Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PDF Sergei Prokofiev A Biography 1St Edition Harlow Robinson Ebook Full Chapter
PDF Sergei Prokofiev A Biography 1St Edition Harlow Robinson Ebook Full Chapter
https://textbookfull.com/product/oprah-a-biography-1st-edition-
kelley/
https://textbookfull.com/product/blood-at-dusk-soulblood-1-1st-
edition-brenna-harlow/
https://textbookfull.com/product/television-a-biography-1st-
edition-david-thomson/
https://textbookfull.com/product/albert-schweitzer-a-
biography-1st-edition-oermann/
Dirichlet A Mathematical Biography 1st Edition Merzbach
https://textbookfull.com/product/dirichlet-a-mathematical-
biography-1st-edition-merzbach/
https://textbookfull.com/product/hitler-a-biography-1st-edition-
peter-longerich/
https://textbookfull.com/product/poulenc-a-biography-1st-edition-
roger-nichols/
https://textbookfull.com/product/paul-a-biography-wright/
https://textbookfull.com/product/paul-a-biography-1st-edition-n-
t-wright/
Sergei Prokofiev
A Biography
by Harlow Robinson
By Odile Ayral-Clause
Camille Claudel: A Life
By Carol Easton
Jacqueline du Pré: A Biography
By Amos Elon
Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time
Herzl
Jerusalem: City of Mirrors
By Helen Epstein
Joe Papp: An American Life
Meyer Schapiro: Portrait of an Art Historian
Miss DeLay: portrait of beloved violin teacher Dorothy DeLay
Music Talks: the lives of classical musicians
Tina Packer Builds A Theater
Writing from Life: On Trauma, Sexual Assault, and Recovery
By Raymond B. Fosdick
John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait
By Howard Greenfeld
Ben Shahn: An Artist’s Life
By Andy Grove
Swimming Across
By Sebastian Haffner
Churchill
Defying Hitler: A Memoir
The Meaning of Hitler
By Hans Heiberg
Ibsen: A Portrait of the Artist
By Anthony Heilbut
Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in
America from the 1930s to the Present
By Eva Hoffman
Lost in Translation
By George Jellinek
Callas: Portrait of a Prima Donna
By Melvyn Leffler
A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman
Administration, and the Cold War
By Klaus Mann
The Turning Point: Thirty-Five Years in this Century, the
Autobiography of Klaus Mann
By Jeffrey Mehlman
Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan
1940-1944
By William Schack
Art and Argyrol: The Life and Career of Dr. Albert C. Barnes
By Stefan Zweig
The World of Yesterday
No matter who the subject is, biographies always reflect the times
in which they are written. This one is no exception.
When I was researching and writing about the life and music of
the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) in the late
1970s and early 1980s, the Cold War was still alive and raging. Not
long after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979,
President Carter announced an American boycott of the 1980
Moscow Olympics. At that moment, I was a graduate student in
Moscow on a Fulbright grant, spending most of my days in the chilly
reading room of the Soviet Central State Archives of Literature and
Art, going through Prokofiev’s manuscripts and papers for my
doctoral dissertation on his operas. During President Ronald
Reagan’s first term in office, the ideological hostility between the
United States and the Soviet Union only intensified. In November
1982, the Soviet Communist Party chief, Leonid Brezhnev, died and
was replaced by the former KGB boss, Yuri Andropov. At that
moment, too, I was in Moscow, now an assistant professor, but
rummaging again (still!) through Prokofiev’s archives and
interviewing those who had known and worked with him in
preparation for writing this biography. It should come as no surprise
that some of these people were reluctant to take the risk of speaking
frankly and openly to an American scholar — although many of them
did, sometimes requesting anonymity. Soon after Andropov came to
power, a Korean Airlines passenger plane was shot down by Soviet
aircraft near the island of Sakhalin and Reagan denounced the
U.S.S.R. as the “Evil Empire.” Even Hollywood got into the act,
producing such viciously anti-Soviet films as Red Dawn, in which
matinee idol Patrick Swayze plays a high school jock leading guerilla
resistance to a brutal Soviet invasion of a small Colorado town. That
film appeared in 1984, the same year I was spending the summer in
the reading rooms of Leningrad libraries in continued pursuit of
Prokofiev.
I admit it: the otherness of Russia at the height of the Cold War
was one of its main attractions for me. It was hard to get there and
difficult to stay. If you studied Russian and Russian culture in those
days, people assumed that you were either a Communist
sympathizer or a spy in training. I was neither. Instead, I was
obsessed with something else: the art and career of one of the
greatest, and most enigmatic, composers of the twentieth century.
As it happens, my biography of Prokofiev appeared (in March
1987) at another crucial period in recent Russian history. About two
years earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev had been named the new
Communist Party First Secretary, and big changes were already afoot
in Moscow. New slogans — glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika
(“restructuring”) — were replacing rigid Communist propaganda, and
Soviet artists and scholars were beginning to taste a freedom of
expression they had not even dared to dream about. By the time I
returned to Moscow in spring 1988, glasnost was in full bloom and
the days of the old Soviet system were numbered. Prokofiev’s official
Soviet biographer, Israel Nestyev, who had since the Stalinist period
been dutifully following the Party line in his many works on the
composer and his music, even invited me to his apartment
overlooking Gorky Street for drinks and zakuski. During our
conversation, he let me know (somewhat apologetically) that he, like
many others, was now reexamining his role in upholding the
bankrupt ideology of a corrupt and inhumane system for so many
years. In Nestyev’s case, this meant denigrating the music Prokofiev
wrote abroad before he returned to the bosom of mother Soviet
Russia in the late 1930s. Although he dedicated most of his life to
serious research on Prokofiev, as a young man Nestyev had also
participated in writing some of the official attacks launched in 1948
against the alleged crime of “formalism” committed by Prokofiev and
other composers.
The Soviet Union finally ceased officially to exist in late 1991, just
a few months after the muted celebration of the hundredth
anniversary of Prokofiev’s birth the preceding April.
The Cold War may be over, but Cold War attitudes have continued
to color Prokofiev’s legacy and reputation. Like all prominent creative
artists who lived and worked under the Soviet regime (including
such figures as the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the film
director Sergei Eisenstein), Prokofiev came under new scrutiny for
the extent to which he had collaborated with and supported what
was now regarded as an evil and corrupt system. As is the case with
all revolutions (and what happened in the Soviet Union in the late
1980s was surely a revolution, both cultural and political), all those
associated with the old regime were now perceived as somehow
tainted. Prokofiev came under attack for having enjoyed the
privileged status of an officially approved (at least most of the time)
artist in a totalitarian society — the same status enjoyed by Richard
Strauss in Nazi Germany. Once again, Prokofiev was castigated for
his decision to leave Europe for the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s — his “ill-
advised retreat from Paris to Moscow,” as the New Yorker music
critic Alex Ross wrote in his review of the Metropolitan Opera’s
brilliant new production of The Gambler in April 2001.
And yet those who have experienced the Soviet system firsthand
have tended to be more generous. The Soviet Maestro Valery
Gergiev, who conducted The Gambler at the Met and who has been
a tireless champion of Prokofiev’s music (especially the works of the
Soviet period) both in Russia and abroad, spoke eloquently to this
issue at the official launch of the Serge Prokofiev Association as a
formal foundation in London in May 2001. “I cannot agree with
those who simplistically see Prokofiev’s return to the Soviet Union as
the biggest mistake of his life,” Gergiev said to a select audience that
included prominent musicians and all the surviving members of the
Prokofiev family. “If he had not returned, we would not have his
Fifth Symphony, or Alexander Nevsky, or the Sixth Symphony, or War
and Peace and so many other great works that continue to find new
audiences today.”
Despite all that has happened in Russia during the fifteen years
since this biography was first published, I am happy to say that with
the exception of the few details described above, my account of
Prokofiev’s life and times remains both accurate and valid. I am
grateful to William A. Frohlich, director of Northeastern University
Press, for deciding to reprint this biography, which will now be
available again to the many individuals who have contacted me in
recent years wanting to purchase a copy. Today I look at the pages
that follow with a combination of pride, gratitude and amazement.
Did I really do this? Was it really that long ago?
In bringing Prokofiev’s remarkable story to life, I have also
immeasurably enriched my own.
Brookline, Massachusetts
Fall 2001
Preface and Acknowledgments
I never met Prokofiev in the flesh, but I have met him many times
in his music. When I was about ten, my parents took the family to a
performance of Love for Three Oranges by a community group at
the local high school. It was the first opera I ever saw. What
impressed me most deeply then was not so much the odd, jerking
rhythms and violent harmonic contrasts (though I liked those, too),
but the plump pieces of artificial citrus fruit — swollen to unnatural
size — that rolled out on stage in Act II. When three princesses —
each singing sadly about something — emerged from them, my
curiosity turned to amazement. I turned with wide eyes to my
brother, whose similar wonder was reflected in the same tiny lines of
joyful concentration that furrowed his brow when he was reading his
favorite books.
A few months ago — about twenty-five years after that first
meeting — I met Prokofiev again, this time in Romeo and Juliet at
the Maly Theater in Leningrad. Arriving ticketless at the theatre only
moments before the curtain was to rise, I was uncertain whether I
could get in. I approached the box office window, which had been
made tiny to protect the little old ladies who sit behind it from abuse
when they announce that the performance is (as usual) sold out.
Suddenly a slip of paper was thrust into my hand and a small
number of rubles specified. “Run,” the babushka said as she took the
diminutive bills, “or you’ll be late.” I sprinted up the staircase
indicated by the anxious usher, opened a small door and found
myself in the lavishly appointed box once occupied by the Tsar and
his family. Suffusing the gold-velvet upholstery in a muted glow, the
lights dimmed as I squeezed through to my seat in the front row —
the best one in the house.
Though I have seen Romeo and Juliet many times in many
theatres, and many performances better than the one I saw on that
bitter January night in icy Leningrad, this Romeo was a special one. I
felt that Prokofiev had wanted me to be there.
Between this Oranges and this Romeo came many other meetings
with Prokofiev: in his symphonies and concertos, his ballets and
operas, his suites and songs. Listening to this beguiling music made
me want to know more about its creator, so I read whatever I could
find (mostly in Russian). Very soon, I discovered that the peculiarly
nomadic life Prokofiev led had largely eluded his biographers. Gaping
lacunae yawned before me as I worked to follow the twisting route
of his personal and artistic odyssey; it was like coming to the most
important pages of a suspense novel only to find them torn out.
Ultimately, I came to see that these gaps resulted both from logistic
problems (Prokofiev rarely stayed in one place for long, dashing
between America, Europe and the Soviet Union) and political bias.
It became clear to me that Prokofiev’s life and music had been
recounted and interpreted from two equally unsatisfying and
incomplete points of view. One was the official Soviet version,
propounded by generations of Soviet musicologists and writers, that
insisted (at least until quite recently) upon regarding Prokofiev’s
decision to leave Russia in 1918 as the biggest mistake of his life.
The other was the “Western” version, argued with particular
vehemence by members of the Russian emigration, which has
insisted on the opposite: that his decision to return to the Soviet
Union in 1936 was the biggest mistake of his life. Unfortunately,
Prokofiev’s complicated personal life in the U.S.S.R. only contributed
further to this political polarization. As in most things, of course, the
truth — some of which, at least, I hope to illuminate in the pages
that follow — lies somewhere in between these two extreme
positions.
I have tried to provide a more complete and balanced portrait of
this remarkably misunderstood genius, drawing extensively on
Russian-language sources previously unavailable to the English-
speaking audience. My goal is to encourage greater appreciation of
Prokofiev’s tart and tender music, presenting it as part of a wider
human and historical struggle. Strong and mysterious bonds linked
Prokofiev’s art to his personality and to his national identity. The
nature of these bonds, and the sources of the prolific talent from
which music flowed so forcefully, with a nearly biological urgency,
are my subject here.
Two final notes involve problems that are the curse of those who
write about Russia in languages other than Russian. The first is
transliteration. In the body of the text, I have chosen to use
popularly accepted spellings of Russian names (e.g., Prokofiev, not
Prokof’ev) and places, rather than transliterating according to the
scholarly Library of Congress system. Where there were several
possible popular spellings (as in the case of Koussevitsky), I have
made an arbitrary choice. In the notes and bibliography, however, I
have employed the Library of Congress system. If I have erred, it is
on the side of accessibility and readability, and I happily accept that
responsibility.
The second is dating. The Western calendar was adopted in the
U.S.S.R. in 1918. In the nineteenth century, the Russian calendar
(commonly referred to as Old Style) lagged behind the Western
calendar (New Style) by twelve days, and in the twentieth century
(until 1918) by thirteen days. In the interest of authenticity, I have
chosen to use Old Style dates in Part I, since it is set for the most
part in Russia and ends in early 1918. In those sections of Part I
which take place in Europe, however, I have used New Style dates.
In other words, when in Russia, Old Style; when in Europe, New
Style. Don’t despair: where there is potential for confusion, I have
provided both.
All translations from the Russian and French are mine unless
indicated.
CHAPTER V
The next morning at breakfast time I went upstairs and knocked on
the door of Adam's room. He called to me to come in and I opened
the door then stopped, one foot over the threshold.
Across the room, admiring his bewhiskered face in the mirror, was
Santa Claus!
"Ho-ho-ho!" he boomed, in a perfect imitation of my own Santa-
voice. "Merry Christmas, Daddy!" He tugged at the beard and there
was the grinning face of Adam-Two. "I found it in the closet," he said.
"Do I look the part?"
I laughed. "For a minute I thought you were the real thing."
He looked away. "I—I guess you know I'll want to go to Earth to live."
I nodded. "It will be pretty rough at first. You realize that?"
"Yes, I expect it will.... Daddy, I'm sorry I messed up Christmas for
the Kids yesterday. I'd kind of like to make up for it by playing Santa
for them today. Will you stand by me in case some smarty-pants tries
to snatch my beard off?"
I grinned at him, but I didn't say anything because I discovered there
was a strange kind of lump in my throat.
"I was thinking, too," he went on, "that maybe I could come back with
the supply ship each Christmas and—and do the same thing, if you'd
like me to."
I cleared my throat. "That—that would be fine, Adam."
He hesitated again, then blurted, "It isn't right, you know. Fairyland, I
mean. It isn't fair to kids not to let them grow up. And it isn't the
answer to all the things you told me are wrong about the world."
"I know, Adam. I know."
"Sooner or later they'll realize that, on Earth."
"I think they already have," I said.
He scratched his chin under the beard. "Then some day they might
decide to close Fairyland, mightn't they? So I was thinking, maybe
each Christmastime you and Mommy could choose two or three of
the older Kids and sort of get them ready for the world. The way you
did me. Then I could take them back to Earth with me, and help them
get started. You could tell the other Kids they went to live with Santa
Claus."
I stared at him in amazement. This—this Kid, I couldn't think of him
any other way—yesterday had been little more than a juvenile
delinquent. Today he was a mature, thinking adult who in a few
sparse words had provided the answer to the question that had been
gnawing at me for two weeks: what was to become of Fairyland?
I felt the way a father must feel when he suddenly realizes his boy
has grown up, and has turned out all right. Kind of proud, and more
than a little grateful.
I gripped Adam's hand. "Son, you've got yourself a deal! Come along
and let's surprise the Kids!"
We went down the stairs arm in arm, and I called to Ruth: "Hey,
Mommy! Guess what. There really is a Santa Claus, after all!"
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAIRYLAND
PLANET ***
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also
govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most
countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside
the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to
the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying,
displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works
based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work. The
Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright
status of any work in any country other than the United States.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form,
including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if
you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project
Gutenberg™ work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or
other format used in the official version posted on the official
Project Gutenberg™ website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at
no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a
means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project
Gutenberg™ License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
• You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the
method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The
fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark,
but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty
payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on
which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your
periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked
as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information
about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation.”
• You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.
1.F.
Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
facility: www.gutenberg.org.