How long does it take to read Tchaikovsky?
The Quest for the Inner Man
Alexander Poznansky
Tchaikovsky by Alexander Poznansky takes about 12 hours 27 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 12 hours 27 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1991. 679 pages, about 186,725 words.
25 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 20 hours 45 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 12 hours 27 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 7 hours 47 minutes |
The page count is the median across 10 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
This monumental 656-page biography is probably the fullest, most revealing account to date of Tchaikovsky's private life. Poznansky identifies the death of the composer's mother as a shattering experience for young Pyotr Ilyich, a source of deep existential melancholy. His hypersensitivity, forged by a child's feeling of paradise lost, would manifest in neurosis, insomnia and depressive fits marked by "a sense of insurmountable terror." A Yale University librarian, Poznansky explores the composer's obsessive fear of death, his idealized relationship with eccentric, free-thinking patron Nadezhda von Meck, the fiasco of his brief, unconsummated marriage, and his involvement in a homosexual subculture that simultaneously fascinated and repelled him. Drawing on Russian sources, the author refutes the theory that Tchaikovsky's death in 1893 at age 53 was a suicide forced upon him by a conspiracy of former classmates. "The story of a soul finding itself," this remarkable book casts only an indirect light on the relationship between Tchaikovsky's life and art, as the author omits extended discussion of the music. Photos.
Subjects: Composers, Biography
