t’s a tiny comfort to hear that the composer of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker doesn’t meet with presidential condemnation. But Tchaikovsky – who wrote to his brother about his “cursed buggermania”, and who fell so in love with his own nephew that he dedicated his aching 6th Symphony to him – has become, in his own way, a victim of Russia’s new suppressions. A biopic of Tchaikovsky’s life that’s currently in production presents the composer as a heartbroken straight man. According to a reporter for Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, an earlier draft of the screenplay acknowledged his love for men, but the film’s screenwriter now says that “only philistines” believe the overwhelming evidence of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality.