Article disputing accounts of Tchaikovsky’s suicide in the face of having his homosexuality broadly divulged.
1993
This article from the journal Gay, Slavs! (Gay, Славяне!) is another instance of work on Russian cultural history by Russian émigré scholars being translated into Russian and republished for an early 1990s Russian LGBTQ readership (in this sourcebook see also “The Unknown Diaghilev”). This piece also instantiates the contesting of prerevolutionary Russian LGTBQ history between Russian émigrés with different agendas. The signatories of this text (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 itself is a sort of open-letter rebuttal of publications — chief among them a publication in the Russian émigré periodical New American (Новый американец) by one Alexandra Orlova — regarding the historical record on the death of Russian composer Petr Ilich Tchaikovsy at the end of the nineteenth century. Orlova, along with some others, sought to revise the canonical account of the composer’s death (from cholera) by presenting evidence that he committed suicide because he feared his homosexuality was about to be broadly divulged. Berberova, Karlinsky, and Brown attack what they see as Orlova’s falsifying historiography and erasure of LGBTQ history in Russia. Their charge is in essence that, whether by design or merely through careless scholarship and questionable methods, Orlova constructs a false picture of the wider historical circumstances of Tchaikovsky’s death. That picture is one of a more or less immediately prerevolutionary Russian society so totally hostile to homosexuality that any public or social gay identities were simply unviable. Indeed, the narrative Orlova presents is one in which the closest familiars of a major cultural figure encourage him to commit suicide when his homosexual affairs are brought to light, and he acquiesces. The essential un-Russianness of social or public LGBTQ identities was often strenuously asserted by Soviets, post-Soviet Russians, and Russian émigrés in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. Part of this assertion was maintenance of a historical record in which such sexual identities were absent because impossible in the society represented by that record. Much of the Russian émigré scholarly community was offended by Karlinsky’s work uncovering LGBTQ elements in Russian cultural history, which they viewed as a 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 (focused on here are aristocratic and artistic circles). In addition to the variously illustrious gay-male contemporaries enumerated in the text (geographer and explorer Nikolay Przhevalsky, journalist and publisher Vladimir Meshchersky, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev), the authors recall Anna Evreinova, a publisher and one of the first Russian 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.”
Homosexuality (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061780)--Russia (Federation) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n92056007)--Periodicals (https://lccn.loc.gov/gf2014026139)
LGBT history in Russia (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4204645)
Gay men (https://lccn.loc.gov/sh85061798)--Russia (Federation)
Karlinsky, Simon (https://lccn.loc.gov/n50044610)
Karlinsky, Simon (http://viaf.org/viaf/22948618)
Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich, 1840-1893 (https://lccn.loc.gov/n79072979)
Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich, 1840-1893 (http://viaf.org/viaf/99258155)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q7315)
Berberova, N. (Nina) (https://lccn.loc.gov/n81007997)
Nina Berberova (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q275935)
Berberova, N. (Nina) (http://viaf.org/viaf/19687670)
Brown, Malcolm Hamrick (https://lccn.loc.gov/n82002926)
Malcolm Hamrick Brown (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q112980663)
Brown, Malcolm Hamrick (http://viaf.org/viaf/19998025)
Orlova, A. A. (Aleksandra Anatolʹevna), 1911- (https://lccn.loc.gov/n82032333)
Aleksandra Anatol'evna Orlova (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q105799233)
Orlova, A. A. (Aleksandra Anatolʹevna), 1911- (http://viaf.org/viaf/109166767)
Przhevalʹskii, Nikolai Mikhailovich, 1839-1888 (https://lccn.loc.gov/n85065884)
Nikolai Przhevalsky (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q192442)
Meshcherskii, V. P. (Vladimir Petrovich), kniazʹ, 1839-1914 (https://lccn.loc.gov/n80116866)
Vladimir Meshchersky (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1269550)
Meshcherskii, V. P. (Vladimir Petrovich), kniazʹ, 1839-1914 (http://viaf.org/viaf/45226396)
Anna Yevreinova (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4173120)
Анна Михайловна Евреинова российская писательница, феминистка (http://viaf.org/viaf/307295571)
Diaghilev, Serge, 1872-1929 (https://lccn.loc.gov/n79081931)
Diaghilev, Serge, 1872-1929 (http://viaf.org/viaf/67208262)
Sergei Diaghilev (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q211513)
St. Petersburg
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich , Berberova, Nina, and Karlinsky, Simon
Russia
Gay Slaviane, 1993, no. 1