Antonina Miliukova(1848 — 1917)

In the spring of 1877, Antonina Miliukova, a student at the Moscow Conservatory, wrote her professor Tchaikovsky a fervent letter declaring her passionate love for him and threatening to take her own life if he did not respond. The letter reminded Tchaikovsky so strongly of the letter scene written for Tatiana in the opera *Eugene Onegin*, which he was then composing, that he agreed to meet her — and eventually to marry her.

Tchaikovsky married Antonina on July 18, 1877, partly to silence rumors about his private life. Only a few weeks after the wedding, he suffered a nervous breakdown so severe that he attempted to drown himself in the Moskva River in the middle of the night. His brother Anatole had to rush to Moscow and take him abroad — first to Switzerland, then to Italy — so that he could recover far from the capital.

While Tchaikovsky recuperated abroad, Antonina continued living in Moscow as though nothing had happened. She sent him affectionate letters that he never answered directly, delegating his brother Modest to reply on his behalf. The couple almost never saw each other again, yet they remained officially married until the composer's death in 1893.

In the years following the separation, Antonina had several children with other men — children she abandoned at the Moscow Foundling Hospital. Her situation deteriorated steadily until, around 1896, she was committed to a psychiatric institution in Saint Petersburg, where she spent the rest of her life until her death in 1917.

In 1913, Antonina published her memoirs, in which she offered her own account of the disastrous marriage. She portrayed herself as the victim of a man who had married her without ever loving her, and sought to defend her reputation against the legend that cast her as an unhinged and importunate woman — at a time when Tchaikovsky's image had already been sanctified by posterity.