Tchaikovsky
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Alina Briullova

Alina Ivanovna Briullova (Алина Ивановна Брюллова) was born Alina Meyer (Мейер) in 1849. During her first marriage to the agriculturist Herman Konradi she was also known as Alina Konradi (Алина Конради).

It was from this first marriage that she had a deaf-mute son Nikolai ("Kolia"), to whom Tchaikovsky's brother Modest became tutor in 1876. The composer and his brother often stayed at the Konradis' estate at Grankino, and knew the family well, although relations with Alina became strained after she divorced from her husband in 1881, and Modest was granted permanent guardianship of Nikolai the following year.

During the 1880s Alina married her second husband Vladimir Aleksandrovich Briullov (1846-1918), the manager of the Russian National Museum.

Although Tchaikovsky's letters reveal that in private he found Alina a very "unsympathetic" person, for Nikolai and Modest's sake he concealed his misgivings, and in 1893 he even dedicated a piano piece to her - Echo rustique (No. 13 from the Eighteen Pieces, Op. 72).

Alina Briullova died in 1932.