Pushkin has the cold Onegin reject the letter of the naive, emotional Tatiana. He, and therefore his readers, interpreted the rational Onegin’s attitude as a fatal mistake. Apparently, Tchaikovsky decided not to repeat Onegin’s error, and he responded to Milyukova’s letter and feelings. He married her.
It happened very quickly. Three months passed between her first letter and their wedding, and it ended in total disaster: right after the wedding, Tchaikovsky felt deep revulsion for his wife and eventually ran away.
No one doubts today that Tchaikovsky’s marriage influenced his composing Eugene Onegin. But why did the homosexual Tchaikovsky marry in the first place?
What exactly do we know about Tchaikovsky’s sexual orientation? As a young musician in the Soviet Union, I heard two oft-repeated rumors: one, that Tchaikovsky was homosexual, and two, that because he was, Alexander III (or his entourage) forced him to commit suicide.
The second rumor appears to have no solid documentary proof, while the number of accounts confirming the first rumor keeps growing. Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality can be now considered a proven fact, despite the continuing attempts in Russia to deny it.12
Certainly, Tchaikovsky’s sex life, like everyone’s, influenced his worldview and his work (and vice versa). However, it was kept in the closet and thus artificially separated from his artistic output. Now it has become clearer how his creative strategies were dictated by his sexual orientation. In the West, where scholars started writing about the sex life of geniuses and about Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality in particular long ago, there are two theories.
The first, which prevailed from the early twentieth century to the 1990s, depicted Tchaikovsky’s homosexual life in tsarist Russia in an exclusively tragic light. Allegedly, Tchaikovsky lived in constant fear of exposure, which would have destroyed his career and life (as happened, for example, in 1895 to Oscar Wilde in England). The composer, according to this theory, unsuccessfully attempted to rid himself of his “perversion,” suffered terribly, and therefore wrote tormented and “pathological” music.
This theory, accepted by music critics and many biographers, reflected the views of the mainstream majority that homosexuality was a “disease.” It suited Western music scholars, too, for it helped to explain what they interpreted as overheated “camp” emotiveness and “incorrectness” (as compared to the classical Austro-German symphonic tradition) of Tchaikovsky’s music.
But starting in the late 1990s, as a result of shifts in public opinion toward sexual minorities, the West (and particularly American academic circles) attempted a revisionist view of Tchaikovsky’s image as a homosexual.
According to this new interpretation, Tchaikovsky’s homosexual sex life, which began at the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence (where his classmates included such subsequently notorious homosexuals as Prince Vladimir Meshchersky and the poet Alexei Apukhtin), gradually settled down, and he was satisfied with it and even happy. It was an easy leap now to maintain that generally Tchaikovsky was “a reasonably happy man.”13
This version, which also forcefully refuted charges of hysteria and pathology in Tchaikovsky’s music, rested largely on two main considerations. First, its proponents claimed that Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century was, contrary to popular opinion, quite tolerant of homosexuality, having more in common with San Francisco a hundred years later than with contemporary Victorian London.
As proof, these American musicologists referred to the very kindly attitude of Alexander II, and then of Nicholas II, to Prince Meshchersky, a prominent conservative journalist of the era whose homosexuality was no secret in the highest circles of St. Petersburg.
The love of the Romanovs for Tchaikovsky goes without saying. Both Alexander III and his wife melted from his music. Alexander called Eugene Onegin his favorite opera. In 1888, the emperor awarded Tchaikovsky a lifetime pension of 3,000 rubles in silver annually.
Basically, the Romanovs perceived Tchaikovsky as their composer laureate, creating music for various ceremonial occasions (including a special cantata for the coronation of Alexander III) as well as church music at the emperor’s personal request. The familial love of Tchaikovsky’s music was passed on to Alexander III’s son, Nicholas II.
Another source for this new theory of Tchaikovsky as a happy person, especially in his later years, are the memoirs of people who knew him in that period and often saw him “animated and full of life.” Modest Tchaikovsky’s evidence has great weight in this regard; the composer’s younger brother wrote a fundamental biography, The Life of Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky, published in the early twentieth century. Modest stressed how “cheerful and lively” the composer was in his final days.
But Modest, author of the libretti for his brother’s operas Queen of Spades and Iolanthe—and, like his brother, a homosexual, as evinced in his frank unfinished autobiography—had an agenda. He wanted to refute, without saying so outright, the rumors of Tchaikovsky’s suicide, at that time already circulating in Russian musical circles; they were elicited in part by the fact that the composer’s last work was his tragic Sixth (“Pathétique”) Symphony, which many contemporaries considered a requiem for himself.
Modest, however, spoke of Tchaikovsky’s “hysteria” in the biography and noted his “out-of-the-ordinary nervousness,” adding, “according to some contemporary scientists, genius is a kind of psychosis.”14 (Modest was referring to the influential French psychiatrist of the period, Théodule Ribeaux, fashionable in Russia, too, who wrote in one of his popular works, “The character of hysterical patients can change like the pictures in a kaleidoscope … the most constant thing about them is their inconsistency. Yesterday they were cheerful, sweet, and polite; today they are gloomy, irritable, and inaccessible.”)15
Tchaikovsky’s doctor, Vassily Bertenson, also stressed the composer’s “extreme nervousness,” which forced him to lie awake at night “with the sense of overwhelming horror.”16 Lacking Prozac in those days, Tchaikovsky smoked “insatiably” (he had begun smoking at the age of fourteen), adding powerful doses of alcohol. According to Dr. Bertenson, the composer “abused cognac and there were periods, his brothers said, when he was on the verge of real alcoholism.”17
Alina Briullova, who was close to Tchaikovsky for many years, confirmed that “he truly was a man with sick nerves,” and had “a definite neurosis, that sometimes grew acute to the point of inexpressible suffering: a burning, causeless ennui, which he could not shake, an inability to control his jangling nerves, a fear of people … it tormented him terribly and poisoned his life.”18
The psychiatrist Ribeaux described this type as having “sudden flares of anger and indignation, uncontrolled delights, fits of despair, explosions of crazy merriment, impulses of strong attachment, unexpected moments of tenderness or fits of temper, during which they, like spoiled children, stamp their feet and break furniture.”
The best illustration for that page from a psychiatrist’s treatise is this excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s December 1877 letter to his brother Anatoly (first published by Valery Sokolov), describing the scene the composer made at his faithful servant, Alexei Safronov. “I suspected that there was something wrong with his genital member. I kept pestering him about how things were. He resisted. I suddenly grew furious, tore at my tie and shirt, broke a chair and so on. When I was indulging in these strange gymnastic exercises, my eyes suddenly met his. He was so terrified, he was looking at me so piteously, completely pale, he kept saying ‘What’s the matter with you, calm down,’ and so on, that I instantly did.”19