Table Of Contentfrontmatter 6/12/08 2:53 PM Page i
SERGEY PROKOFIEVAND HIS WORLD
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OTHER PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS VOLUMES PUBLISHED
IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE BARD MUSIC FESTIVAL
Brahms and His World
edited by Walter Frisch (1990)
Mendelssohn and His World
edited by R. Larry Todd (1991)
Richard Strauss and His World
edited by Bryan Gilliam (1992)
Dvoˇrák and His World
edited by Michael Beckerman (1993)
Schumann and His World
edited by R. Larry Todd (1994)
Bartók and His World
edited by Peter Laki (1995)
Charles Ives and His World
edited by J. Peter Burkholder (1996)
Haydn and His World
edited by Elaine R. Sisman (1997)
Tchaikovsky and His World
edited by Leslie Kearney (1998)
Schoenberg and His World
edited by Walter Frisch (1999)
Beethoven and His World
edited by Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (2000)
Debussy and His World
edited by Jane F. Fulcher (2001)
Mahler and His World
edited by Karen Painter (2002)
Janáˇcek and His World
edited by Michael Beckerman (2003)
Shostakovich and His World
edited by Laurel E. Fay (2004)
Aaron Copland and His World
edited by Carol J.Oja and Judith Tick (2005)
Franz Liszt and His World
edited by Christopher H. Gibbs and Dana Gooley (2006)
Edward Elgar and His World
edited by Byron Adams (2007)
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SERGEY PROKOFIEV
AND HIS WORLD
EDITED BY SIMON MORRISON
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
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Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
All Rights Reserved
For permissions information, see page 562
Library of Congress Control Number 2008926970
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13894-7 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13895-4 (paperback)
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This publication has been produced by the Bard College Publications Office:
Ginger Shore, Director
Kevin Trabucco, Cover design
Natalie Kelly, Design
Text edited by Paul De Angelis and Erin Clermont
Music typeset by Don Giller
This publication has been underwritten in part by a grant from
Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
press.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments viii
SIMON MORRISON
Note on Transliteration, Dates, and Titles xii
PART I
DOCUMENTS
“Look After Your Son’s Talents”: 2
The Literary Notebook of Mariya Prokofieva
INTRODUCTORYESSAY, COMMENTARY, ANDTRANSLATIONBYPAMELADAVIDSON
The Krzhizhanovsky-Prokofiev Collaboration on Eugene Onegin, 60
1936 (A Lesser-Known Casualty of the Pushkin Death Jubilee)
INTRODUCTORYESSAY, COMMENTARY, ANDTRANSLATIONBYCARYLEMERSON
Prokofiev and Atovmyan: Correspondence, 1933–1952 190
INTRODUCTIONANDCOMMENTARYBYNELLYKRAVETZ
TRANSLATIONBYSIMONMORRISON
Prokofiev’s Immortalization 285
LEONIDMAXIMENKOV
PART II
ESSAYS
“I Came Too Soon”: Prokofiev’s Early Career in America 334
STEPHEND. PRESS
Lieutenant Kizhe:New Media, New Means 376
KEVINBARTIG
Observations on Prokofiev’s Sketchbooks 401
MARKARANOVSKY
TRANSLATIONBYJASONSTRUDLER
Prokofiev on the Los Angeles Limited 423
ELIZABETHBERGMAN
Between Two Aesthetics: The Revision of Pilnyak’s Mahogany 452
and Prokofiev’s Fourth Symphony
MARINAFROLOVA-WALKER
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CONTENTS
After Prokofiev 493
PETERJ. SCHMELZ
Beyond Death and Evil:Prokofiev’s Spirituality
and Christian Science 530
LEON BOTSTEIN
Permissions and Credits 562
Index 563
Notes on the Contributors 578
• vi •
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For Malcolm Brown
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Preface and Acknowledgments
Sergey Prokofiev composed some of the most beloved works in the Western
musical canon. Romeo and Juliet, the Third Piano Concerto, and Peter and the
Wolfendure in the orchestral and theatrical repertoire even as that reper-
toire shrinks, ceding to the popular idioms from which it sprang. Much of
Prokofiev’s appeal stems from his remarkable talent as a melodicist and his
invigoration of traditional genres and forms. We know this composer, yet
there is much about his art, and his life, that remains unknown.
The story of Prokofiev’s prodigious childhood in tsarist Russia, his mat-
uration in the West, and his rise and fall as a Stalinist-era composer has
been greatly illuminated by the Serge Prokofiev Foundation in London
which, since 2001, has published a biannual journal, Three Oranges, devot-
ed to his career. In 2001, 2004, and 2007, respectively, the Glinka Museum
in Moscow published a collection of documents dealing with Prokofiev’s
Soviet period, and in 2003, David Nice produced a detailed biography of
the first half of his career. Crucial questions are unanswered, however, and
long-standing debates unresolved. The greatest puzzle concerns Prokofiev’s
decision to relocate with his family from Paris to Moscow in 1936: the chain
of events leading up to that move, and the pressures exerted on the com-
poser by Stalinist cultural and political agencies to undertake it, continue
to be matters of informed and uninformed speculation. The precise nature
of his existence in the Soviet Union—the chronology of his wartime evacu-
ation, the bureaucratic discussions that resulted in certain works being
celebrated (Alexander Nevsky, the Fifth Symphony, the First Violin Sonata)
and others prohibited (the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October,
Tonya, A Story of A Real Man), the causes of the precipitous decline in his
health after 1945, his reactions to the arrest of his longtime collaborator
Vsevolod Meyerhold—likewise remains unclear. And whereas the publica-
tion in 2003 of Prokofiev’s diaries (in Russian) offers fascinating,
provocative insight into his career between 1907 and 1933, the chronology
of his final creative years in the West is incomplete.
Prokofiev spent much of his composing career in and around Paris and
Moscow, but he left traces of his existence as a performer in Buffalo,
Casablanca, Denver, Havana, Lisbon, London, Montreal, St. Petersburg/
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Simon Morrison
Leningrad, Tokyo, and dozens of other cities and towns. Letters, manu-
scripts, and reminiscences are preserved in national archives, municipal
libraries, small-town colleges (Dartmouth and Wheaton), specialized col-
lections (the Mary Baker Eddy Library), and the scrapbooks of friends and
acquaintances. Some of the Prokofiev holdings in Russia are inaccessible,
and others simply unexplored—a consequence of the Soviet practice of
distributing the records of leading cultural and political figures among dif-
ferent federal archives. Rarely do revelations about canonic artists
materialize, but Prokofiev remains fertile ground for scholarly study.
This collection of documents and essays, the companion to the 2008
Bard Music Festival, probes beneath the surface of Prokofiev’s career, con-
textualizing his contributions to music on both sides of the nascent Cold
War divide. It contains hitherto unknown documents from the Russian
State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow, the Russian State Archive of
Social and Political History, the State Archive of the Russian Federation,
the Serge Prokofiev Archive in London, and several smaller holdings in the
United States. Pamela Davidson opens the documents section of this vol-
ume with a translation of a literary notebook belonging to Prokofiev’s
mother, Mariya Grigoryevna, which attests to her profound and long-lasting
investment in her son’s education, especially as it concerned his indoctrina-
tion in Schopenhauer and Russian Symbolist poetry. As Davidson explains
in her introductory essay, the notebook is especially valuable for its insights
into the conception of Prokofiev’s Seven, They Are Seven, an outlandish musi-
cal treatment of an ancient (third-century) Akkadian incantation against
malevolent spirits. The little-performed score, which calls for full-sized
orchestra, chorus, and dramatic tenor, sets a Russian translation of the incan-
tation by Konstantin Balmont, a founding member of the Symbolist
movement whose influence on composers greatly exceeded that of his peers.
The second cluster of documents chronicles Prokofiev’s interaction
with Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (1887–1950), a dramatist and surrealist
fiction writer rediscovered in Russia in the 1990s and only now becoming
appreciated in English translation. Krzhizhanovsky fell out of favor with
Stalinist cultural officials and, by inevitable extension, disappeared from
Soviet-era accounts of Prokofiev’s career. Using exclusive archival
materials, Caryl Emerson narrates the conception and reception of
Krzhizhanovsky’s ill-starred theatrical adaptation of Pushkin’s novel-in-
verse Eugene Onegin, a commission by the Moscow Chamber Theater for
which Prokofiev composed incidental music in 1936. The adaptation
went unperformed, leaving the composer free to later reuse parts of his
score. Reactionary politics doomed numerous Pushkin-related commis-
sions in the run-up to the official commemoration of the centennial
• ix •
