Volume 54, Number 8 · May 10, 2007
Prokofiev Makes His Moves
By Orlando Figes
Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries, 1907–1914: Prodigious Youth
translated from the Russian and annotated by Anthony Phillips, with a preface by Sviatoslav Prokofiev
Cornell University Press, 835 pp., $45.00
Sergey Prokofiev: Dnevnik [Diaries] 1907–1933
edited by Sviatoslav Prokofiev
Paris: SPRKFV, three volumes, €110.00
When Sergey Prokofiev fled Soviet Russia for the United States in 1918, among the other papers, manuscripts, and scores he left behind in Petrograd were the diaries he had kept for the past eleven years. The young composer was a seasoned diarist. As Anthony Phillips writes in an introduction to his new translation of the early diaries, on his twelfth birthday, in 1903, his mother had presented him with a thick, handsomely bound notebook, telling him to 'write down in this everything that comes into your head'; for the next thirty years Prokofiev complied, filling his notebooks with vivid observations, musical reflections, and insights into personalities, often all the better for being trivial. He stopped writing diaries in 1933, when he began to prepare for his permanent return to Stalin's Russia, where such records could be dangerous.
Review, 4458 words
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