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The young Tschaikovski was late, like Wagner, in deciding on music, and was twenty-three before he took up instrumentation. He was of a passionate nature, but his temper usually struck inward, and his friend Kashkin said that he "never began a quarrel or defended himself when attacked."
His photograph at this time has a worn, hunted look, and he has become addicted to cold baths, of which his new plan was the coldest of all. In May, 1877, his friend Kashkin suspected him of being engaged. In July, Kashkin was amazed to find him married. Just once Kashkin saw the couple together.
At her performance he sat in the pit with his friend Kashkin, who says he was terribly excited, and kept his opera-glasses fastened on her always, though he must have been almost blinded by the tears that streamed down his cheeks. The two did not meet, however, for seven years, and then unexpectedly. He called at Nikolai Rubinstein's office in the Conservatory; he was told to wait in the anteroom.
There followed that strange affair which was a riddle as late as the time Miss Newmarch's biography appeared in 1900; a solution was then hoped from a sealed document left by Kashkin, and not to be opened till the year 1927. Tschaikovski himself had looked over his own diary, and had been so terrified at what he read that he destroyed a great portion of it before his death in 1893.
How this happened was doubtless told in his diaries, which were written with great regularity: but unfortunately he destroyed them all a few years before his death. The few facts that have been gleaned from his intimate friend, M. Kashkin, are that he was engaged to the lady in the spring of this year, and married her a month or so afterward.
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