Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

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.