Original sentence: Anthony Holden maintains that, after the débacle of his marriage, Tchaikovsky decided not to deny "what I am by nature" (quoting the composer's 1876 letter to his brother nine months prior to the marriage).In a January 1875 letter to his brother Anatoly, thus predating his marriage, the composer writes that his homosexuality creates "an unbridgeable gulf" between himself and society at large: "It lends my personality an aloofness, a fear of company, excessive shyness, a mistrust of everyone—in sum, a thousand qualities which make ever more unsociable.One year later Tchaikovsky wrote Modest, who was homosexual himself, a letter that could not be more explicit:.Poznansky surmises that after coming to terms with his sexuality, Tchaikovsky accepted it and had few qualms, if any
Edited sentence: A January 1875 letter from Tchaikovsky to his brother Anatoly would seem to back Holden's argument.Anthony Holden takes yet another course.He maintains that, after the débacle of his marriage, Tchaikovsky decided not to deny "what I am by nature" (quoting the composer's 1876 letter to his brother nine months prior to the marriage).In 1876, Tchaikovsky wrote Modest, who was homosexual himself, a letter that could not be more explicit:.In it, the composer writes that his homosexuality has created "an unbridgeable gulf" between himself and society at large: "It lends my personality an aloofness, a fear of company, excessive shyness, a mistrust of everyone—in sum, a thousand qualities which make ever more unsociable.One view is that Tchaikovsky loathed his homosexuality, seeing it as a mental or spiritual aberration as much as he indulged in it.Poznansky takes a totally opposite view — that after coming to terms with his sexuality, Tchaikovsky accepted it and had few qualms, if any.The personal life of Tchaikovsky has been much studied since his death, with different interpretations of his homosexuality and events surrounding his marriage.Though the veracity of the book in which that quote appears, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, has been hotly questioned since its publication, the quote itself bears more than a grain of truth