, the authorship of which is attributed to Marquez, was not actually written by him. Commenting on the excitement surrounding this “farewell letter,” the writer expressed surprise and regret that an extremely large number of people were misled. There is a version that the manuscript of the “letter” was brought to the editorial office of one of the largest newspapers in Peru by the Ambassador of Argentina, who had fun writing texts in his spare time; apparently, at some point he wanted recognition of his talent and played on the name of Marquez.

Somerset Maugham

My biggest mistake was imagining myself to be three-quarters normal and only one-quarter gay, when in reality it was the other way around.

Maugham was a practicing bisexual.

Maugham traveled constantly: he visited China, India, Italy, North America, Mexico, Polynesia. During the First World War he was a British agent in Switzerland and Russia. In 1928, he bought a villa on the French Riviera, which became his permanent home almost until the end of his life.

Maugham always looked like a true gentleman and had impeccable manners. He was also a great storyteller, despite his stutter. He maintained friendships with Winston Churchill, H.G. Wells and Noël Coward, who often visited his villa. In the last years of his life, Maugham was not at all afraid of death. He once said to one of his friends: “Death, like constipation, for example, is just one of the banalities that are very often encountered in a person’s life. So is it worth it to be so afraid of her?