Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Diaries. Nikolai Kashkin. Memories of P.I. Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the great Russian composer, conductor, and educator, kept diaries for much of his life. He recorded everything that happened to him and his surroundings, jotted down intimate thoughts and observations, judgments about his contemporaries, and his and others' secrets. He did not show them to anyone and eventually burned almost all of the entries. The remaining papers (11 notebooks) were collected by his brother Modest, and later published in 1923 by another brother, Ippolit, in collaboration with Nikolai Timofeevich Zhegin, the first director of the P.I. Tchaikovsky House-Museum. The notes in the “Diaries” belong to the hand of Nikolai Zhegin. In this edition, the “Diaries” of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky are published together with the complete text of the memories about him, by his close friend and colleague, a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. “Memories of P.I. Tchaikovsky” by Nikolai Kashkin, written with immense warmth and love shortly after the composer’s death, is the first creative biography of Pyotr Tchaikovsky and contains extremely valuable testimonies about Tchaikovsky's artistic taste and personality traits.