Aleksey Apukhtin: Homosexual, Poet, and Friend of Tchaikovsky

Aleksey Nikolayevich Apukhtin is known as the author of poems that became popular romances: “Frenzied Nights, Sleepless Nights” (Nochi bezumnye, nochi bessonnye), “A Pair of Bay Horses” (Para gnedykh), “Does the Day Reign?” (Den li tsarit). Set to music, these texts eventually overshadowed the rest of the poet’s work.

In the history of Russian literature, Apukhtin remained not only a talented lyric poet of the Alexander III era but also a man whose biography was closely intertwined with the life of the composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Apukhtin acted as a crucial connecting link between the romanticism of the Golden Age and the psychologism of the Silver Age.

Documentary sources, letters, and memoirs confirm the same-sex attraction of Apukhtin and Tchaikovsky. Contemporary researchers also note a “poetics of evasion” in Apukhtin’s love lyrics – a consistent avoidance of indicating the addressee’s gender.

Childhood and the School of Jurisprudence

Aleksey Apukhtin was born on November 27, 1840, into a modest noble family in the city of Bolkhov, Oryol Governorate. A great influence on his development was his mother, Maria Andreyevna (née Zhelyabuzhskaya), who instilled in her son a love for poetry. The boy grew up impressionable and possessed a phenomenal memory: he easily memorized huge texts by heart.

Even as a teenager, Apukhtin was perceived as a literary talent. In 1852, he entered the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg. In May 1853, Pyotr Tchaikovsky joined Apukhtin’s class. The writer Aleksandr Druzhinin, having met the poet in December 1855, recorded in his diary:

“Tolstoy introduced me to the boy-poet Apukhtin, from the School of Jurisprudence.”

The School of Jurisprudence became one of the centers of homosocial culture in St. Petersburg. In closed all-male institutions of that time, emotional and sexual connections developed between students. This tradition was recorded by subcultural literature: in 1879, an anonymous collection titled Russian Eros Not for Ladies was published in Geneva, and its preface pointed to the prevalence of homosexual relationships in elite schools.

Apukhtin became a protector and mentor to the less confident Tchaikovsky. He helped his friend make sense of his first infatuations – for instance, his strong feelings for a younger fellow student, Sergey Kireyev. The writer Nina Berberova described the influence of the 13-year-old Apukhtin, whom she calls a “seducer,” in her biography of the composer:

“Everything that had hitherto been sacred to Tchaikovsky, the concept of God, boyish love for his neighbor, respect for his elders – all this was suddenly showered with mockery… Next to him, Tchaikovsky seemed a boy of average abilities…

At night in the dormitory, they would whisper until midnight (their beds stood side by side); they had secrets buried from others for life. They loved each other, one with a shade of patronage and power, the other with envious anxiety: for Apukhtin everything was clear, he was already a formed man, with talent, with future glory. For Tchaikovsky, everything was dark.”

The influence of Apukhtin and the homosocial environment of the closed institution helped the composer recognize his identity. According to Berberova’s testimony, after initial attempts to become interested in young women from high society, the young Tchaikovsky fully realized his nature:

“Just a year later, he felt a complete, final, insurmountable indifference to women.”

In the summer of 1857, Apukhtin wrote a humorous poem to Tchaikovsky, referring to a St. Petersburg pastry shop familiar to them both. In the poem, a joke about sweets turns into a joke about a kiss:

In 1854, during the Crimean War, the 14-year-old student debuted in print with the patriotic poem “Epaminondas.” This was followed by success in the journal Sovremennik. Ivan Turgenev and Afanasy Fet prophesied a brilliant future for the young man. In 1859, Apukhtin graduated from the school with a gold medal, but the triumph was marred by his mother’s death. This loss became a crushing blow and laid the foundation for his deeply elegiac style, permeated with the motif of existential loneliness.

Service, Criticism, and the “Shotan” Scandal

After graduation, Apukhtin and Tchaikovsky served together in the Ministry of Justice and, according to rumors, lived in the same apartment. The journalist Aleksey Suvorin recorded in his diary for 1889 the words of his acquaintance Maslov about this period:

“Tchaikovsky and Apukhtin are both pederasts; they lived like husband and wife… Apukhtin was playing cards. Tchaikovsky came up and said he was going to sleep. Apukhtin kissed his hand and said: ‘Go, my dear, I will come to you in a moment.’”

At the turn of the 1850s and 1860s, Russian society was experiencing changes. Literature was dominated by democratic critics who demanded civic service and social utility from poetry. In 1860, Nikolay Dobrolyubov published caustic reviews, accusing Apukhtin’s poems of “boudoir-style” and detachment from the suffering of the people. This deeply wounded Apukhtin. Unable to bend his talent to political expediency, he made a radical decision: he stopped publishing in the press for more than twenty years.

In 1862, Tchaikovsky, Apukhtin, and several former students of the School of Jurisprudence found themselves at the center of a scandal surrounding the St. Petersburg restaurant “Shotan.” The consequences are well known: according to the memoirs of Modest Tchaikovsky, the participants were “defamed throughout the city as bugry.”

The word bugr or bugor in 19th-century Russian urban slang referred to a homosexual man. The word derives from the French bougre, tracing back to the Late Latin bulgarus (Bulgarian). In the 11th–13th centuries, the French Catholic Church used it to call the Cathar heretics, accusing them of refusing reproductive sex and engaging in sodomy.

After the scandal, the friends’ paths diverged. Apukhtin left the Ministry of Justice and departed for his family estate. Tchaikovsky, on the contrary, radically changed his life: he entered the newly opened conservatory and became a composer.

Life in Oryol and Return to St. Petersburg

From 1862 to 1868, Apukhtin served as an official for special assignments under the governor in the Oryol Governorate. Traveling through the districts, he came face to face with the corruption of the bureaucratic apparatus and the harsh everyday life of post-reform Russia. This experience stripped him of his illusions. The poet became fascinated with the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which found a direct reflection in his lyric poetry. He wrote his poems at this time exclusively “for the drawer.”

In 1868, Apukhtin returned to St. Petersburg, having received a sinecure position in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. By this time, due to a hereditary predisposition and a metabolic disorder, he had turned into a man suffering from pathological corpulence. However, his physical heaviness strikingly contrasted with his refined spiritual organization: he became one of the central figures of aristocratic salons.

In the spring of 1866, Tchaikovsky wrote a letter to Apukhtin from Moscow, urging him to abandon idleness and begin working professionally in literature. Apukhtin replied to this letter sarcastically:

“You, like a naive institutka, continue to believe in ’labor’, in ‘struggle’… Why labor? With whom to struggle? My dear pepinyerka, understand once and for all that ’labor’ is sometimes a bitter necessity and always the greatest punishment allotted to human beings… Should admiring the beauty of X really be considered labor as well?”

This correspondence perfectly illustrates the LGBT subculture of that time. Apukhtin uses feminized forms of address for his friend (institutka, pepinyerka – terms for girls at closed boarding schools), which was characteristic of the homosexual slang of St. Petersburg bohemia, and speaks of male beauty as an object of aesthetic pleasure (“admiring the beauty of X”).

Tchaikovsky sublimated his marginality through prodigious industry. Having become a national symbol, he gained protection from homophobic attacks. Apukhtin, however, chose the path of internal emigration and aestheticism. He rejected the ethics of productivity, preferring to remain a salon dilettante.

Despite being an author who fundamentally did not publish, Apukhtin enjoyed nationwide fame. His texts circulated in thousands of handwritten copies. He possessed a hypnotic gift for declamation: he read deeply, but without theatrical affectation. The censor and memoirist Aleksandr Nikitenko wrote after one of the evenings:

“The poet Apukhtin, hitherto unknown to me, read his poems… I generally have little trust in the verses of today’s new poets, but these, to my delight, turned out to be excellent.”

Love Lyrics and Musicality of Verse

Apukhtin reached the height of his literary success in the 1880s – an era that Aleksandr Blok called the “dull, Apukhtin years.” Apukhtin wrote about unrequited love, loneliness, and melancholy.

His poetry, abounding in trisyllabic meters (anapaest, amphibrach), was ideally suited for the romance genre, as it imitated interrupted human breathing. Tchaikovsky found in his friend’s poems the same emotional vibration that he himself embodied in sounds.

Apukhtin and Oscar Wilde were contemporaries, but their fates turned out differently. Unlike Wilde, Apukhtin was not persecuted for his orientation. Historian Alexander Poznansky notes that the poet led an “openly homosexual lifestyle, embarrassed by nothing, afraid of nothing, and making his lifestyle an object of his own jokes.”

Nevertheless, in his lyrics, Apukhtin developed a complex poetics of understatement. American researcher Brian James Baer calls this a “poetics of evasion”. Baer believes this was not simply fear of censorship or a symptom of “closeted homosexuality,” but a conscious queer performativity. In Russian, past tense verbs and adjectives reveal gender. Apukhtin hid the addressee’s gender by using the present and future tense, the imperative mood, and metonymy.

A characteristic example is the poem “Dry, rare, accidental meetings…”. The lyrical hero uses words that avoid indicating the addressee’s gender:

Original text:

In the poem “In the Theater” (1881), Apukhtin speaks of himself in the masculine gender, but addresses not the person directly, but their body parts (“eyes shone”, “childish laugh”, “heart beat”). This allows him to avoid gendered endings:

Original text:

Apukhtin was fluent in French, Italian, and German. In his translations, he deliberately eliminated the heterosexual markers of the original. Translating Ludwig Rellstab’s poem “Serenade” (Ständchen), he omitted the feminine address (Holde) and translated the neuter Liebchen with the masculine phrase “beautiful friend” (drug prekrasnyi):

Original text:

Baer calls the translation of the poem “He Loved Me So Much” (Il m’aimait tant) by the French poetess Delphine Gay the most complex example of queer performativity. Apukhtin acts as a female lyrical heroine. Ending each stanza with the phrase “He loved me so much!”, the male poet tries on a female voice. Later, this translation was set to music by his friend Pyotr Tchaikovsky, which added an additional homoerotic subtext to the text.

For Apukhtin, the creation of queer literature consisted not in a direct statement of his identity, but in performative play and the rejection of rigid gender frameworks. The genderless text became radically inclusive — homosexual readers could find their personal experience in it.

British musicologist Philip Ross Bullock explains why Apukhtin and Tchaikovsky chose the romance form for their creative union. In the second half of the 19th century, literature was dominated by the realist novel (like those of Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoevsky), which demanded moral assessment and detailed descriptions of everyday life from the author. The romance, however, inherited the aesthetics of salon culture – reticence and fragmentation.

In 1886, Tchaikovsky created one of the most popular romances to Apukhtin’s verses – “Frenzied Nights, Sleepless Nights”:

▶️ Listen to the romance “Frenzied Nights” (YouTube)

The Triumph of the First Collection and Late Prose

In the mid-1880s, under pressure from friends, among whom was Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov (the poet K.R., also a homosexual), Apukhtin overcame his barrier and agreed to publish a book. In 1886, the first collection of Poems was released, the print run of which sold out instantly. Apukhtin was recognized as a living classic.

In his mature years, the poet created large-scale psychological texts: the confessional “A Year in a Monastery,” the innovative dramatic monologue “The Madman” (anticipating the modernist quests of the Silver Age), and the philosophical “Requiem.”

In his final years, a severely ill Apukhtin turned to prose. He wrote the novellas The Archive of Countess D** (1890) and The Diary of Pavlik Dolsky (1891). In them, he analyzed the mores of St. Petersburg high society with detachment and deep cynicism. The texts are permeated with an exaggerated attention to high-society rituals – an aesthetic known today as camp. The main character of The Diary… is an aging aristocratic bachelor who squandered his life on empty affairs, an image Apukhtin partly modeled on himself. In the story “Between Death and Life” (1892), the writer boldly described the separation of the soul from the body, turning to mystical symbolism.

These novellas delighted Emperor Alexander III. He listened to The Archive of Countess D** in a closed circle and insisted on its publication.

Illness and Final Days

By the early 1890s, Apukhtin had almost completely lost the ability to move. He developed dropsy and a progressive heart disease. Because of suffocating attacks, he could not lie down and sat around the clock in a specially designed huge chair. Despite agonizing pain and trophic ulcers, his intellect remained clear: upon waking up, he would declaim Pushkin’s poems, and dictated new works to his secretary.

His apartment became a place of pilgrimage. Tchaikovsky, who himself was at the zenith of world fame, constantly visited his sick friend. They reminisced about their years at the School of Jurisprudence and talked about the impending end.

Aleksey Apukhtin died on August 17, 1893, in St. Petersburg. The entire elite of the capital attended the funeral. Pyotr Tchaikovsky, who survived his friend by only a few months (he would die of cholera in October), wrote to his nephew:

“At the very minute I am writing this, they are holding the funeral service for Lyolya Apukhtin!!! Even though his death is not unexpected, it is still eerie and painful.”

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