Revisiting Tchaikovsky's Supposed Suicide: Rebuttal

This article from the journal Gay, slaviane (Lit: Hey, Slavs!) is one among many works on Russian cultural history originally written by Russian émigré scholars, then translated into Russian and republished for an early 1990s Russian LGBTQ readership . “Revisiting Tchaikovsky’s Suicide” reflects debates around prerevolutionary Russian LGTBQ history occurring between Russian émigrés with different agendas. The signatories of this open letter, originally printed in English in 1981 in the American music periodical High Fidelity, are Nina Berberova, a major voice in American Russian émigré culture; Simon Karlinsky, an American scholar of Russian literary, intellectual, and cultural history born to Russian émigré parents and raised in the Manchurian city of Harbin; and the American Russian-music specialist Malcolm Hamirck Brown.

The text rebuts previous historical works on the death of Russian composer Petr Ilich Tchaikovsy in 1893—chief among them an article in the Russian émigré periodical New American (Novyi amerikanets) by Alexandra Orlova. Orlova, among others, sought to revise the canonical account of the composer’s death from cholera by presenting evidence that he committed suicide because he feared being outed as homosexual. Berberova, Karlinsky, and Brown attack what they see as Orlova’s falsifying historiography and erasure of LGBTQ history in Russia. They argue that, whether intentionally or merely through careless scholarship, Orlova constructs a false picture of the broader historical circumstances of Tchaikovsky’s death by suggesting that Russia just before the Bolshevik Revolution was so hostile to homosexuality that death was preferable to becoming publicly known as gay. Indeed, according to Orlova, Tchaikovsky’s closest familiars encouraged him to commit suicide when his homosexual affairs were brought to light—a suggestion to which he supposedly acquiesced. Orlova’s argument aligns with the official Soviet position on homosexuality, which emphasized the essential “un-Russianness” of being openly gay—a view some post-Soviet Russians and Russian émigrés continued to espouse. Supporting this assertion was a sanitized Russian, later Soviet, historical record that removed all traces of alternative sexual identities. Much of the Russian émigré scholarly community was offended by Karlinsky’s work uncovering LGBTQ elements in Russian cultural history, which they viewed as violence wrought on Russia’s cultural history by a fully Americanized Karlinsky promoting a distinctly “un-Russian,” Western “gay agenda.”

Berberova, Karlinsky, and Brown revise Orlova’s revisionist narrative with their own evidence that homosexual relationships were an accepted aspect of many parts of prerevolutionary Russian society, notably in the aristocratic and artistic circles of which Tchaikovsky was a part. In addition to the illustrious gay-male contemporaries enumerated in their letter, including geographer and explorer Nikolay Przhevalsky, journalist and publisher Vladimir Meshchersky, and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the authors recall Anna Evreinova, a publisher and one of Russia’s first female lawyers, who openly carried on a relationship with another woman. The same year this translation was published, 1993, the year of the repeal of Russia’s “sodomy law,” the Moscow publisher Glagol issued a book by Russian-American Tchaikovsky scholar Alexander Poznansky titled Tchaikovsky’s Suicide: Myth and Reality. These two simultaneous publications focused on this question mark it out as an LGBTQ-specific illustration of the high stakes of pre-Soviet Russian historiography for a post-Soviet Russian society seeking identity, a case of looking for pre-Soviet precedents to justify visions of a post-Soviet Russia, in this instance competing visions that do and do not accommodate sexual pluralism.