Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik

Tchaikovsky Research
Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik (1874-1952)

Russian writer and translator (b. 12/24 January 1874 in Moscow; d. 27 July 1952 in Moscow); born Tatyana Lvovna Shchepkina-Kupernik (Татьяна Львовна Щепкина-Куперник).

The daughter of the lawyer, writer and theatre critic Lev Kupernik (1845–1905) and his wife Olga Shchepkina (d. 1893), who had been a student of Tchaikovsky's at the Moscow Conservatory, Tatyana would later become a distinguished writer and translator. In her memoirs she recounted how her father had introduced her, then a shy fifteen-year-old girl, to Tchaikovsky during the interval of a production of Yevgeny Onegin at the Kiev Opera on 5/17 September 1889. Kupernik told the composer that Tatyana wrote verses, and Tchaikovsky had encouragingly urged her to carry on writing, adding that one day he might perhaps set one of her poems to music. When Tchaikovsky again visited Kiev the following year, to attend the first two performances of The Queen of Spades in that city (on 19/31 December 1890 and 21 December 1890/2 January 1891), Tatyana was unfortunately ill, but her father met him at the theatre and Tchaikovsky had asked how his daughter's verses were getting on, again requesting to see them once they were ready, since he was always looking for suitable texts that might be set to music. Tatyana later found out about this from her father:

I was astonished when father told me this: just think, a year later he still remembered about the verses of some little girl! But I did not, though, dare to send him my verses, since I thought they were quite poor. I was later terribly jealous of that languid, blond youth 'Danya' Ratgauz (a student whom I knew) when Tchaikovsky used his poems for a large number of songs" [1].

In 1892, Tatyana did, however, publish a one-act drama in verse — Eternity in an Instant (Вечность в мгновении) — for which Tchaikovsky made some tentative vocal sketches, apparently in 1893 (see TH 251).

Correspondence with Tchaikovsky

No letters from Tchaikovsky to Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik are known, but one letter from Tatyana to the composer, dating from 15/27 December 1890, is preserved in the Tchaikovsky State Memorial Musical Museum-Reserve at Klin (a4, No. 2020).

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External Links

Notes and References

  1. This extract from Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik's memoirs is included in Воспоминания о П. И. Чайковском (1980), p. 266. Translated here by Luis Sundkvist. The same extract can also be found in Tchaikovsky remembered (1993), p.94–96.