Sergey Prokofiev, Diaries 1924–1933: Prodigal Son by Anthony Phillips (review)

In 1907 Sergey Prokofiev, then sixteen years old and a student at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, began a modest, daily “record” of his life. He diligently updated his diary for the next twenty-six years, filling dozens of notebooks and yielding a wonderfully detailed and compelling first-person account of early-twentieth-century European and American musical life. The diaries became available to readers only in 2002, when the Serge Proko fiev Estate published them in the original Russian. The daunting task of translating the 1,600-page Russian edition into English was taken up by Anthony Phillips, who divided Prokofiev’s literary work into three volumes: Prodigious Youth (1907–14), Behind the Mask (1915–23), and the present and final installment, Prodigal Son (1924–33).

The title of the final volume is a reference both to Prokofiev’s final ballet for Sergey Diaghilev, L’enfant prodigue (1929), and to the itinerant composer’s increased contact with his radically-changed homeland (which culminated in his 1936 repatriation). The motivation behind Prokofiev’s return to Russia after nearly two decades abroad has long been the stuff of speculation; scholars and critics have suggested everything from homesickness to NKVD coercion. Yet even Prokofiev’s contemporaries sensed that the success of other Russian émigrés in the West, particularly that of Igor Stravinsky and Sergey Rachmaninoff, propelled a narcissistic and fame-starved Prokofiev toward Russia, where generous, state-funded commissions were plentiful and the competition decidedly less. Not surprisingly, the diaries amply document jealousy and indignation. Typical is an entry from late summer 1929 in which Prokofiev laments that “the success and adulation heaped on Stravinsky in the West, so far exceeding my own, had always seemed disproportionate in relation to my just deserts” (p. 854).

More revelatory on the subject of repatriation are the diaries’ insights into Prokofiev’s spiritual world. On the same page that he grouses about Stravinsky’s success, for example, he congratulates himself for countering his “egocentricity” with a new metaphysical understanding gained from Christian Science doctrine. Sub scribing to Christian Science’s philosophical idealism, Prokofiev maintained that reality existed in a spiritual realm separated from an illusory material world, a division that fortified him in the face of professional travail. For instance, when struggling with his opera The Fiery Angel in 1927, fearful that he was “coming apart at the seams,” he reminded himself that such disquietude was “shameful for a Christian Scientist” (p. 607). Indeed, passages culled from Christian Science literature (most likely the Christian Science Monitor) accompany many daily entries, revealing that Prokofiev regularly pondered such tautologies as “[t]he sum total of evil belief Jesus designated a lie; and a lie is a negation—nothing. Therefore, thinking about evil is thinking about nothing” (p. 849). Thus did Prokofiev cordon off struggle and anxiety from a spiritually pure reality, a plane in which true art— his music included—existed outside of time. Perhaps more tragically, as he toured Stalin’s Russia with increasing frequency beginning in 1927, Prokofiev was ever more willing to disregard the evidence of material deprivations and political terror that confronted him at every turn.

He was less willing to ignore the substantial potential for financial gain and professional security in the Soviet Union. The diaries reveal that offers from Moscow and Leningrad beckoned as early as 1925, when Prokofiev received an offer to compose a “film-symphony” to accompany The Battleship Potemkin, Sergey Eisenstein’s famous silent chronicle of an anti-tsarist mutiny. Yet promises of a large fee and creative freedom did not outweigh what Prokofiev felt was a repellent subject: as he expounds, “[s]aying yes would mean signing up to Bolshevism, and goodbye to any career in bourgeois countries!” (p. 209). Passages like these read as if Prokofiev is convincing himself of his categorical stance; yet, after a 1927 tour of the U.S.S.R., his resistance to Soviet professional...