An attempt at a short review.

“Overly active widows are dangerous: They cripple posthumous publications. And, according to Jules Lemaitre, “sometimes they even write them themselves.”

This is the beginning of Andre Mauroi’s article about the French poet Jules Michelet, in the excellent book of the anthology of Mauroi’s works “The Three Dumas. Literary portraits.”

I admit, I always reread it with interest and pleasure. A subtle and intelligent literary analysis, a lot of interesting information about French history and literature, one of the four great literatures that formed the foundation of the entire world literature. The other three are English, German and Russian literature.

I am expressing my purely personal and equally purely unprofessional opinion.

But although Mauroi provides evidence for his statement, one can hardly fully agree with him, because the point is not the excessive activity of the widows of writers and poets, but something completely different:

Does this widow have any talent as a writer or poet?

If there is, then her talent creates a wonderful setting for the works of a deceased poet or writer.

If not, then yes, I completely agree with Mauroi’s statement.

That is, the emphasis should be shifted from the “hyperactivity” of widows, to the presence or absence of their LITERARY TALENT TOO!

Although, I admit for the second time, talents and widowhood somehow don’t go together.

It’s understandable. Unfortunately, men with talent rarely, very rarely, married talented women. It is clear and even obvious WHY.

Here, the innate, genetically recorded difference between the female and male sex is fully manifested.

Women have a priority character trait – COMMITMENT TO MISSION!
Men have a character trait as a priority – COMMITMENT to THEMSELVES, their own ego!

(I wrote an article with a similar title a long time ago).

Pushkin’s wife was just a beautiful female, empty-headed and completely indifferent to literature in general and poetry in particular. IT’S HIS CHOICE!

But this is not the most dangerous thing, going back to Mauroi’s statement.

It is much more dangerous when the widow of a poet, only on the basis of the “fact of life” – sharing a bed together, suddenly becomes imbued with the belief that THIS is WHAT made her a talent and a legislator of literary, moral and all other fashions.

After such a lengthy preface, I turn to the actual topic, more briefly.

Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of Osip Mandelstam. She once wrote a short critical article about Nikolai Erdman’s play “Suicide”, or rather about his sad fate. I can’t say that this review somehow attracted my interest, there is a direct quote from Erdman with a rude name for buttocks, which is already disgusting, but I was outraged by Nadezhda Mandelstam’s words about Ilf and Petrov, which reflected either her complete stupidity or her progressive senility.

At the very beginning of her opus, Mandelstam mentions a certain handful of Soviet intellectuals who remembered “humanism”, without mentioning a single name, at least for concretization. So “THEY”, these “humanist intellectuals”, remain unknown to us shadows of humanism, like the scene of Orpheus’s descent into the kingdom of Hades, behind the shadow of his wife Eurydice (beautiful music in Gluck’s opera of the same name!).

A quote about “THEM” from the Mandelstam review. The time described is the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties of the Soviet Union:

“The first priority was to expose them to ridicule in literature. Ilf and Petrov took up this task and settled the “soft-bodied” in the “Voronya Sloboda”. Time has erased the specifics of these literary characters, and no one will now think that a sad idiot who sticks to his wife who abandoned him should have typified the main features of an intellectual. A reader of the sixties, reading the immortal work of TWO YOUNG SAVAGES, is completely unaware of where their satire is directed and what they are mocking.”

Personally, not in the sixties, but later, the idea of bullying the real intelligentsia of that or any other time did not occur to me in any way. “Them” is the plural of “intellectuals” – Mandelstam probably did not remember the novel “The Little Golden Calf” at all, because, according to Ostap: “I’m the only one of the three who’s intelligent.”

Who else in Mandelstam’s mind was an intellectual in the “Voronya Sloboda”? In my mind, it was Lokhankin who became firmly associated with a kind of “Prometheus”, a professional loafer, a brute husband (according to his wife, Jenny von Westphalen) and a provocateur Karl Marx. This is the true prototype of Vasisuali Andreevich!

And by no means a true intellectual is Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, who bravely defended scientists from Stalinist informers and murderers, who were already being prepared for another bloody spectacle of the crucifixion on the five-pointed star of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the Kumach mise en scene of the victorious march of the hegemon class to the “yawning heights” of socialism. And there were intellectuals at that terrible time who voted with their feet against the omnipotent, multimillion servile meanness and snitching, or cleverly fought them under the guise of loyalty to leaders and teachers.

M.Gorky, for example, described in “Untimely Thoughts” all the base abomination and meanness of the behavior of the unbridled slaves who seized the Winter Palace.

How could a sane woman write next to an “Immortal work” (WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY TRUE!) the vile words of “YOUNG SAVAGES”???

SAVAGES DO NOT WRITE IMMORTAL WORKS, they do not even know how to write, but only gorge their own kind!

Answer: To put it mildly, only a senile woman who had completely lost her mind could write such crazy nonsense, and therefore imagined herself to be the BRILLIANT moralizing widow of a poet who died prematurely and went mad.

24 X 2025

P.S. Examples that are the opposite of my statement:

Maria Sklodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie

Irene Curie and Frédéric Joliot-Curie

Pelageya Fedorovna Shaine and Grigory Abramovich Shaine

I wanted to write down Nina Vasilyevna Varzar, an astrophysicist, and Dmitry Shostakovich, but I couldn’t find any of her achievements in astrophysics.

That’s all I know about the marriages of two talented people.

Talented women often remained unmarried, such as the outstanding theoretical physicist Lisa Meitner and mathematician Emmy Netter.

I would be grateful to those who wish and know other examples.