Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

What must have infuriated Tolstoy most was that Taneyev was a silent rebuke, the ideal Tolstoyan, a follower of his moral teachings: he lived simply, did not care about money, and did not chase after fame and glory; nor did he smoke or drink, and he was a vegetarian, like Tolstoy.

But while Tolstoy proclaimed in The Kreutzer Sonata that the key to the moral revival of humanity was celibacy, the writer himself remained a prisoner of sexual passions. And here was some musician (“All musicians are stupid,” Tolstoy said, “and the more talented the musician, the stupider”),²⁵ almost thirty years younger, for whom the problem simply did not exist.

Looking at Taneyev, the world-famed prophet and stern judge of tsars saw himself as pathetic and ridiculous. His bedroom was his gallows: although only he and his wife knew it, he feared that everyone knew (or guessed). His dilemma was an irresolvable contradiction between his writing and his lifestyle, a fundamental problem that eventually drove Tolstoy to flee his house in 1910 and contributed to his death that same year at the age of eighty-two.

CHAPTER 11

Tchaikovsky and Homosexuality

in Imperial Russia

A paradox mentioned frequently by contemporaries of Leo Tolstoy: that stern brute would burst into tears at the least provocation. He was particularly moved by sophisticated classical music, whose right to exist he always stubbornly denied: Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin.

The sole contemporary composer who could wring tears from the great writer was Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky. In December 1876 a private performance of Tchaikovsky’s music was arranged for Tolstoy at the Moscow Conservatory. The writer, listening to the soulful Andante from the First String Quartet, “began sobbing”¹ (according to Tchaikovsky), thereby pleasing the composer enormously.

Fired up by the idea of “gabbing” about music with Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy visited him several times, which made the composer (who considered Tolstoy a “semigod”) “terribly flattered and proud.”² But Tchaikovsky was a nervous and fragile person, and these contacts with Tolstoy ultimately brought “nothing but difficulty and torment, like any acquaintance,”³ as he confessed in a letter to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck.

Tolstoy’s drive and Tchaikovsky’s neurotic reticence clashed. Right off the bat, Tolstoy ranted about Beethoven, putting Tchaikovsky off: “To lower an acknowledged genius to the level of their lack of understanding is a quality of intellectually limited people.”⁴

Paradoxically, Tolstoy, justly celebrated for the psychological insights in his work, did not do so well in person with Tchaikovsky. He did not notice—or simply ignored—the extreme nervousness of that small, delicate, and seemingly acquiescent man with his neat gray beard. That is obvious from Tolstoy’s later description of his meetings with the composer: “I think there was a bond between us.” (If there was anything, it was lingering irritation on the part of Tchaikovsky.)

Tolstoy pursued his uninvited expansion into Tchaikovsky’s realm, sending him an old edition of Russian folk songs, which he himself loved (he even figured out the piano accompaniment to one of them), with a suggestion that the composer write arrangements of them and with precise instructions how to do it: “In the Mozart-Haydn mode, not in the Beethoven-Schumann-Berlioz mode, so artificial and pretentious.”⁵

Bearing in mind Tchaikovsky’s shyness and his admiration for Tolstoy the writer, the response from the usually polite composer was uncharacteristically direct. Tchaikovsky wrote Tolstoy that the folk songs he had sent him (“an amazing treasure,” Tolstoy had called it) were recorded “by an untutored hand and so bear only the traces of their original beauty.”⁶ He flatly refused to execute Tolstoy’s idea about arranging the songs.

Still, Tchaikovsky buffered his refusal in some pleasantries and a request for a photograph as a memento of their meetings. But the angered Tolstoy did not oblige with his photograph, even though he routinely sent out hundreds to fans, and began denigrating the composer’s works as an “artistic lie.” In 1894, after Tchaikovsky’s death, Tolstoy summed up his opinion of the composer this way: “So-so, one of the average ones.”⁷

In October 1878, Tolstoy wrote to Turgenev in Paris, complaining that he had been suffering a “mental breakdown” of late, overcome by “a complex feeling in which the main part is shame and fear that people are laughing at me … it seems to me that you are laughing at me, too.” At the end, Tolstoy asked an unexpected question: “What is Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin? I haven’t heard it yet, but I am very interested.”⁸

Everything about this letter is curious—Tolstoy’s admission of his psychological vulnerability as well as his inexplicable interest in the latest work by a composer he so disliked (the piano score of the opera had just appeared).