Tchaikovsky: The Story of a Lonely Life

A sequel to the “Outlanders” series: a new cult biography.

In the 1930s, Nina Berberova—one of the most famous writers and memoirists of the first wave of émigrés—writes a fictionalized biography of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. She does not conceal the composer’s hidden life, but she preserves tact and fidelity to facts. Berberova creates a portrait of a living man—a portrait without a mask.

An eternal foreigner, she tells of a Russian composer as if she had never left Russia...

“Whenever I was printing my biography of Tchaikovsky in feuilletons in ‘The Latest News,’ Alexander Nikolaevich Benois would always tell me that he felt I was his contemporary, ‘as if you knew everyone—both Bob, and Modest, and Argo (Argutinsky),’ and then, all at once, caught up in it, he suddenly exclaimed:

— Do you remember, at the premiere of ‘The Queen of Spades’...’—and then he was terribly embarrassed, lowered his eyes, and sang in a thin little voice, ‘What an evening, clouds...’ (The premiere had been nine years before my birth).”

Nina Berberova. “My italic”