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