Clowns

Hello Joan!  Sounds like a great trip, and what an airfare!  That's amazing!  Thank you for your description of Capetown; it seems very beautiful.  There seems to be hope for the country's future.
I don't think the taste for deformity was restricted to women Tsars; it grew naturally out of the traditional place that jesters and clowns, with grotesque demeanour and appearance, had in the Russian court for a long time.  Peter had lots of clowns in his pay.  Being Tsar, or even a noble, precluded having human sympathy for the less fortunate, since inequality was the foundation and principle of the regime.  Poor people were looked at as less than human, and their suffering held to be of no account.  Laughing at the misfortunes of others was indispensable training for a Tsar.  The building of St. Petersburg, which cost thousands of lives, makes no sense otherwise.
Tschaikovsky seems a sensible, deeply feeling, and very conservative man.  He was a firm Tsarist, and I believe his self-identification with the Tsarist regime caused him to internalize its condemnation of homosexuality, giving him unbearable feelings of self-contempt.  He spoke of suicide at various times during his life.  He seems a wonderfully sweet, innocent, honest man.  When he does go deeper in his music, it usually opens layers of profound sadness that he felt so strongly.  So much of art seems to be the attempt to bring nobility to unbearable suffering.  I'm reading Troyat's life of Gogol, and that certainly seems to apply to him.  Take care, Sidney

Baroness Von Meck

Hello Joan!  I finished Troyat's lives of all the Tsars from Ivan the Terrible to Nicholas II.  There was an interesting story about Tsarina Anna in the 1720s.  She loved dwarves and disfigured oddities, and collected them for her court.  She thought it would be a great joke on the recently widowed nobleman Golitsyn to make him marry the ugliest dwarf in the court, and even funnier if the wedding took place in the great square in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and was consummated inside a huge palace made of ice on a bed made of ice, transparent to the whole city.  She stationed guards outside the ice palace to make sure the newlyweds spent the entire February night there, while she slept comfortably in her warm room. My Russian friends know of this event, but I had never heard of it.
Having run out of Tsars, I picked up another book by Troyat called "La Baronne Von Meck et le Musicien," about the relationship between Tschaikovsky and his patroness.  She loved music, played the piano well, and when her husband died her greatest pleasure was listening to Tschaikovsky's music.  Her husband had built the Moscow-Ryazan railway, and hearing of T's severe money problems gave him a pension, on condition that the two never meet.  She was afraid that meeting him in person might spoil the perfection of the music for her.  They corresponded often and had a platonic love affair; the correspondence exists and is fascinating.  Over time she wished for a more satisfying contact, according to Troyat, but realized that for a grandmother like herself acorporeal music was the best form of love to indulge in -- an idea I thought illumined for me my ever growing love for music.  Finally the rumors about T's homosexuality and his insistence on writing operas, a form she thought vulgar, led her to break off with him.  His suicide by drinking cholera-tainted water was in part a reaction to these vicious rumors (probably well founded) and her rejection, although he no longer needed the money.  (The Tsar was about to commence a formal inquiry into his private life.)  It was fun reading Troyat in French -- his language is just lovely, although many words are so recherche I can't find them in any dictionary.
Passengers on the cruise we're going to be taking were robbed outside of Puerto Vallerta, so we're definitely staying inside the city -- I hope that's safe!  We had a pretty good earthquake here yesterday.  Take care, Sidney