Bleeding Fiction

Lena and I talked about Mayakovsky yesterday, a Russian poet, artist and playwrite from the revolutionary period and one of the founding members of the Cubo-Futurist movement (which just sounds cool). I found out that he committed suicide when he was 37. "What is it with Russian writers," I said. "Why do all of them kill themselves?" At least I thought they did. But I wasn't sure, so today I looked into it. Below are the results.

The following Russian authors did not die by suicide:

Brodsky

Chekhov

Dostoevsky

Lermontov

Nabokov

Pushkin

Tolstoy

In fact, out of the famous Russian authors I researched, only Mayakovsky committed suicide. Most of the rest died of some lung ailment or another. Notable exceptions are Lermontov and Pushkin (ever the romantic), who were killed in duels.

But my idea about Russian artistic suicide must've come from somewhere, right? So I moved on to the composers.

The following Russian composers, likewise, did not commit suicide:

Mussorgsky

Prokofiev

Rachmaninov

Stravinsky

Three of them died perfectly boring deaths, with only Mussorgsky reduced to begging in the street for months before he died of pneumonia. Tchaikovsky apparently did commit suicide when certain scandals about his private life became public.

I know don't know a thing about Russian painters, so I left off there.

In short: though this little web tour taught me a great deal about the arts in Russia throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th century, I also learned that I was way off base about the number of Russian creative types who've offed themselves.

This is probably for the best.