A disturbing biography of the woman who married a superstar composer only to find herself in the Gulag
The three volumes of Sergey Prokofiev's diaries, now complete in Anthony Phillips's compelling translation, provide what is probably the most complete picture we possess of any significant 20th-century composer. Prokofiev wrote them, it seems, not for publication but for his own satisfaction, and did not try to conceal the disagreeable aspects of his character or behaviour. He appears to have written them up periodically from elaborate notes taken in the immediate shadow of the experiences they describe.
The diaries are well written because he was a natural writer; they are candid because spontaneous. And because he was famous when young, travelled widely and met everyone, they contain endless details about his contemporaries, and his often caustic opinions of them, their music, their playing or their wives. Incidentally, Phillips's footnote biographies of practically everyone mentioned are not the least dazzling aspect of his editorial work: astonishing that Faber accepted them all, since they must have extended the already immense text by a good quarter.
Frustratingly, though, the diaries stuttered to a halt, for no obvious reason, in the spring of 1933, and were apparently never resumed. From St Petersburg, through Paris, America, various European tours, and the first two or three trips back to (by this time Soviet) Russia, the narrative is complete. Almost from the minute Prokofiev decides firmly that his future lies in Russia, the diary ceases. Phillips doesn't advance any reason for this, and it would probably be facile to suggest that it had anything to do with the inadvisability of committing intimate thoughts to paper in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. It's true that Prokofiev and his wife Lina, who was his willing companion when he finally settled in Moscow in 1936, knew that they were under constant observation, their phones tapped and their footsteps shadowed. But Prokofiev was sanguine about such matters, preferring to believe that artists would be favoured under Stalin and that he himself, as a world superstar, would always receive favourable treatment.
What actually happened to him has been well documented by previous biographers. What happened to his wife has also been related, but in less detail, and always (if with regret) from the point of view of the composer himself. Simon Morrison's book, based on new research in Soviet and Prokofiev family archives, reverses this emphasis, and to disturbing effect.
Born in Madrid in 1897 to a Spanish father and a Russian mother, both singers, Lina Codina was brought up from the age of 10 in New York, where she met the 27-year-old Prokofiev at a piano recital he gave in 1919. After a fitful courtship (Prokofiev was attractive, susceptible, and had high-profile admirers), they eventually married when Lina became pregnant with the first of their two sons in 1923. For the next 13 years she led the life of itinerant composer's moll, often travelling with him, sometimes even participating (as a singer) in his concerts, but always engaged in a battle with his music for a share of his attention.
The diaries suggest a spasmodic concern for her well-being. Quite apart from the essentially private act of composition, Sergey's favourite entertainments – chess, bridge – tended to exclude her, and at social events he would be lionised while she was to some extent neglected. As a singer, she inhabited an awkward penumbra in his vicinity. A nervy performer, she would often lose her voice and withdraw. His reports of her variable standard of performance express sympathy rather than the pain it caused her. Besides, she was, he thought, a fussy traveller, moody and sometimes quarrelsome.
The return to Russia was always, for him, a homecoming. For Lina – though she had visited as a child and spoke the language – it was an adventure whose successful outcome depended on his love and support. Alas, both were swiftly withdrawn. When she joined him there in August 1935 after a five-month separation, he immediately disappeared to the Caucasus, then to western Europe on another tour that lasted till early 1936, leaving her to fend for herself and their two small sons. That year they moved into an apartment that Morrison describes as "impressive enough to be showcased to tourists from England" (a fair sample of his prose style), but that actually covered a mere 60 square metres, the size of a large farmhouse kitchen.
The question now, according to Morrison, was whether the marriage could survive their enforced togetherness. For as long as Prokofiev continued to tour in the west it hung in the balance. But after 1938, when even he was refused foreign travel, the situation became critical. For two or three years they stuck it out, but in March 1941 he packed a bag and left for good. For more than two years there had been another woman, a literature student called Mira Mendelson. Mira wrote bad poetry and aspired to membership of the Party; but having set out to capture Prokofiev, she made herself useful, helping to write his articles and libretti.
Lina's life meanwhile went steadily downhill. She lived alone with her sons through the Moscow siege and everything that entailed (she dug tank traps rather than tend livestock on a collective farm). Her car and piano were requisitioned. Not surprisingly she began to look for a way out. She talked to embassy acquaintances and once-influential friends, and might have got out in 1941 if her contact hadn't been killed by a German bomb. Instead she stayed on, increasingly under suspicion because of her unconcealed inquiries about leaving, until one night in February 1948 there was a phone call. When she descended to the street to pick up a parcel she was dragged into a car, carted off to the Lubyanka, and her flat ransacked while her sons looked on in despair.
Morrison's detailed and harrowing account of Lina's eight years in a sub-Arctic gulag contains few surprises for anyone who knows their Solzhenitsyn. What's uniquely appalling about the story is the sense that she had no business being in Russia in the first place, that its social and political struggles were not hers, that a profound emotional injustice lay at the heart of her entire destiny. She had gone to Moscow solely for her husband, and he no longer loved her. Had his fate been linked to hers, hers might have made some sense, however grim. But, although Prokofiev was one of the composers condemned by the central committee in February 1948 – a terrifying experience that destroyed his work and undermined his health – he was never arrested, though he was deprived of his livelihood. He lived only another five years, and died in March 1953 on the same day as Stalin, which meant that no flowers were available for his funeral. Lina, by contrast, lived on for 33 years after her release in June 1956, and did eventually manage to leave the Soviet Union, apparently with the help of one Yury Andropov, head of the KGB.
Morrison tells a good story, without excess or indulgence, and with touching empathy for his heroine. Lina Prokofiev was no saint: she was truly a femme moyenne sensuelle, good-looking but not specially talented, a spirited, sharp-tongued arguer. She needed these qualities to help her stand her ground against a self-centred genius whose work came first and whose sense of the world began and ended with his own interests. For sure what happened to his abandoned wife was partly his fault. Whether it is expiated by Romeo and Juliet or the Fifth Symphony is a matter of taste.
• Stephen Walsh's Stravinsky is published by Pimlico. To order The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev and Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1924-1933: Prodigal Son, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Reported by guardian.co.uk 16 hours ago.
The three volumes of Sergey Prokofiev's diaries, now complete in Anthony Phillips's compelling translation, provide what is probably the most complete picture we possess of any significant 20th-century composer. Prokofiev wrote them, it seems, not for publication but for his own satisfaction, and did not try to conceal the disagreeable aspects of his character or behaviour. He appears to have written them up periodically from elaborate notes taken in the immediate shadow of the experiences they describe.
The diaries are well written because he was a natural writer; they are candid because spontaneous. And because he was famous when young, travelled widely and met everyone, they contain endless details about his contemporaries, and his often caustic opinions of them, their music, their playing or their wives. Incidentally, Phillips's footnote biographies of practically everyone mentioned are not the least dazzling aspect of his editorial work: astonishing that Faber accepted them all, since they must have extended the already immense text by a good quarter.
Frustratingly, though, the diaries stuttered to a halt, for no obvious reason, in the spring of 1933, and were apparently never resumed. From St Petersburg, through Paris, America, various European tours, and the first two or three trips back to (by this time Soviet) Russia, the narrative is complete. Almost from the minute Prokofiev decides firmly that his future lies in Russia, the diary ceases. Phillips doesn't advance any reason for this, and it would probably be facile to suggest that it had anything to do with the inadvisability of committing intimate thoughts to paper in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. It's true that Prokofiev and his wife Lina, who was his willing companion when he finally settled in Moscow in 1936, knew that they were under constant observation, their phones tapped and their footsteps shadowed. But Prokofiev was sanguine about such matters, preferring to believe that artists would be favoured under Stalin and that he himself, as a world superstar, would always receive favourable treatment.
What actually happened to him has been well documented by previous biographers. What happened to his wife has also been related, but in less detail, and always (if with regret) from the point of view of the composer himself. Simon Morrison's book, based on new research in Soviet and Prokofiev family archives, reverses this emphasis, and to disturbing effect.
Born in Madrid in 1897 to a Spanish father and a Russian mother, both singers, Lina Codina was brought up from the age of 10 in New York, where she met the 27-year-old Prokofiev at a piano recital he gave in 1919. After a fitful courtship (Prokofiev was attractive, susceptible, and had high-profile admirers), they eventually married when Lina became pregnant with the first of their two sons in 1923. For the next 13 years she led the life of itinerant composer's moll, often travelling with him, sometimes even participating (as a singer) in his concerts, but always engaged in a battle with his music for a share of his attention.
The diaries suggest a spasmodic concern for her well-being. Quite apart from the essentially private act of composition, Sergey's favourite entertainments – chess, bridge – tended to exclude her, and at social events he would be lionised while she was to some extent neglected. As a singer, she inhabited an awkward penumbra in his vicinity. A nervy performer, she would often lose her voice and withdraw. His reports of her variable standard of performance express sympathy rather than the pain it caused her. Besides, she was, he thought, a fussy traveller, moody and sometimes quarrelsome.
The return to Russia was always, for him, a homecoming. For Lina – though she had visited as a child and spoke the language – it was an adventure whose successful outcome depended on his love and support. Alas, both were swiftly withdrawn. When she joined him there in August 1935 after a five-month separation, he immediately disappeared to the Caucasus, then to western Europe on another tour that lasted till early 1936, leaving her to fend for herself and their two small sons. That year they moved into an apartment that Morrison describes as "impressive enough to be showcased to tourists from England" (a fair sample of his prose style), but that actually covered a mere 60 square metres, the size of a large farmhouse kitchen.
The question now, according to Morrison, was whether the marriage could survive their enforced togetherness. For as long as Prokofiev continued to tour in the west it hung in the balance. But after 1938, when even he was refused foreign travel, the situation became critical. For two or three years they stuck it out, but in March 1941 he packed a bag and left for good. For more than two years there had been another woman, a literature student called Mira Mendelson. Mira wrote bad poetry and aspired to membership of the Party; but having set out to capture Prokofiev, she made herself useful, helping to write his articles and libretti.
Lina's life meanwhile went steadily downhill. She lived alone with her sons through the Moscow siege and everything that entailed (she dug tank traps rather than tend livestock on a collective farm). Her car and piano were requisitioned. Not surprisingly she began to look for a way out. She talked to embassy acquaintances and once-influential friends, and might have got out in 1941 if her contact hadn't been killed by a German bomb. Instead she stayed on, increasingly under suspicion because of her unconcealed inquiries about leaving, until one night in February 1948 there was a phone call. When she descended to the street to pick up a parcel she was dragged into a car, carted off to the Lubyanka, and her flat ransacked while her sons looked on in despair.
Morrison's detailed and harrowing account of Lina's eight years in a sub-Arctic gulag contains few surprises for anyone who knows their Solzhenitsyn. What's uniquely appalling about the story is the sense that she had no business being in Russia in the first place, that its social and political struggles were not hers, that a profound emotional injustice lay at the heart of her entire destiny. She had gone to Moscow solely for her husband, and he no longer loved her. Had his fate been linked to hers, hers might have made some sense, however grim. But, although Prokofiev was one of the composers condemned by the central committee in February 1948 – a terrifying experience that destroyed his work and undermined his health – he was never arrested, though he was deprived of his livelihood. He lived only another five years, and died in March 1953 on the same day as Stalin, which meant that no flowers were available for his funeral. Lina, by contrast, lived on for 33 years after her release in June 1956, and did eventually manage to leave the Soviet Union, apparently with the help of one Yury Andropov, head of the KGB.
Morrison tells a good story, without excess or indulgence, and with touching empathy for his heroine. Lina Prokofiev was no saint: she was truly a femme moyenne sensuelle, good-looking but not specially talented, a spirited, sharp-tongued arguer. She needed these qualities to help her stand her ground against a self-centred genius whose work came first and whose sense of the world began and ended with his own interests. For sure what happened to his abandoned wife was partly his fault. Whether it is expiated by Romeo and Juliet or the Fifth Symphony is a matter of taste.
• Stephen Walsh's Stravinsky is published by Pimlico. To order The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev and Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1924-1933: Prodigal Son, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Reported by guardian.co.uk 16 hours ago.