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Tchaikovsky's Last Days: A Documentary Study Book
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Amazon Review
What or who killed the famous Russian composer Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky? Was it cholera, as his doctors recorded at his death in 1893 and most historians have since believed? Or was it self-administered poison, the enforced exit from a scandalous homosexual affair with a member of the Russian royal family? Versions of this latter account, which began as a swirl of rumors immediately after the composer's death, have had a long and curious afterlife, through the Czarist and Soviet periods into the heated sexual-political debates of our own time.
In an attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery, Alexander Poznansky's Tchaikovsky's Last Days shifts carefully through a wealth of documentary evidence, including Russian archival material formerly inaccessible to scholars. His conclusion comes by way of a fascinating look at the sexual life of 19th-century Russia and a reflected glance at the sexual mythmaking impulses of the present.
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Product Description
Tchaikovsky's death in October 1893 in St. Petersburg, shortly after the first performance of his masterpiece, The Pathetique symphony, is one of the most thoroughly documented deaths of a prominent cultural figure in modern times. He was treated by no fewer than four physicians and surrounded by a group of relatives and friends. The official account of his death was that he died from cholera. But almost since the day of his passing there have been rumors that it was not accidental. It is alleged that Tchaikovsky was forced to commit suicide in order to avoid the scandal and disgrace of being unmasked as a homosexual.
Alexander Poznansky is the first Western scholar to have access to the Tchaikovsky archives in Klin, Russia. In this fascinating new book, the product of five years' research, he provides a definitive account of the circumstances preceding the composer's death. On the basis of much previously unknown material, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspaper reports, he traces in minute detail the composer's activities during the last weeks of his life and finds no evidence to support the notion that Tchaikovsky's death was brought about by anything other than cholera.
- 019816596X
- 9780198165965
- Alexander Poznansky
- 31 October 1996
- Clarendon Press
- Hardcover (Book)
- 256
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