The Diaries of Tchaikovsky

THE private (very private) diaries of Tchaikovsky, long preserved in the Tchaikovsky Museum at Klin, and released in 1923 by his brother Ippolit for publication in the original language, have now appeared in English translation. The composer is nowhere favored by expurgation. There is a diary for the summer of 1873, another for the spring and summer of 1884, and a series of them, with slight interruptions, from February, 1886, to May, 1890. The diary of the composer’s visit to America in the spring of 1891, which appeared (almost complete, together with occasional excerpts from the earlier diaries) in the English version of the Life and Letters by his brother Modeste, is also included here.

Thus the diaries are carried through Tchaikovsky’s ripest years until two years before his death. He was composing through all of them, but not his greatest works, except the Fifth Symphony, which he hardly mentions, and “Pique Dame.” “Pique Dame” he seems to have written (contrary to his mood revealed elsewhere about his work in hand) with some satisfaction and even elation.

“It seems to me,” wrote the self-examining Tchaikovsky on June 27, 1888, “that letters are never entirely sincere. I judge, at least, by myself. Regardless to whom or why I write, I always worry about what impression the letter will produce. . . . There, I am posing. . . . I am never myself in a letter.” There is no question of “pose” in his diaries, but many momentary impulses are recorded. In one place he writes of his friend Taneiev, who had been indulging in some of his free criticism: “I cannot stand the provoking stupidity of that bully.” But later, when Taneiev helps him with his orchestration, he writes: “I had a lively chat with the lovable Taneiev.” He records his deeds with the sometimes devastating candor of one who never suspects that mortal eye will see what he has written. We live close to the composer, following his day-by-day routine, his neurotic fears, his reactions of affection or aversion to those about him, his indulgences and selfcastigations.

It is a pitiable spectacle. He is a prey most of the time to nerve excitation. His composing relieves him (“work is a saviour,” he writes). But when he overdoes it, he is left with a throbbing head. He writes elsewhere of the “mysteries of the creative spirit, which elects for its temple a vase so fragile and apparently incongruous.” He is speaking of Glinka, but more closely describing himself. It seems a marvel, as one reads through the diaries, that that vase was not shattered. His physical disorders become a catalogue. More than death, he fears the loss of his power to compose.

His homosexual cravings leave him in an agony of frustration, and when, in the diary of 1884, he must stifle his affection for his nephew of thirteen, he calls himself a “monster,” unfit for the society of men. In this most terrible of the diaries, he throws himself into card games for distraction, is unmannerly when lie loses, and so gives himself new cause for self-reproach. Here and elsewhere he takes walks to quiet his nerves for composing. There is the oft-repeated self-accusation “drunkenness,” and on the following day, “katzenjammer.” Tchaikovsky was anything but a cheerful sinner.

That fragile “temple" of the spirit which was Tchaikovsky is not to be wholly understood by the music alone or the biographical record. He could not have been understood by the friends who loved him and no more than dimly suspected what lay hidden in the diaries. But the diaries are not the whole picture — God forbid! They are more for clinical knowledge than casual reading.

JOHN N. BURK