Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

In response, Turgenev, somewhat smugly, explained that although “some of your writing pleased me greatly, and others I did not like at all,” he had never laughed at them and expressed the rather ironic hope that Tolstoy’s “mental illness” had passed.

As for Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, he had already gotten the piano score and heard it performed by the singer Pauline Viardot:

It is without a doubt marvelous music; the lyrical, melodic parts are especially fine. But what a libretto! Just imagine, Pushkin’s descriptions of the protagonists are put into their mouths. For example, Pushkin says of Lensky: He sang of life’s end / At barely the age of 18, etc.

And in the opera, Lensky sings: I sing of life’s end, etc.

And it’s like that throughout.⁹

We know Tolstoy’s reaction to Turgenev’s letter from his own to his friend the poet Afanasy Fet: “Yesterday I received a letter from Turgenev, and decided to keep my distance from him. He’s such an unpleasant bully.” After that summary, the letter from the unpleasant bully should have sunk into oblivion. But no. Mysteriously, Turgenev’s review of the opera—and, interestingly, only the negative part, with the criticism of the libretto—instantly circulated throughout Moscow’s cultural circles.

The only person who could have given such publicity to Turgenev’s letter was Tolstoy himself. He was a master of manipulating public opinion. His wife once compared him to a spider catching wretched buzzing flies in his web. Tolstoy must have really enjoyed humiliating Tchaikovsky using Turgenev’s words.

The phenomenal speed with which the acidulous response traveled is explained by special circumstances. Music in Russia then (and now) played a marginal role compared to literature. But here was the opinion of one great writer in a letter to another about a new musical work based on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, one of the cornerstones of Russian culture. The opera was being rehearsed just then at the Moscow Conservatory under Nikolai Rubinstein. It was a readymade bit of gossip in a highbrow cultural wrapping, the best candy to relish in salons.

No one cared that the particular example Turgenev used to prove Tchaikovsky’s unforgivable distortion of Pushkin did not actually exist in the libretto. It was Turgenev’s error, made worse by his assertion that the whole libretto was like that. His accidental mistake, disseminated by Tolstoy, and thereby supported by his powerful authority, was about to undermine the reputation of the as yet unperformed opera (which was probably what Tolstoy intended) among the literature-centric Moscow public.

It had that effect, according to Modest Tchaikovsky, the composer’s brother, who was present at the premiere of Eugene Onegin on March 17, 1879. Modest recalled the “cold reception” from the public and tied it directly to the careless and unfair letter which “set the public against the composition” at the premiere. “The word ‘blasphemy’ raced around the audience. I remember hearing it several times that day.”¹⁰

The impression Turgenev’s letter made on newsmakers was so strong that even six years later, after the opera’s premiere at the Imperial Maryinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1884, an influential journalist, Alexei Suvorin, quoted Turgenev in his review in the popular newspaper New Times.

Tchaikovsky was in a panic. He tried inviting Tolstoy to a Moscow performance of his opera, for him to see that there was no “blasphemy,” but Tolstoy ignored the invitation and later recalled, after the composer’s death, “I think he was hurt that I did not attend his Eugene Onegin.”

Trying to control the damage, Tchaikovsky literally dictated an article to a friendly music critic, which proclaimed that it was too easy “to dismiss the new opera with a few loud phrases about the profanation of Pushkin.”¹¹ Following Tchaikovsky’s prompting, the critic tried to explain both the innovative character of the work (not a traditional opera but “lyrical scenes,” as Tchaikovsky called it) and the unusual degree of the composer’s psychological identification with Pushkin’s characters.

The article could only hint at what is now well known. In the spring of 1877, Tchaikovsky received several letters from one Antonina Milyukova, twenty-eight, a former student of the Moscow Conservatory who had fallen in love with him. The letters made a profound impression on the thirty-eight-year-old composer who consequently wrote the opera based on Eugene Onegin, where the plot revolves around the letter written by the infatuated provincial girl Tatiana to the social dandy Onegin.

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.