ABSTRACT
The question of one's relationship with Christ is inseparable from the question of religious belief. Leo Tolstoy's Confession probably offers the most precise model of Russian God-seeking in the last third of the nineteenth century, which in many ways is applicable to Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky worked intensively to make himself a true believer or at least to clarify his relationship with Christianity, as Olga Zakharova established from studying the copies of his Bible among the family heirlooms. Moreover, there are traces of Tchaikovsky's interest in the musical expression of his feelings toward Christ. Tchaikovsky's Russian publisher Yurgenson took the risk and published his Liturgy of John Chrysostom. Rimsky-Korsakov recalled how the Russian Musical Society had to cheat the censors by renaming some of Bortniansky's and Anton Rubinstein's spiritual pieces for a concert programme. Russian spiritual music was contained within the Church, and within the Church it was limited to liturgical praxis.
