The horrible childhood of a famous pianist: the torture of a father and the desire to turn a daughter into a child prodigy

By the 1980s, everyone in the Soviet Union had lost their minds to the Wunderkinds. The talented children received a lot of attention, their destinies and careers were closely monitored by the media and they were diligently surrounded. They were unofficially called Indigo Children, and officially praised and said it was the result of successful experiments by Soviet teachers, according to Kulturologia.

1988 The Soviet Union was shocked by the news that the pianist Wunderkind fled his father. The teenager told reporters that he beat her, made fun of him, demanded impossible things from him. The girl’s hands were in such a condition that it was doubtful that she would ever become a professional pianist. Due to the loading and incorrect posture, his hands could not perform the correct movements required for a professional call.

Bloody piano

2006 Already an adult Polina Osetinskaya wrote a book about her childhood, in which she revealed much more cruel details than those written by the Soviet press. The book is called Goodbye Sadness, and it instantly became a best-seller.

The book begins with a terrible memory, true, not the most terrible. 12 m. Polina, with a figure that had already begun to form, welcomed, served tea for her father’s guests: five intelligent men. Suddenly, his father demanded that he play Chopin. Faster, even faster!

The girl complained that her arm started to hurt. Then the father tore her dress off, hit it several times where it screwed up, hit her head on the radiator. Then the female figure of the female figure was brought to the piano again in a panty and told to continue calling. No intelligent guest said a word to O. Osetinski, everyone continued drinking tea and blood dripped from the keys of the instrument.

This event became one of the last drops that led the girl to run away from home. O. Osetinski boasted that he was teaching using his supposedly unique double stress method, which turned an ordinary girl into a child prodigy. Nobody questioned what are the peculiarities of this method and if the stress does not harm the child.

Heart attack and hunger fainting

One of Polina’s earliest memories is of her father stealing it back from her mother. Her parents divorced when she was very young. They took turns stealing their daughters and hiding them. Finally, as is well known, he stayed to live with his father. No one thought the girls were waiting for a year of bullying.

Besides Polina, O. Osetinski had two more daughters. One fled the house after another scandal, it is true that only the father caused the scandals. The same day that the daughter left the house, the father brought the future mother of Polina, the sixth wife. He probably didn’t question why his wives and daughters were running away from O. Osetinski.

There was constant music in his house and for 5 years. Polina was enrolled in music school, the girl had absolute audition. True, the father did not like the teacher’s teaching methods, once he went to talk to her, the teacher was taken to the hospital after a heart attack. After that, his father began teaching Polin himself; he thought his knowledge was enough.

To raise a super daughter, O. Osetinski almost stopped feeding her. For breakfast, the girl often only drank water with a little vinegar and some vitamins. For lunch, a little honey cheese or tenderloin not fully baked without garnish, for dinner – a glass of kefir. The hungry school girl was passing out, but no one was worried about it. In addition, during the meal, the father applied the rule: eat in exactly two minutes. What they failed to swallow during that time, they did not get anything else. In short, the father made his daughter starve.

O. Osetinski had a habit of taking Polina to a restaurant and sitting there until late at night. He had little time to sleep, but he was secretly able to eat something. Polina’s brother was given even less food, he became boxing champion, so the father thought that the boy had to endure even more strict discipline.

O. Osetinskis was looking for exclusive music teachers for his daughter, but everyone did not like the way her father communicated with them. The Poles had to visit teachers for certificates to organize concerts, but they actually taught him at home, according to a double stress methodology, on an empty stomach. Music, exercise for posture and relaxation of the hands and, again, music. He had a strict schedule and had practically no time to eat.

Father Gestapo

The Polins made terribly strict demands: a complex piece of music, which had to be called upon to play faster and faster, much faster than the composer indicated, for her to train. The works were not intended for the small hands of children, but there was no reason to object, so the father beat. Using her father’s little musical competence, Polina skipped some of the notes and arranged, improvised, playing in a way that kept her harmony and her fingers hit the keys.

Finally, convinced that the daughter’s nervous system needed a shock, the father added more exercise. Polina was worth running a few kilometers a day, skating, dancing. He enjoyed dancing and running on an empty stomach was a real pain. Polina’s favorite book at the time was Prisoners of Auschwitz.

Once, at the request of her father, the girl spent the night with her common teacher Vera Gornostayeva. Polina did not look very neat, so the teacher and her daughter came up with the idea of ​​taking a bath and washing their clothes. When Polina undressed, the teachers got sick: she looked terribly dirty, with dark spots on her body. When I started to wash, it turned out that those spots were blackened bruises, they covered practically the entire body. Still, the teacher went nowhere.

It was practically impossible to complain to my mother. Polina feared that even the bond she had kept secret would be broken. The girl called her mother from the pay phone after the night. Mom got a job at a music school that Polina attended so they could be seen more often. It is true that the meetings were brief.

O. Osetinskis seemed too small to be beaten, starved, countless insults to the direction of his daughter. He set it up against the wall, grabbed a tennis racket and a ball, and began throwing Polina in the face or chest with lightning speed. The twists and turns – a great man, he failed – he was to blame. Dad was perfect.

Interestingly, a hit saved Polina’s life. The father did not realize that the daughters had severe ear inflammation. Finally, noticing it, she hit her daughter’s head on the bench. Inflammation erupted, blood spilled with pus. Dad went out to watch soccer. A foreign woman called an ambulance and the doctors said that if there was not a hit on the bank, the girl would have died a few days later because blood had spilled on her brain. The woman who saw the hit didn’t tell anyone that her father had done it.

Everything is for the father

The fame of a daughter who was constantly acting was not the only thing that satisfied her father. Large sums of money were received after each concert. O. Osetinskis drank and treated friends and artists for that money. He especially liked drinking with famous personalities. Polina performed in torn sports pants; there was no time to sew and the new pants seemed an unnecessary luxury to his father.

From Polina’s concerts, the father had more than financial benefits. For those who admired Polina’s fame, she offered to teach her daughters according to her own methodology. I just have to ride with Polina after the concerts, her schedule is tight. Then, in the dark of the hotel room, Polina heard her father rape a normal teenage girl.

The girls cried, but there were no consequences … O. Osetinski knew how to intimidate, pressure, break the will of a child. Polina herself was too afraid of him to warn the girls and their parents. Many years later, he apologized to those girls. Still, it is difficult to see the guilt of a child bullied by an adult offender.

And externally, everything seemed perfect. In each interview, Polina spoke of a great relationship with her father, although in her mouth she often tasted the blood of her father’s slap. On stage, he had learned to smile: he would sit at the piano and immediately begin to smile, no matter what song he was playing. The news of the escape, when Polina was already an age that seemed to interest her father in the most horrible aspect, shocked the whole country.

I had to build myself from scratch

Long and long ago we suspected something was wrong. When the mother came to the school to pick up the documents, the principal handed her a blank book with her daughter’s grades, offered to write the grades there, and … congratulated her. At that time, Polina already had several dozen chronic illnesses, ranging from digestive problems, joints, heart disease, and more. When she was in the hospital due to exhaustion, her father began feeding her, but her stomach was already badly damaged. The girl had been thinking about suicide for a long time.

When Polina told her ordinary teachers, she advised her to run. Together with my mother, they all made a plan; it wasn’t easy to implement, but it still worked. O. Osetinski had many friends who believed in his every word. A woman with a daughter was accommodated by a family clergyman on the road with her mother. From there, he wrote a statement to the military in which he did not mention everything. The rape of other girls was masked by the vague word “fornication.”

The career of the pianist was not clear: her hands were severely damaged by constant exertion, and the psychological condition of the girl was difficult. Fortunately, a talented teacher taught her, and eventually Polina became a famous pianist. Later, his personal life turned out perfect.

Polina’s father gave many interviews accusing his daughter of defaming him, saying that she became a pianist only because she worked a lot with her as a child. He emigrated to the United States, where, using the name of his daughter, he tried to train pianists, but without much success. Hopefully he didn’t prepare them in the same way as the girls during Polina’s tour. He died in 2020. in the fall.