Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

Expanding the gender field for his self-expression, Tchaikovsky appropriated Milyukova’s behavior and letters. (Sokolov points out that even after he left Milyukova, Tchaikovsky continued using her letters as material for his work: the lyrics of at least one song in his vocal cycle op. 60 are a paraphrase of her words.) It was no accident that he began working on the opera with the episode in which Tatiana writes to Onegin. That scene is one of the opera’s emotional and musical peaks. Tatiana’s “gasp” as she anxiously awaits Onegin’s response—“O my God! How miserable, how pathetic am I!”—is Tchaikovsky’s emotion.

Tchaikovsky’s strategy in Eugene Onegin is complex: his autobiographical “I” is divided into the shy but strong Tatiana and the fiery but elegiac young poet Lensky.²⁹ Turgenev was the first to note that Lensky in the opera is a much more formidable presence than in the work by Pushkin, who treated Lensky sympathetically but with irony. Tchaikovsky, contrary to widespread presumption, could be ironic in his music. But there isn’t a trace of irony in his attitude toward Lensky. He admires him. Where Pushkin saw reason for mockery, Tchaikovsky elevates Lensky to a tragic pedestal.

The best example of this is Lensky’s aria before his duel with Onegin. Pushkin makes Lensky’s poem before his death a parody of the Romantic clichés of the time, but there is no parody in the music. The aria is the most popular number in the opera and the most famous tenor aria in Russian music. (I doubt Pushkin could have imagined such a rendering of his parody.)

Tchaikovsky accomplished this radical emotional transformation of Pushkin’s text because of his identification with Lensky. For Tchaikovsky, Lensky is the victim par excellence, which was how he saw himself.

The choreographer George Balanchine, who came from the old St. Petersburg and had known people who had been Tchaikovsky’s friends, often told me that the composer considered himself a martyr, the victim of society that rejected and persecuted his sexual orientation, this essential component of his ego.³⁰ This was also the posthumous perception of Tchaikovsky’s image in Russian intellectual circles, succinctly summarized by Boris Asafyev, the best authority on the composer’s works: “Tchaikovsky, finally, was a martyr.”³¹

Describing Lensky, Pushkin tosses away a line that for Tchaikovsky could have been the key to his identification with Lensky; the poet mentions Lensky’s “fear of vice and shame.” The composer wrote about Lensky to Nadezhda von Meck: “Isn’t the death of an enormously talented young man over a fatal confrontation with society’s view of honor profoundly dramatic and touching?”

In Tchaikovsky’s opera the real “couple” is not Onegin and Tatiana, whose love is the center of Pushkin’s narrative, but Tatiana and Lensky.

According to Tchaikovsky, Lensky’s death is the consequence and result of his “otherness,” and Tatiana survives only because she submits to the dictates of high society and “bon ton,” even though that brings her to a spiritual breakdown.

This is a George Sandian interpretation of Pushkin’s work, coming via Herzen and Turgenev, whom the composer admired and read avidly. That is why Turgenev had reacted so sensitively to Tchaikovsky’s innovative promotion of Lensky to major protagonist (less perceptive contemporaries did not notice this radical shift).

Transforming Pushkin’s work into a Turgenevian novel with a hidden agenda, Tchaikovsky feared that his Onegin was doomed to remain a work “for a few” (although, like every author, he hoped for a miracle). The miracle took place: this was the opera that made Tchaikovsky the most popular Russian composer.

It happened gradually. First the Russian public bought the piano scores of Onegin. The demand for the sheet music grew steadily as more amateur singers began to study excerpts from the opera—primarily, Tatiana’s letter scene and Lensky’s aria before the duel. A typical reaction is in von Meck’s letter of September 24, 1883, to Tchaikovsky: “When I hear the duel scene on the piano, I cannot express in words what I feel. I come to a state where I can only say, ‘Ah, I can’t take it anymore!’ whereas when I read the same scene in Pushkin, I merely say, ‘Poor little Lensky!’ ”

Eugene Onegin started to sell out every performance. The box office success increased the number of new productions. The opera became the absolute champion on every index: popular love of Russian audiences, number of performances, and, subsequently, critical esteem. By now it could be said that Tchaikovsky’s interpretation is more entrenched than Pushkin’s original approach. Thus, Tolstoy’s attempt to nip the success of this opera in the bud failed, adding to the eternal quandary: how is the cultural canon formed, and who plays the more important role in the process—the experts or the consumers?

PART V

CHAPTER 12

Dostoevsky and the Romanovs