to be a pillar of bourgeois society and called for its abolition. Meck especially respected Pisarev's work, as well as 19th-century positivism in general. Support of the performing arts With her great wealth and her passion for music, Nadezhda von Meck became a major mover in the Russian performing arts. The sole exception to her general reclusiveness was the series of Russian Musical Society concerts given in Moscow, which she attended incognito, sitting alone in the balcony. Through these concerts she made the acquaintance of Nikolai Rubinstein, with whom she maintained a complex relationship. While she respected Rubinstein's talents and energy, that did not stop her from disagreeing strongly with him at times. While her husband was still alive, Nadezhda von Meck began actively supporting and promoting young musicians, several of whom she continually employed, living in her household and playing her favorite works. She hired Claude Debussy as a music tutor for her daughters, and he wanted to marry one of them. She would not give her permission, preferring her daughters to marry men of her own choosing, which they did, but their marriages all ended in divorce. In February 1880, Meck came to the assistance of the Polish violinist Henryk Wieniawski, who had been taken ill in Odessa while on a concert tour. She moved him into her house and arranged medical treatment for him, but he died a few weeks later in Moscow. Relationship with Tchaikovsky In 1877, one of the musicians she supported was violinist Iosif Kotek, with whom she played chamber music. Kotek was a former student and friend of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, recommended to Meck by Nikolai Rubinstein. She had already been impressed with Tchaikovsky's music such as his symphonic poem The Tempest, and she asked Rubinstein at length about him. She wrote to the composer. Introducing herself as a "fervent admirer", she commissioned some pieces for violin and piano to be played at her house. Tchaikovsky quickly obliged. One of her first commissions was for a funeral march, which was never published and is now considered lost. They continued writing even as his marriage followed its brief though tortuous course. As their relationship developed, she subsequently provided him with an allowance of 6,000 rubles a year, large enough that he could leave his professorship at the Moscow Conservatory to focus on creative work full-time. This was a substantial income. A minor government official