This documentary biography presents a portrait of the major 19th-century Russian composer Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky. As a former archivist at the Tchaikovsky Museum at Klin, Alexandra Orlova had unrivalled access to all the composer's extant documents, including over 5000 letters, his diaries, and articles written by him. Linking the documents with explanatory passages, this study charts the events of Tchaikovsky's life and sheds much light on all aspects of his personality. It provides full details of his disastrous nine-week marriage, and proposes the controversial theory that he did not die of cholera, but committed suicide to preserve his honour in the face of a homosexual scandal - an argument censored from the Soviet edition and first smuggled to the West by Orlova in 1979. The book also examines his method of working, and records the range and diversity of his views on such subjects as philosophy, religion, literature, and, of course, music.