Short answers, pulled from the story.
Tchaikovsky was born on the 7th of May 1840 in Votkinsk, a small town in the Vyatka Governorate of the Russian Empire, in what is now Udmurtia, near the banks of the Kama River. His father, Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, managed the Ironworks at Kamsko-Votkinsk as a lieutenant colonel and engineer.
Tchaikovsky trained as a civil servant at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg and graduated on the 10th of June 1859. He was appointed to the Ministry of Justice, rising from junior assistant to senior assistant within months, and remained in civil service for three years before pursuing music full-time.
Nadezhda von Meck was the widow of a railway magnate who became Tchaikovsky's patroness for thirteen years, providing financial support that allowed him to compose full-time. Tchaikovsky called her his "best friend", but the two agreed never to meet under any circumstances and maintained their entire relationship through letters.
Tchaikovsky died on the 6th of November 1893 in Saint Petersburg at the age of 53, and his death is generally attributed to cholera contracted from drinking unboiled water. Academic debate in Britain during the 1980s raised the possibility that the death was intentional; the musicologist Roland John Wiley wrote in the New Grove Dictionary of Music that "we do not know how Tchaikovsky died. We may never find out."
Tchaikovsky had a mixed but not hostile relationship with The Five, the nationalist group of composers including Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin. He collaborated with Balakirev in 1869 on the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet, which the group embraced, but he deliberately maintained his musical independence from both their nationalist agenda and the conservative faction at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.
Emperor Alexander III conferred the Order of Saint Vladimir on Tchaikovsky in March 1884, which included a title of hereditary nobility and a personal audience with the Tsar. In 1892, he was voted a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts in France, only the second Russian subject so honored, and in 1893 the University of Cambridge awarded him an honorary Doctor of Music degree.