Who was Antonina Miliukova?
The enfant terrible of Russian cinema Kirill Serebrennikov examines Tchaikovsky's life through the eyes not of the genius composer but of the woman he married to hide his homosexuality and protect his family.
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Half a century after Igor Talankin's Soviet biopic (1969) and Ken Russell's
Pathetic Symphony
(1971),
Tchaikovsky's Wife
, the first of 21 films in the running for the Palme d'Or, promises a more intimate glimpse of brief and disastrous marriage of Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
“It's not a biopic, he's not the main character. It is a film about a few episodes of his life and about a woman who was obsessed with him”,
explained to AFP Kirill Serebrennikov, during an interview conducted in April 2022 in Berlin where he is now installed.
"It shows her version of events and it's interesting because Antonina Milioukova is a completely forgotten character",
continues the director, for whom this film is the
"beginning of a long journey"
in the universe of the composer
of Swan Lake.
.
"A Terrible Lie"
A few years ago, when Serebrennikov was seeking public funding for this film, ex-Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky (currently head of the Russian delegation to negotiations with Ukraine),
"wanted us to follow the Soviet version of the composer
's
life, he says.
“But this film is a terrible lie”
.
In Russia,
“Tchaikovsky is a monument which has not suffered, which has had no private life”,
he specifies.
For him, his intimate life remains
“unknown to Russians just like
Chekhov
,
Dostoyevsky
or
Tolstoy
”
.
Refuting any sensationalism in his film, Serebrennikov says he wants to show in part how this tumultuous relationship was also a source
of "inspiration for his extraordinary works"
.
If the composer's homosexuality had been known for a long time, passages from Tchaikovsky's letters published without censorship for the first time in 2018 revealed his heartache or his desires for men.
"I met a young man of striking beauty (...) after our walk, I offered him money, which he refused",
he wrote in 1880 to his brother Modeste, also a homosexual and librettist of his opera
La Dame de Pique
.
The same year, he described his servant Alexeï Sofronov, his lover then faithful friend, as
“an angelic creature”
of which he would like to be
“the slave, the plaything, the property”
.
These passages had been censored after his death, first by his brothers and then during the Soviet era.
"So far, many people don't believe it and consider it an attempt to tarnish the reputation of the best Russian composer,"
Marina Kostalevsky, professor of Russian at Bard College in New York, told AFP. co-published the collection of letters.
"to be normal"
According to her, Tchaikovsky married Antonina Milioukova, a former student of the Moscow Conservatory who had sent him a letter of admiration, because
“he wanted to be normal in the eyes of society”
.
"I want to get married or have a public relationship with a woman to shut up all those bastards whose opinions I don't care about but who make people close to me suffer,"
he wrote to Modeste in 1876. But the composer
"quickly realized his mistake (...), he described to his brother Anatoli how much torture it was to be with her and that he found her physical proximity revolting",
explains Marina Kostalevsky.
He even tries to kill himself in a freezing river.
And Antonina Miliukova?
For a long time, biographers blamed all of Tchaikovsky's suffering on her, calling her mad – he himself called her a
“viper”
– but today research is more nuanced.
In
Antonina Tchaikovskaya: Story of a Forgotten Life
by Valery Sokolov, the author
"attempts to show that she was not this monster described by certain biographers,"
says Professor Kostalevsky.
Antonina's life, which ended up in a psychiatric hospital,
“was completely destroyed”
.
Despite the brevity of their cohabitation – they will never divorce – it was during this period that the composer created one of his masterpieces, the opera
Eugene Onegin
, influenced by this impossible relationship.
