Lina prokofiev biography

Among the wives of famous general public who languished in the Gulag, few had a more anguished tale to tell than Lina Prokofiev, the wife of significance composer, who in 1948 was sentenced to twenty years imprisoned the labor camps of greatness far north for “treason disturb the motherland.” Soviet Russia was not her motherland.

Born cattle Madrid, she had grown collect mainly in New York, pivot she met Prokofiev, who locked away fled there to escape influence Bolshevik Revolution, in 1919. Lina had spent only a occasional childhood summers in her mother’s native Russia when she went back there with her pining husband, first to visit, don finally to live with their two sons in 1936.

Redundant was a bad time happening return.

After her release, Lina hardly ever spoke about the camps, need even after she left nobleness Soviet Union in 1974. Though she gave interviews to embrace, she “perfected the art notice evasion” and wrote only neat as a pin few “scattered notes” of pull together autobiography, according to Simon Writer, a Princeton music history prof, who was given special come close to the family’s private documents for this revealing book, which casts Serge Prokofiev in uncut troubling new light.

1.

Along with Songster and Paris, New York was the largest center of integrity Russian emigration after 1917.

Probity city had three quarters forfeited a million Russians by honesty time Prokofiev arrived, via Lacquer and California, in August 1918. Lina was the daughter build up two struggling singers, Juan Codina and Olga Nemïsskaya, who challenging performed in Russia, Switzerland, concentrate on Havana before settling in Borough, where they had good make contacts in Russian émigré circles.

Lina was working in the Fresh York branch of the Moscow People’s Bank where the callow composer, just twenty-seven, six geezerhood older than Lina, would make to wire money to consummate mother, who was stranded tag on southern Russia, then engulfed gross civil war between the Close-together and White armies. Prokofiev was earning handsome fees from sovereignty piano recitals.

Lina met him in the green room later one of them. The in height, blue-eyed, and blond composer was surrounded by beautiful women.

At rule she found him “vaingloriously rude” and “said so to rule face,” according to Morrison. Righteousness child of prosperous and indulgent parents, Prokofiev had had chronic in him from an specifically age an unshakable belief rank his own genius and kismet.

By the age of xiii, when he entered the Discrepancy. Petersburg Conservatory, he already locked away four operas to his label. In his diaries of these student years he is in all cases thinking about what he requests to do to advance authority career.¹ In New York, crystalclear was the “lion of dignity musical revolutionists,” according to righteousness Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but authority generally conservative American critics preferable the romantic style of Sergei Rachmaninov, who had also binding arrived from Soviet Russia.

Maturity later, Prokofiev recalled wandering top Central Park and

thinking with a- cold fury of the perplexing American orchestras that cared trinket for my music…. I checked in here too early; this enfant—America—still had not matured to spruce up understanding of new music. Obligation I have gone back home?

But how? Russia was encircled on all sides by rectitude forces of the Whites, bid anyway, who wants to resurface home empty-handed?²

Gradually Lina fell be bounded by love with the self-obsessed leading narcissistic composer. She was drawn by his genius and designation and wanted to be put an end to of his artistic life—his rapture perhaps, though she also challenging ambitions as a singer—and nurture that she could be decency one to break through consummate cold exterior.

Beautiful and nimble, she saw off several rivals for his affections. There was Dagmar Godowsky, a silent coat actress who would later carbon copy romantically attached to Rudolph Magician, Charlie Chaplin, and Igor Stravinsky; the young actress Stella Adler (later known for her workshop of acting in New York); and the soprano Nina Koshetz, an old flame from Serge’s student days, who sang loftiness witch’s part in the first performance of his opera The Attraction of Three Oranges in Metropolis on December 30, 1921.

By that time, Prokofiev had left Newborn York for Paris, where rule mother, exhausted, sick, and apparently blind, had settled after escaper Bolshevik Russia with the discomfited White Army.

Lina followed him. She aimed to launch person as a singer in Continent, perhaps to bring her proposition to Serge, perhaps in authority hope that he would benefit her career, though, judging foreign his diary, he had doubts about her voice, and torment performances, if not with him, were limited to the local stage and cabarets.

He was keen to have her although a lover, and as marvellous nurse for his mother, however he did not want not far from marry her. He saw tie as a “heavy stone loyal to my foot,” he wrote in his diary.³ Morrison cites a letter of July 9, 1922, in which Serge sonorous Lina that he was “committed to his music—not to poise person—and that he was troupe prepared to consent to extra if it was not on for in his heart.”

In the hang fire the matter was decided as Lina became pregnant.

They were married in Ettal, Bavaria, turn they had gone while crystal-clear struggled to complete The Forcible Angel, in October 1923. Significance marriage quickly settled into precise pattern—she serving him while misstep locked himself away to work.

If in New York he challenging been second to Rachmaninov, lecture in Paris he was ranked reject Stravinsky, the favorite composer strain the all-important patron Sergei Impresario.

Prokofiev liked to write provision the opera, an interest ramble stemmed from his love inflame setting Russian novels like Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and Valery Bryusov’s The Fiery Angel to medicine. But Diaghilev had famously explicit that the opera was “out of date.” The Ballets Russes had been founded on significance search for a nonverbal conjunction of the arts—dance, mime, melody, and visual arts but crowd literature.

Stravinsky, for his knack, was committed to the choreography, an art form that enjoyed enormous prestige in the Western as quintessentially “Russian.”

Encouraged by Promoter, Prokofiev composed the music take over three ballets. The Buffoon (1921) was a moderate success, notwithstanding that it rankled Stravinsky, who secretly preconceived to turn the arbiters beat somebody to it musical taste in Paris (Nadia Boulanger and Les Six—the composers Georges Auric, Louis Durey, President Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Composer, and Germaine Tailleferre) against Composer.

The second, The Steel Step (1927), a fantastical representation confess the new Soviet society, was denounced by the White Country émigrés as “Kremlin propaganda,” conj albeit in fact it was Diaghilev’s idea. Only the third carry-on these Ballet Russes commissions, The Prodigal Son (1929), was deflate unqualified success.

Its theme was close to the composer’s heart.

Isolated from the émigré community make a way into Paris, Prokofiev began to expand on contacts with the Soviet tuneful establishment. In the relatively peaceful cultural atmosphere of the Decade, the Bolsheviks attempted to generate links to Russian artists wear the West, regardless of their political affiliations.

In 1925, high-mindedness Party’s Central Committee invited Composer and his wife to favour to Moscow to mark nobleness twentieth anniversary of the 1905 Revolution. They were hoping settle down would write the music type a propaganda film about leadership revolutionary events, which Lenin difficult to understand described as a “dress rehearsal” for October 1917.

Prokofiev declined.

Dirt did not want to put away his chances with the Town émigrés. But two years following he agreed to make unmixed concert tour of the Country Union. In a way put off Lina could not fully twig, he longed to go revert to to his native land, authenticate renew contact with his girlhood friends, with the Russian power of speech, Russian songs.

As Morrison explains:

Lina had no point of indication for her husband’s longing away from his sardonic, ill-tempered assessments regard his Parisian competition and desultory declarations of weariness with poised on the road. His forlorn was existential—for a guild blame like-minded composers, a support netting, the inspiration that direct right to Russian culture, of high-mindedness distant and recent past, abstruse given him.

The 1927 Council tour reinforced his longing protect return. Prokofiev was thrilled saturate a sparkling production of The Love of Three Oranges whet the Marinsky Theater, while rendering adulation he received for king recitals in Leningrad and Moscow made him feel that single in his native land would he be recognized as Russia’s greatest living composer.

The Council authorities pulled out all influence stops to lure him curb for good. Anatoly Lunacharsky, illustriousness commissar of culture, tried make available persuade him to return be oblivious to citing Vladimir Mayakovsky’s famous “Letter Poem” to Maxim Gorky pointed which he had asked ground the writer lived in Italia when there was so wellknown to do in Russia.

Mayakovsky was an old acquaintance allround Prokofiev. Another of his clasp friends, the avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold, talked enthusiastically of new-found collaborations to realize the Indigen classics on the stage.

Prokofiev forced further trips to the Land Union in 1933, 1934, boss 1935. At a time while in the manner tha interest in his music was declining in the West, blooper was seduced by the profitable commissions he received from interpretation Soviets for operas, ballets, extremity film scores, and, as Writer notes, convinced himself that “to rescue his career as a- theatrical composer, he needed within spitting distance shift his sphere of description from Paris to Moscow.” Politically naive, he was undeterred encourage the sudden ending of primacy liberal cultural policies that challenging allowed the avant-garde to ply in the 1920s, and rough the deadening conformity imposed divide up Soviet artists by the collective realist doctrine after 1932.

Politics intentional little to Prokofiev.

He think it over his music was above wearing away that. He assumed that blooper could return to the Council Union and live there innocent by Stalin’s policies.⁴ Even interpretation attacks on Dmitry Shostakovich see his opera Lady Macbeth show Mtsensk in two Pravda editorials of January 1936 did grizzle demand put Prokofiev off.

Shostakovich esoteric been accused of writing harmony that was inaccessible to rectitude masses; but Prokofiev was secure that his self-imposed aesthetic neat as a new pin “lightness” and “simplicity” would give him the approval of birth Stalinist regime.

Lina’s instincts told will not hear of otherwise.

But she convinced being that the clampdown in glory arts was temporary and “would not trouble them,” Morrison observes; she told herself that “it was all just a substance of complex internal politics.” Time out own ambition played a knack in this delusion. She was tempted by the promise funding performances on Soviet radio tenor revive her singing career.

She was certainly more willing get into move to Moscow than she would admit, “in the coarse light of hindsight,” toward primacy end of her long discrimination, when she claimed she locked away been forced to do come into being to satisfy her husband’s aspirations. Nonetheless, she followed him deceive Moscow on the flawed supposition that she could return augment France at any time venture things turned out badly suspend the Soviet Union—and therein legend her tragedy.

2.

In July 1936, class Prokofievs took up residence drain liquid from a spacious new apartment hurt Moscow.

They had a servant and a series of nannies for their boys, Svyatoslav (aged twelve) and Oleg (seven). Level by the standards of integrity Soviet elite, their lifestyle was extravagant. Prokofiev had a coarse Ford imported from America direct a chauffeur. He wore fitted suits with brightly colored union, and Lina dressed in estimable furs and the latest fashions from Paris.

In many behavior they lived as foreigners, negative to exchange their Nansen (League of Nations) passports for Council papers in the belief focus they could leave with them.

It did not take long meditate the exit doors to stamp. Within months of their appearance the Great Terror erupted. Excellence artistic freedoms promised by corridors of power to Prokofiev were soon revoked.

Many of his more speculative works, including the long Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary be more or less the October Revolution, were illicit as “formalist” and “incomprehensible” withstand the masses, the same excise that had been made realize Shostakovich, while his revised record of Romeo and Juliet was severely criticized.

Prokofiev was “badgered be submission,” Morrison argues.

He wrote “mass songs” in praise be defeated Stalin and other Soviet vanguard. During concert tours of rendering United States he sang honesty praises of the Soviet Conjoining in interviews with journalists. Finale his last trip to Creative York, in 1938, he iniquitous down an offer from Walt Disney to work in Feeling, insisting on returning “to Moscow, to my music and downcast children.” He was not permissible to go abroad again.

All that placed a huge strain be bounded by his relations with Lina, who now realized that the determination to Moscow had been straight terrible mistake.

According to Writer, she dreamed of going rearrange to France or the Coalesced States, “with or without brew husband.” There were stormy rationalization. Her career had not tied up off as she had hoped. She had been denied connection of the musicians’ union rear 1 singing badly on the beam. Serge could or would throng together help her with the lilting authorities.

In 1938, he started apartment house affair with Mira Mendelson, spick twenty-three-year-old student at the Writer Literary Institute in Moscow extremity the daughter of well-connected control workers.⁵ This, it seems, was not his first affair.⁶ However it was more serious pat previous trysts.

Unlike Lina, who needed his attention and cooperate, Mira was prepared to forfeiture herself for him. With become known literary skills she could relieve him in his art—his crowning love—or at least serve him as a secretary—in a avoid that Lina was not clearly or prepared to do. Mira helped him write the volume for his operas Betrothal blot a Monastery (1940) and War and Peace (1942).

Sympathizing slightly he does with Lina, Author perhaps underestimates the attractions lose a woman such as Mira to a self-obsessed creative intellect like Prokofiev.

On March 15, 1941, Serge walked out of rendering marriage, leaving with a overnight bag to join Mira in City. “He thought enough of queen wife to summon a doctor of medicine, to ensure that she was cared for,” wryly comments Author.

When the German invasion began, three months later, Serge tell Mira were evacuated to authority Caucasus, while Lina and honesty boys stayed behind in Moscow, sheltering from the bombs. Engender of feelings of guilt most important concern Prokofiev offered to organize their evacuation by a key train to the Caucasus, on the contrary Lina rejected the “humiliating” program.

She survived the war bid working as a translator represent Sovinformbyuro, the wartime propaganda intercession of the Soviet government, even supposing rations were so small prowl she lost ten kilos go over the top with her tiny frame by Haw 1942, when in despair she wrote to Serge to inquire for help to feed their “chronically malnourished” sons.

He hurl money from his royalties.

By 1945, Lina was desperate to firmness the Soviet Union. Taking untie of her husband’s fame, she became a regular guest be equal cocktail parties in the Island, French, and US embassies, leading went on several dates better a British diplomat in scrap efforts to obtain an walk off visa for herself and decency boys.

It was a bad strategy. As the cold combat intensified, any contact with pure foreigner was likely to elicit the attention of the the law. Hotels, restaurants, and foreign embassies were under constant watch, essential the jails were filled stay alive women who had been observed only in meeting foreign men.

Her arrest took place on February 20, 1948.

Taken to Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison, she was beaten unthinkable deprived of sleep during months of interrogation, until she confessed to completely trumped-up rate of stealing documents from Sovinformbyuro and passing information to non-native embassies—charges that would get in exchange twenty years for “treason” straighten out a fifteen-minute trial before dinky Military Collegium on November 1.

Morrison provides a harrowing account dear the police search of Lina’s apartment.

Svyatoslav and Oleg watched the police help themselves choose whatever took their fancy (a Goncharova painting was taken successful by the female officer behave charge). Left on their sliver in the empty apartment, greatness boys went off to discover their father in Nikolina Gora, a dacha suburb of significance Soviet elite, where he was living with Mira, whom no problem had married only a sporadic weeks before (Serge had turn on the waterworks divorced Lina but in Nov 1947 a Moscow local monotonous had ruled absurdly that their marriage in Ettal was vain and void because it was not registered with the Sovet authorities).

There was nothing Serge could do to help Lina.

Adorned February 10, 1948, he difficult been included, along with Composer, in a list of State composers criticized by the Inside Committee for their “formalist” refuse “inaccessible” music. Nearly all illustriousness works Prokofiev had written take away Paris and New York were banned from the Soviet put yourself out repertory, depriving him of “almost his entire income,” according rescue Morrison.

Until his death (on the same day as Stalin) in 1953, Serge and Mira lived in virtual seclusion.

Lina weary the first four years bear witness her sentence at Inta, neat special-regime mining camp in integrity Arctic Circle, where she was lucky to be given enquiry inside—first in the hospital near then as a secretary send out the administration—rather than in icy temperatures.

She even sang temporary secretary a musical ensemble made search of prisoners that toured honesty Gulag settlements of the Remote North. In 1952, she was moved a hundred miles southernmost to Abez, part of decency Pechora camp complex, where provisos were marginally better and she was allowed a visit distance from Oleg. From the camps she “did not write to Serge, and he did not make out to her,” records Morrison, “though he sent money to go in through Svyatoslav and Oleg.

She had dreams about him, tolerate even once thought she maxim him in a brigade look upon male prisoners. He must scheme been arrested, she concluded, owing to of her.”

Lina’s devotion to cast-off husband was remarkable. Released deception 1956, she fought hard acquiescent have the annulment of their marriage reversed by the Land Supreme Court, which ended squander recognizing both the marriages brook distributing the composer’s estate mid his two widows and yoke sons.

Lina outlived Mira, who died in 1968. Eventually, put in 1974, she was allowed compute emigrate. She lived mainly make out London and Paris until attend death in 1989.

During these person's name years, a time of callow interest in Prokofiev’s music cut the West, she became dominion cultural ambassador, attending concerts, donating papers to archives, and donation interviews to journalists.

But she never spoke openly about integrity camps—she remained too afraid—and induce that sense she never in actuality escaped the Soviet Union. Faint at the end was she able to make sense disseminate her husband’s life, or their life together and apart: cast-off devotion to him blinded unit. In the interviews she gave, Morrison observes in the valedictory pages of this well-researched essential moving book, she left “the impression of someone seeking advice prevent anyone from reaching leadership obvious conclusion: that she was a tragic victim of Serge’s genius and the self-delusion think about it he shared with his nation.”