Introduction

It is hard to imagine how such a large—indeed impressive—number of letters, offi cial papers, and notes related to someone as beloved, famous, and familiar as Tchai kovsky could have remained, until recently, unknown. Moreover, it’s not as if these documents have been sitting, for more than a century, in an abandoned attic waiting for some lucky person to come along and discover them. On the contrary, they have been faithfully preserved at one of Russia’s most esteemed cultural institutions: the archive of the Pyotr Ilyich Tchai kovsky State House-Museum in Klin. Why then did these important documents remain either unpublished for many years or published only in part, with deliberate distortions and omissions? The reasons are simultane- ously public and private, cultural and political, specifi cally Russian and more or less general. Tchai kovsky’s monarchism, his adherence to the Russian Orthodox tradition, and his homosexuality have pre- sented, at different times, different but similarly uncomfortable topics for the composer’s biographers. Some taboos were implemented over the course of Tchaikov sky’s lifetime, others after his death in 1893, and most of them under the Soviet regime. The Soviet historians usually dismissed out of hand Tchai kovsky’s ardent patriotism toward Imperial Russia and his sincere loyalty to Al- exander III, whose patronage the composer enjoyed in his later years.1

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Needless to say, during the Soviet period, this kind of ideological “makeover” was methodically applied to all famous Russian fi gures of the past. In order to enter the Soviet pantheon, the Russian greats had to be purifi ed of their ideological and moral “errors.” In Tchai kovsky’s case, his respectful references to the Russian monarchy and its policies were deliberately erased from any public discussion of the composer’s life. As a result, the notifi cation letters of awards and gifts sent to Tchai kovsky from the offi ce of Alexander III were not published until recently.2 The same ideologically motivated approach was applied to his musical heritage. It is telling that in the Soviet Union, Tchaikov sky’s 1812 Overture (from 1880) was performed without its climactic section, the old Russian national anthem “God Save the Tsar” [Bozhe, Tsarya khrani]. The new and “improved” version of the famed overture was reworked with the help of a Soviet composer, Vissarion Shebalin, who replaced the “God Save the Tsar” section with the chorus “Glory” [Slav’sya] from Mikhail Glinka’s opera Ivan Susanin. In all likelihood, the irony of such a rearrangement would not have escaped the well- educated and intelligent Shebalin: the original title of Glinka’s opera had been A Life for the Tsar, and the original opening line of his chorus used to be “Glory to Our Tsar.”3 In similar fashion, Tchai kovsky’s sacred works, such as the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (1878) and the All-Night Vigil (1882), were excluded from performance in the atheist Soviet Union, and his contribution to the art of Russian Ortho- dox music was consciously ignored.4 The central prohibition concerning Tchai kovsky’s life has been his homosexuality—public discussion of the topic has been taboo in his home country for almost a century. Ironically, in early Soviet publications from the archive of the Tchaikov sky House-Museum in Klin, the editors regarded the composer’s homosexuality as a matter that should not be excluded from scholarly study of his life.5 But aside from a few such exceptions, Tchai kovsky’s intimate life was zealously concealed by his family members, by au courant music scholars, and by the offi cials of such opposing regimes as the Romanov empire and Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the eyes of the authorities, it would have been unthinkable to accept the idea that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikov sky, Russia’s national treasure, was a homosexual. Therefore, he wasn’t. Outside of Russia, also, the issue was not properly addressed for a long time.

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Though the fact of Tchai kovsky’s homosexuality was fairly known in the West and often mentioned in studies of the composer, his biographers did not elaborate on it any further.6 In general, even apart from this point, an interval between the fi ftieth anniversary (in 1943) of Tchaikov sky’s death and the last decades of the twentieth century cannot be considered particularly fruitful for research on Tchaikov sky in the West.7 A signifi cant exception during this period of calm seas is David Brown’s monumental four-volume study of the composer’s life and music from his early to his fi nal years.8 The discourse on Tchaikov sky started to pick up steam in the late twentieth century, when homosexuality and related issues had fi nally become a legitimate part of scholarly inquiry. It has notably benefi ted from the most recent historical and sociological methods in biographical studies and put the issue of Tchaikov sky’s sexuality in the relevant sociocultural context. As it happened, the new direction in Tchai kovsky scholarship has been additionally energized by a whiff of sensa- tionalism resulting from the publication of articles by an émigré musi- cologist from the Soviet Union, Aleksandra Orlova.9 According to her interpretation of the circumstances surrounding Tchai kovsky’s death, he committed suicide in order to avoid a public homosexual scandal that was about to break. Orlova’s version has provoked “the great suicide debate,” which has involved energetic participants from opposite camps.10 Years later, Richard Taruskin, who refuted the idea of the suicide plot in favor of the offi cial “death in the time of cholera” scenario, expertly provided analysis of the debate within its broader setting.11 Yet another expert in Tchaikov sky studies, Roland John Wiley, has also summed up the pros and cons of the theories about Tchaikov sky’s death and come to a more cautious conclusion: “the singular failing of the cholera theory is that it cannot disprove that Tchai kovsky poisoned himself with something similar in its effect.”12 The most comprehensive study of Tchaikov sky, his homosexuality, and the question of his death has been produced by Alexander Poz- nansky, who had the chance to examine, back in the 1980s, the origi- nals of Tchai kovsky’s intimate letters, kept in the Tchai kovsky House- Museum Archive. Poznansky effi ciently used his fi ndings to shape the biographical narrative in his book, Tchai kovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man.13 He followed this infl uential volume with a number of publications focused on discrediting the suicide theory.

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Meanwhile, the Tchai kovsky archive began more and more actively to publish previously unknown materials, including some concealed or censored letters of the composer. These commendable, though arguably belated, efforts led to the publication of Neizvestnyi Chai kov- skii—the original for our translation.14 Unquestionably, this edition of the archival documents accompanied by precise references to pri- mary sources fi lled in conspicuous gaps in both public knowledge and research. Both the Russian and English versions are composed of correspondence between Tchai kovsky’s parents; letters from his governess, Fanny Dürbach; Tchai kovsky’s letters to his brothers, friends, and associates; and some offi cial papers. Taken together, they remind us that Tchai- kovsky was a product of a cultural environment that encompassed not only important characteristics of his own time but also sensibilities of the preceding century.15 The fi rst part of the book, the letters of the composer’s parents, offers an intimate glimpse into the everyday life of a family from the Russian gentry in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century. More im- portantly, it brings us closer to understanding Pyotr Tchai kovsky as a man born into this milieu. Regarding the fi rst point, these letters, written between April 1833 and September 1851, clearly demonstrate an established social practice of privileged classes everywhere in Europe, including the vast Russian Empire, where travel and letter writing came—literally—with the territory. For the members of the Russian nobility, frequent travel, either in government service or for personal reasons, shaped in many ways the dynamics of relations with family and friends. Letters, of course, were the common form of communication during periods of absence. At the same time, the practice of correspondence became the best answer not only to the diffi culties of separation but also to the aesthetic challenge of writing a text and went hand in hand with the sentimental style in literature. Similar to its visual model of the family portrait eulogizing emotional ties between husbands and wives, and parents and children, an epistolary adaptation of the sen- timentalist trend also relied on an image of the family as emotional unit.16 Metaphorically speaking, within the domestic universe of Sen- timentalism, the familiar letters acted as a reassuring representation of the gravitational force that held all family members together.

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For families that were well off, writing letters didn’t require a special occasion, but was part of daily activities and as customary as a cup of tea in the morning and a shot of stronger drink in the evening. Often, because of irregular mail collection, people would stretch the writing of a letter over a number of days, thereby blurring the distinction between letter and diary. One historian has described letter-writing prac- tices of the period this way: “Letters, between parents and children, siblings and spouses, use emotional declarations, nicknames, conver- sational language, and occasional vulgarity to express and create intimacy between writer and audience. Family news, gossip and business are interspersed with descriptions of emotional and physical health and queries about that of others. Although the letters encompass a number of distinct relationships, a common concern with domestic harmony and emotional intimacy marks the correspondence as a whole.”17 Though it would be a stretch to claim that the correspondence of Tchai kovsky’s parents belongs to the literary genre of familiar letters,18 the literariness of these texts (especially those penned by Pyotr Ilyich’s father) is rooted in the same tradition of epistolary writing that fl ourished among all distinguished Russian writers, such as Nikolay Karamzin, Vasily Zhukovsky, Pyotr Vyazemsky, and many others. Like his renowned contemporaries, Ilya Petrovich Tchai kovsky used various narrative devices to create a lively picture for the enjoyment of his reader, who happened to be his wife, Aleksandra Andreevna Tchaikovskaya.

Today I can picture you, my Angel, if not in St. Petersburg itself, at least very near there. I can feel your heart beating when you think how far it is to the last way-station and how slowly your coachman is driv- ing. Kolya is showering you with questions: “Isn’t this St. Petersburg? Mommy, over there I can see a lot of churches, it must be St. Peters- burg, mommy.” “No, darling, it’s Tsarskoye Selo.” [ . . . ] There you all are, stopping for a rest, shaking the dust from your clothes, hurrying to get washed. [ . . . ] You are being offered food, but you’re not hun- gry. Finally you’re seated again in the carriage, moving fast, although it seems slow to you.

It is not diffi cult to notice that the language and tone employed with considerable grace by Pyotr Tchaikov sky’s parents echoes a literary model popular among educated Russians through the late eighteenth

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and early nineteenth centuries, and represented foremost by the doyen of Russian Sentimentalism, Nikolay Karamzin. In accordance with the culture of sensibility, their letters are permeated with expressions of love, tender reproaches, and descriptions of feelings, as in the following example written by Aleksandra Andreevna to her husband-to-be.

May is almost over, and you will be back in August, I hope. So there will still be those two cruel months to wait; June and July! Oh dear! If they would only fl y by! I have so much to tell you that I can’t pos- sibly write it!! It’s so dull and dreary without you. I just can’t wait for the moment when I will see you and convince you of the sincerity of my devotion to you! How happy I will be then! In your letter from Voronezh you really hurt me—you wrote that you were even sure that I don’t love you, and that I couldn’t love you—but who then could force me to give you my hand and my heart as long as I live?

Letters from the age of Sentimentalism are embellished with emotional exclamations, characteristic diction, and distinct stylistic devices, which were employed to convey the sensitivity of the author, whether it was a novelist or an epistolarian. This kind of emotional refi nement is expressed, in the words of a scholar of Russian literature, by “means of a highly stylized language and specifi c lexical markers, such as selected epithets to describe a person’s psychological traits, the physical repercussion of certain mental conditions (such as sighs, tears, paleness, faintness), and culminating in highly emotional utterances.”19 Many passages in Ilya Tchai kovsky’s letters reveal his predilection for these fi gures of speech and verbal gestures, such as this one written to his wife:20

My Angel! When I said goodbye to you yesterday evening, I had to hold back my tears, because I didn’t want to seem weak in the eyes of the people around me, but no matter how hard I tried, the tears welled up—and I had to keep my eyes closed while I was trying to comfort Petya who was crying inconsolably because his mommy didn’t take him to St. Petersburg. While I was seeing you off, as well as the whole procession following you, I felt so keenly the pain of separation that I could hardly contain myself.

While “mommy” visits St. Petersburg, her son Pyotr (Petya) does what anyone of his time would do: he writes letters. The very fi rst epis-

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tolary example of Pyotr Ilyich Tchai kovsky’s handwriting, included in his parents’ correspondence, looks like a zigzagging outline of non- verbal exclamation. His sensitive father helpfully “translates” the boy’s scribble: “Dear Mommy, I’m well, don’t forget to bring me toys and candy.” Another following message from the future composer is, as might be expected, musical in nature: “Sasha and Petya,” their father reports, “have composed a song, ‘Our Mother is in St. Petersburg.’ ” When Aleksandra Tchaikovskaya returned home, she brought her children not only toys and candy but also a governess, Fanny Dürbach, who would remain part of the Tchai kovskys’ “emotional unit” until the family left Votkinsk in September of 1848. Although “Fanny’s reign” lasted less than fi ve years, Tchai kovsky scholars agree that the composer’s fi rst mentor had signifi cant infl u- ence on the formation of his personality and his general development. What kind of infl uence, we may ask? The second section of this volume, which contains Fanny Dürbach’s letters, gives us some answers. Especially telling is the information about the reading materials she used in her classes with the Tchaikov- sky children:

Apart from “L’Education Maternelle” by Mlle. Amable Tastu, I also had “Family Education” by Mrs. Edgeworth in several volumes. In natural history, I also had a small illustrated copy of Buffon. For reading: the “Tales of Guizot” and also Schmidt’s “Canon,” and my class books, which I also used. One of our favorite volumes was “Cele- brated Children” by Michel Masson; we read it and recounted it in the evenings and on Saturdays.21

Just like Tchai kovsky’s parents’ letters, the reading list of the future composer belongs to a particular cultural paradigm ushered in by the age of Sensibility. The fi rst author in Fanny Dürbach’s pedagogical library is Amable Tastu.22 During her long life, Tastu proved herself a prolifi c writer, working in many genres and fi elds such as children’s literature, the pedagogical treatise, historical writings, short fi ction, literary criticism, travelogue, and translation. However, Tastu’s early reputation as a French woman of letters was established in 1826 when she published her fi rst collection of poetry; this was praised by the foremost literary critic of the time, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who characterized one of her poems as a model of the “domestic elegy.” In

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one of her later pieces of literary criticism, Tastu eloquently elaborated on the poetic virtues of sensibility, claiming that “sentimental poetry expresses more than domestic affection or resignation,” but also awak- ens our sympathies for the sorrows of others.23 The “Tales of Guizot” read by the children in Tchai kovsky’s home could have been one of the French editions of Moral Tales or Popular Tales written by Pauline Guizot (née Pauline de Meulan),24 the fi rst wife of the celebrated French historian, political thinker, and states- man François Guizot.25 Before her marriage in 1812, Pauline de Meu- lan was already known as a respectable woman of letters, contributor to the periodical press, and an author of sentimental novels. But her union with Guizot created a husband-and-wife team that had a great impact on the intellectual and political climate of early nineteenth- century France. Together, they published the six-volume collection Les Annales de l’éducation, which included many of Pauline Guizot’s stories and articles on morality and education. By all accounts, she had an enormous infl uence on her husband and, according to his biographer, Gabriel de Broglie, taught him to value emotions and sentimental intimacy.26 Another author on Fanny’s list for the Tchai kovsky children is Ma- ria Edgeworth.27 She wrote one of the most famous sentimental novels, Castle Rackrent, which stands in the same row as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, and Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise. We don’t know exactly which of Mrs. Edgeworth’s works Fanny included in her pedagogical practice, but most likely she used collections of children’s stories as well as Edgeworth’s Practical Education, a theory of education in which she made sensible use of the ideas introduced by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The information provided by Fanny Dürbach further illuminates the cultural landscape of Tchaikov sky’s upbringing, which served as an aesthetic background for him throughout his entire creative life. For many reasons, Tchai kovsky’s reunion with his “old teacher and friend” on the eve of 1893 held a special meaning for both of them. We can also say that it was symbolic, as this turned out to be the composer’s fi nal year. Their fi rst and last meetings, separated by almost fi fty years, served as emotional bookends to Tchai kovsky’s sentimental

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education. After seeing Fanny Dürbach in Montbéliard, Tchai kovsky wrote to his younger brother and future biographer Modest:

Upon her return to Montbéliard, she spent the next 42 years living quietly and uneventfully. And her younger years, so different from the rest of her life in Montbéliard, remained completely undisturbed in her memory. At times, I have been so vividly transported to that distant past that it felt somewhat eerie but also sweet; we both were holding back tears all the time.28

During his visit, Tchaikov sky learned that all these years Fanny Dür- bach had safeguarded his childhood notebooks, which contained com- positions, writing assignments, and drawings as well as letters from his family members. In Fanny’s own words, “those precious letters” and notebooks possessed great sentimental value for her. As she later expressed herself to Modest Tchai kovsky, “if time destroys every thing, [ . . . ] it has no power over those sincere affections which, like our most treasured possessions, we will carry with us beyond the grave.”29 After Pyotr Ilyich Tchai kovsky’s death, Fanny Dürbach kept up an active correspondence with Modest Ilyich. She provided him with a substantial portion of her archive and promised to bequeath the re- maining documents to the Tchai kovsky House-Museum in Klin, then just established.30 Pyotr Ilyich Tchai kovsky’s own letters reproduced in the third section of this volume are an especially valuable and engaging addition to the corpus of previously published correspondence between the composer and his numerous addressees. They represent only a frac- tion of Tchaikov sky’s correspondence, and naturally should be read in the context of the entire body of his letters and diaries. Considering that Tchaikov sky left more than fi ve thousand presently known letters and presumably a few hundred missing ones, the term “man of letters” characterizes him quite literally. As numerous examples from the composer’s epistolary output testify, he possessed natural gifts of verbal expression. After all, his childhood teacher, Fanny Dürbach, had reason to call him “my dear little poet” and even believed that his main talents lay in literature. A particular set of Tchai kovsky’s letters goes as far as to echo a literary genre—the epistolary novel—which was very popular in the eighteenth century but had fallen out of favor

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by his time.31 I am referring here to the composer’s remarkable correspondence with Nadezhda von Meck, which mirrors the literary con- vention of a long-distance love affair unfolding through writing. Their relationship developed exclusively through letters, and they never actu- ally met in person.32 Furthermore, in his letters to von Meck, his “best friend” and patroness, Tchaikov sky often uses the rhetorical devices favored by Sentimentalists, as in this instance:

You ask whether I can call you my friend. Could you truly doubt this; is it possible that you did not see within the lines of my letters how deeply I value your friendship, how sincere and most warm are my friendly feelings towards you. How pleased I would be at some time to show you, not in words but in deeds, the full measure of my gratitude and my love for you!33

In later years, such stylistic features as emotional declarations, dra- matic questions, and expressions of feeling appear less and less in Tchai kovsky’s writing. However, the overall “rhetorical orchestration” of his letters underlines their affi nity with the epistolary practice of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Russia. In the spirit of that tradition, the composer’s letters speak of intimacy and the atmosphere of trust conveyed by both sensibility in subject matter and style. Simi- lar to Karamzin and his younger contemporaries, such as Konstantin Batyushkov, Vyazemsky, and Alexander Pushkin, Tchai kovsky, over time, moved in his letters from lofty observation and emotional out- pourings to daily reports casually peppered with a different kind of emotional release—obscenities and self-deprecating vulgarities. In a letter to his publisher, Pyotr Jurgenson, for example, Tchai kovsky re- fers to his music as excrement:

Well, my dear fellow, for some time now I have been feeling that this miniature march is just a miniature piece of shit. To be frank, I would like to discard this garbage altogether. [ . . . ] Yours P. Tchai kovsky (Begetter of the little piece of shit)

Modest Tchai kovsky provides a valuable commentary on the reasons behind the changes in his brother’s writing style:

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He [Tchai kovsky] preferred the system of brief and imperfect notes, because in reading through the diaries of his childhood and youth, in which he had gone more fully into his thoughts and emotions, he had felt somewhat ashamed. The sentiments and ideas which he found so interesting, and which once seemed to him so great and important, now appeared empty, meaningless and ridiculous, and he resolved in the future only to commit facts to paper without any commentary. Disillusioned by their contents, he destroyed all his early diaries.34

Needless to say, however, Tchai kovsky’s desire to convey his sentiments to the world was not undermined by his embarrassment over his youthful attempts to do it verbally. He had long been aware that the language best suited for him to express human feelings was music. “Where words leave off, music begins,” he asserted, quoting Heinrich Heine. Comparing the process of composing to writing a poem, he elaborated further: “the difference is just that music has incomparably more powerful resources and a more subtle language at its disposal for expressing a thousand different nuances of inner feeling.”35 Tchai kovsky’s explicit attention to “nuances of inner feeling” should be seen not only as an indicator of his personal emotional traits but also as the artistic attitude that corresponds to the fundamental idea of Sentimentalism: an intrinsic ability of all people to feel and to love is the key to higher truth and harmonious society. The ideas of Senti- mentalism certainly did not vanish with the end of the eighteenth century and even with the related period of early Romanticism. A number of celebrated artists and writers of the nineteenth century, such as Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky, inherited the rich culture of feeling that had been instigated by the “cult of sentiment.”36 Tchai kovsky’s emotional sensibilities as an artist, as well as his appeal to the emotional sensibilities of his listeners, were also shaped by the cultural paradigm of Sentimentalism. The collection of letters published in this volume provides a new ground for understanding the composer’s con- nection to that European movement. They also allow us to take a new look at Tchai kovsky’s rather infamous sentimentality. For it is important to see this not just as the refl ection of his psychological and sexual makeup but as the manifestation of his loyalty to Sentimentalism—a positive culture of feeling. Arguably, such an approach can offer yet another perspective in our search for new insights into Tchaikov sky’s life and music.

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