Nadezhda von Meck

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Nadezhda von Meck : biography

1831 – 1894

She was always compulsively busy. She took her elder servants on periodic inspection tours of her house, from cellar to roof, and cellar to roof never remained quite the same. String was saved for her to untangle and wind. Books were bought so she might cut the pages. She purchased quantities of wool, which she then wound into balls and sent to her daughter, Countess Bennigsen. While engaging in this business, she would summon her daughter Julia to come and read to her. Julia did not mind. Of all von Meck’s children, she was the one most eager to please her mother. Her mother demanded everything from her—and got it.

She was probably well aware she was hard to tolerate. She wrote to Tchaikovsky, "I am very unsympathetic in my personal relations because I do not possess any femininity whatever; second, I do not know how to be tender, and this characteristic has passed on to my entire family. All of us are afraid to be affected or sentimental, and therefore the general nature of our family relationships is comradely, or masculine, so to speak."Tchaikovsky, P.I., Perepiska s N.F. fon Mekk (1876-1890) [Correspondence with N.F. von Meck], ed. Zhdanov, Vladimir and Zhegin, Nikolai (Moscow and Leningrad, 1934-1936), 3:197. As quoted in Poznansky, 197.

Personal views

Nadezhda von Meck was a professed atheist. This was nothing unusual in aristocratic Russia in the 1870s. Her fierce need for independence, on the other hand, was very unusual for a woman of the time. Her division between it and concern for her family resulted in contradictions between her beliefs and actions. Her views on affairs of the heart were strictly moralistic. However, she did not believe in marriage as a social institution. She regularly professed her hatred of it to Tchaikovsky. "You may think, my dear Pyotr Ilyich, that I am a great admirer of marriage," she wrote on March 31, 1878, "but in order that you not be mistaken in anything referring to myself, I shall tell you that I am, on the contrary, an irreconcilable enemy of marriages, yet when I discuss another person’s situation, I consider it necessary to do so from his point of view."As quoted in Poznansky, 198. On another occasion, she stated more genially but no less forcefully, "The distribution of rights and obligations as determined by social laws I find speculative and immoral."

Even with her views on matrimony, von Meck was resigned to it as a means of social stability and procreation. Her own marital experience may have forced her to recognize its benefits. This realization may have also been why she strove to marry off her children as soon as possible—to ensure their stability in the event of her demise. Even in marriage, though, she considered sexual relations between men and women to be mutual exploitation. Russian radical thinkers of the period such as Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Dmitry Pisarev espoused views not far removed from von Meck’s. Both men considered marriage a pillar of bourgeois society and called for its abolition. Von Meck especially respected Pisarev’s work as well as 19th-century positivism in general.

With these views in mind, it is easy to see how Tchaikovsky’s seeming misogyny and professed aversion to marriage could attract someone like von Meck. Neither would his homosexuality necessarily cause her indignation. Von Meck’s second daughter Alexandra may have told her of his sexual preferences at the outset of her relationship with him. Even then, von Meck may have already known of it, since she was extremely diligent in discovering all she could about her composer. She could interpret passionate love between two men as a sentimental excess, and therefore understandable. If anything (at least according to von Meck family tradition), that knowledge might have reassured her that there was no other woman in Tchaikovsky’s emotional life.

Donation by Galina Nikolayevna von Meck

In 1985 Galina donated to Columbia University a collection including her translation of 681 letters written by Tchaikovsky to his family. The collection covered the period from March 1861 to September 1893.