Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (33 page)

In the final year of his life, Gershwin was living in Los Angeles, where he and Ira had moved to write the score for
Shall We Dance
, the movie musical starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Ira liked the sunny and slow pace of California; George wanted to go back to the dynamism of New York. He never got the chance. It was in Hollywood that Gershwin began to develop headaches, which became increasingly severe. In early 1937, Gershwin suffered a blackout during an appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He complained of smelling burning rubber and experienced repeated dizzy spells. A medical checkup in June found nothing unusual, and the normally vital composer, deemed nervous and overworked, was given a diagnosis of probable “hysteria.” Over the next two weeks, his symptoms worsened, and he fell into a coma on July 9. Only then did neurosurgeons discover his brain tumor. Gershwin did not survive a five-hour emergency surgery and died on the morning of July 11, 1937.

Just a few months earlier, Gershwin had told his sister that he had not “scratched the surface” of what he wanted to do. The intrepid composer had taken his audiences from French cafés and taxicabs (in the lyrical and jubilant
An American in Paris
) to the tenements of Catfish Row (in his soulful opera
Porgy and Bess
). Until the end, his mind galloped forward with the next great idea—another opera, a string quartet, a symphony, a ballet.

Although he died tragically young, Gershwin's imprint on music was monumental. Indeed, it outlived him. “The world will always remember George Gershwin,” Rouben Mamoulian wrote after Gershwin's death. “His music will remind them. As long as people dance and sing and play, as long as concert halls and radio remain on this earth—George Gershwin remains on this earth.”

T
HROUGHOUT HISTORY
, many of the most powerful and incisive depictions of mental illness appear in great works of literature. Consider Shakespeare, revered by many as one of the world's greatest psychologists. The 16th-century playwright's dramas are rich with dramatic portrayals of madness. Macbeth suffers from delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia. Hamlet articulates key characteristics of depression, including emptiness and worthlessness. King Lear has been diagnosed with everything from senile dementia to bipolar disorder with psychotic features.

Enter Fyodor Dostoevsky, the great 19th-century essayist and novelist whose numerous works include
The Idiot, Crime and Punishment
, and
The Brothers Karamazov
. His masterpieces, drenched
in the foibles of humanity, catapulted Dostoevsky into the highest ranks of Russian literature and left an enduring mark on Western writing, influencing authors as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf. With his razor-sharp insight into the moods and minds of his countrymen, Dostoevsky crafted characters that throb with every human emotion from despair, rage, and shame to exuberance and exultation. Freud, the psychoanalysis pioneer, called
The Brothers Karamazov
, with its dramatic portrayal of three men and their father's murder, “the most magnificent novel ever written.”

Dostoevsky's ability to penetrate human psychology would turn out to be his salvation during one of many financial crises in his life. In 1865, the author, 43 years old and besieged by a mountain of debt, agreed to a preposterous proposition from a publisher: to write a new novel in little more than a year. Desperate to meet his deadline, he turned to a plot that he could describe with flawless precision: addictive gambling.

For ten years of his life, Dostoevsky was a compulsive gambler, gouging both his wallet and his relationships. Drawing on this experience, the writer set his short novel
The Gambler
in the fictional resort town of Roulettenburg; his protagonist, Alexey Ivanovich, becomes tangled up in the delusional mind games that drive gambling addicts. Like Dostoevsky, Alexey Ivanovich is unable to walk away when he is ahead. Instead, he convinces himself that he knows how to beat the system, bets again, loses, and sinks deeper into the red.

Can too much roulette playing constitute a mental disorder? Yes, according to the latest version of the
DSM
. Researchers have found that compulsive gambling strikes at areas of the brain that are similar to those activated by addictive drugs. Marking a major shift in how psychiatrists view the condition, gambling disorder
is the first “behavioral addiction” to emerge as a distinct diagnosis similar to substance use disorders.

You can't drink it, smoke it, snort it, or inject it, but money can seriously mess with your mind. Dostoevsky—the writer, the political activist, the addicted gambler—knew this better than anyone.

F
YODOR
M
IKHAILOVICH
D
OSTOEVSKY WAS BORN
, aptly enough, at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow on November 11, 1821. His forebears once belonged to the great Lithuanian nobility, but the family had fallen on hard times long before Fyodor arrived on the scene. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were priests, ranking low on the social hierarchy. His father, Mikhail Andreevich Dostoevsky, was a physician—a profession that brought him honor but not a great deal of money. Dr. Dostoevsky's dedicated service had nudged him up in society's ranks, and though the family would never achieve the upper-crust status of their long-gone relatives, he remained determined to keep up appearances, spending the little cash he had to hire servants and purchase a modest summer estate in the countryside. Most of the year, however, the family lived in a cramped apartment near a cemetery for criminals and the hospital, where disease and poverty collided every day. Not exactly breeding ground for Russian nobility.

Dr. Dostoevsky, a stern, disciplined man with rough features and a flaring temper, suffered from epilepsy as well as terrible headaches and bouts of melancholy triggered by bad weather. He was “naggingly unhappy” and suspicious of the people around him, according to his esteemed biographer Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky's mother, Maria Feodorovna, by contrast, was warm, loving, and upbeat—a woman of “natural gaiety,” as she once described herself. Dostoevsky
and his older brother, Mikhail, who became the writer's confidant and literary partner, spent much needed respites with their mother at their treasured country home. From his mother, Dostoevsky learned about compassion and the Bible; his father bequeathed to him a propensity for epilepsy, anxiety, and a fitful temper.

When he was just 15 years old, two monumental events transpired in Dostoevsky's life. First, his beloved mother died of tuberculosis, a disease she had battled for several years. Then Dostoevsky's father sent him off to the Academy of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg. The goal was to prepare his son for a financially secure career—but it did not align with Dostoevsky's interests. Evening reading sessions in the family home had introduced young Fyodor to the great works of Russian writers and poets, as well as the stories of English novelist Ann Radcliffe, which made him “agape with ecstasy and terror,” as he would later recall. He wanted to be a writer, not an engineer.

It was around this time that Dostoevsky's dysfunctional relationship with money began. Despite financial assistance from wealthy relatives, Dr. Dostoevsky struggled to cover the assorted expenses of his son's education. His son, however, never hesitated to send home letters requesting more rubles. “How bitter it is to have to ask my flesh and blood a favor which so heavily oppresses,” he wrote, with the tone of exaggerated humility in which he addressed his father. “Were I but free and independent, I should never have asked you for so much as a kopeck.” Dostoevsky reported that he needed the money to buy an extra pair of boots, a locker for his books, and his own personal stash of tea—but none of these items were vital to his survival. He simply wanted to fit in with his wealthier peers. His father never said no, but in what would turn out to be the last letter he wrote to Fyodor before he died, Dr. Dostoevsky reported that drought and heat had
decimated the estate's farm harvest, and he made it clear how little he had to spare. “After this, can you continue to grumble at your father for not sending you money?” he wrote.

During his student years, Dostoevsky escaped the drudgeries of engineering by discussing great works of literature—Homer, Shakespeare, Schiller—with a like-minded friend and poet named Ivan Shidlovsky. This was the world he was determined to inhabit. In 1841, after finishing his preliminary studies at the academy, 19-year-old Dostoevsky earned a commission, which provided a salary on top of a stipend he was receiving from his family's estate after his father's death. Now free to live away from school grounds, Dostoevsky indulged in the cultural delights of St. Petersburg, attending operas, concerts, plays, and ballets at the Alexandrinsky Theatre. “All of these amusements, of course, required a liberal supply of funds, and Dostoevsky was chronically short of cash,” writes biographer Frank. Scrambling to cover the costs, Dostoevsky got into the bad habit of asking for an advance on his earnings, and took out loans at very high interest rates. His money troubles were well under way.

From his earliest adult years, the young intellectual lived beyond his means, at one point renting an enormous apartment that contained just a couch, a desk and a few chairs. Igor Riesenkampf, a young doctor who lived with him for a time, discovered that Dostoevsky was subsisting largely on bread and milk, which he obtained on credit from the neighborhood grocer. One day, Riesenkampf found his roommate pacing happily in his room with 100 rubles in hand; soon after, Dostoevsky asked Riesenkampf for a five-ruble loan. “It turned out that most of the sum was spent paying for previous debts,” Riesenkampf reported. “The remaining money was all but lost yesterday at billiards, and the last small portion was simply stolen by his partner in the game.”

After graduating from the military academy in 1843, Dostoevsky was assigned to a drafting position with the St. Petersburg Engineering Command, but it wouldn't last long. By then, the aspiring writer was spending his free time translating works of literature and writing his own fiction. Fed up with engineering and determined to get published, Dostoevsky quit his position after just one year, renouncing his salary for literary freedom. “I resigned because I just had to resign,” he wrote to his brother, Mikhail in the fall of 1844. “I swear I couldn't stand the service any longer. Life is bleak if one's best time is wasted.” Clearly, this was an imprudent financial decision, but in a characteristic display of financial wangling, Dostoevsky devised a solution, demanding a cash payment from his father's estate in return for giving up all rights to later funds. His brother-in-law, who managed the estate, thought it an unwise plan. Enraged, Dostoevsky asked Mikhail to intervene. “I haven't got one kopek to buy clothes,” he wrote. “In the name of God, ask them to send me that money!”

Dostoevsky's transformation from engineering student to celebrated novelist evolved with staggering speed. By 1845, he had completed his first novel,
Poor Folk
, an epistolary tale told through the letters of an impoverished man and the young girl he pines for. A fellow engineering friend turned literary compatriot was so impressed by the work that he submitted it to a publisher he knew, who then shared it with Vissarion Belinsky, a preeminent literary critic. Just a few years earlier, Belinsky had made Gogol's 1842 novel,
Dead Souls
, the talk of the town with its stark portrayal of Russian society and character. Struck by Dostoevsky's revelation of the “secrets of life and characters in Russia as no one before him even dreamed of,” Belinsky couldn't tear himself away. The story was simple, the critic noted, “but what drama, what types!” Word
got out. Even before
Poor Folk
was published in January 1846, Dostoevsky, just 24 years old, had risen to literary acclaim.