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the packet purchased at the Beverly Hills auction are interesting enough to possibly justify future publication, but all the material bearing upon what I may call The Great Cholodenko Mystery is contained in the three letters you have just read. To them, I can add nothing about Cholodenko, although I can supply some peripheral data available to any researcher willing to spend a little time digging into the history of Russian music:
    In the years following Lord Stanton’s visit to Russia, Mily Balakirev enjoyed a miraculous recovery. He returned to his abandoned Tamara , completed it, and in 1882 saw it produced to acclaim so tremendous that it secured for him, in the following year, a coveted appointment as Director of the Court Chapel. He again became an active host, filling his home with musicians and others eager for his friendship and guidance. He composed his Second Symphony and worked on a piano concerto. He conducted. He organised festivals in homage to Chopin and Glinka. He personally prepared a new edition of Glinka’s works. He energetically composed and edited music even into his retirement years, and outlined the other members of the koochka (with the single exception of Cui), dying in 1910 at the age of 73.
    A final curiosity: a yellowing sheet of music paper, presumably the one Lord Stanton mentioned, the page he said contained Alyosha’s aria from The Brothers Karamazov in Cholodenko’s own hand, actually is folded into his April 12th letter—but, except for the printer’s mark and the orderly rows of staves, it is blank.

The Runaway Lovers
    The runaway lovers were captured just before they reached the border of the Duchy.
    They were dragged immediately before His Grace, the Duke, whose noble mien and halo of snowy curls lent him the aspect of a painted angel; and his face was sad as he looked reproachfully at his errant young wife, then at her troubadour lover, and then, with a great sigh and tears brimming in his soft old eyes, paid their captors in gold and turned the two prisoners over to his warder.
    The Duke’s curt instructions to the warder were surprising, for he enjoyed a reputation far and wide as a clement and a pious lord:
    The lovers were to be taken to the dungeons and severely punished for a total of seven days—one day for each of the cardinal sins—finally to be irrevocably demised upon the seventh. During this time, they were to be prohibited, by the most direct of means, from looking upon or speaking to each other, from proffering solace by either words of courage or glances of love.
    ‘The most direct of means,’ chattered the genial warder as, keys jangling, he led the unhappy pair down into the subterranean dungeons. ‘Aye, that would be to remove your eyes and tongues.’ They howled in outraged protest, but he laughed merrily and assured them it was a simple operation done with pincers and hot irons in a few seconds.
    Still, all the world loves lovers, and the warder was a merciful man. He chose to postpone removing their eyes and tongues until the morrow, allowing them the night in ‘which to see and speak to each other. See and speak, but not touch or fondle, for after stripping them he stuffed them into separate cages, tiny cages designed for minimum ease. Leaving one smoky torch flickering in a wall sconce, the warder took his leave of them. The lovers, squatting on bare haunches, their toes gripping the hard iron of the cages’ floors, were free to console each other as best they could with words and looks.
    The woman was the first to speak. ‘See to what a sorry state we have come,’ she said through tears. ‘And all because of you.’
    ‘Of me? the youth replied. ‘It was I who insisted you remain with your husband the Duke, for we could easily take our pleasure of each other under his sanctimonious old nose and he be none the wiser. But no—you had to run away.’
    ‘Any other course would have been ignoble. Running away was the only decent thing to