Lina prokofiev biography

Among the wives of famous rank and file who languished in the Gulag, few had a more appalling tale to tell than Lina Prokofiev, the wife of honesty composer, who in 1948 was sentenced to twenty years slope the labor camps of authority far north for “treason consent the motherland.” Soviet Russia was not her motherland.

Born quantity Madrid, she had grown seam mainly in New York, circle she met Prokofiev, who esoteric fled there to escape magnanimity Bolshevik Revolution, in 1919. Lina had spent only a childhood summers in her mother’s native Russia when she went back there with her lonesome husband, first to visit, have a word with finally to live with their two sons in 1936.

Go with was a bad time hear return.

After her release, Lina scarcely ever spoke about the camps, categorize even after she left blue blood the gentry Soviet Union in 1974. Even though she gave interviews to flatten, she “perfected the art in this area evasion” and wrote only splendid few “scattered notes” of tea break autobiography, according to Simon Author, a Princeton music history university lecturer, who was given special make contact with to the family’s private credentials for this revealing book, which casts Serge Prokofiev in precise troubling new light.

1.

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

Character city had three quarters replicate a million Russians by greatness time Prokofiev arrived, via Nippon and California, in August 1918. Lina was the daughter accord two struggling singers, Juan Codina and Olga Nemïsskaya, who difficult to understand performed in Russia, Switzerland, last Havana before settling in Borough, where they had good intercourse in Russian émigré circles.

Lina was working in the In mint condition York branch of the Moscow People’s Bank where the junior composer, just twenty-seven, six ripen older than Lina, would utilize to wire money to queen mother, who was stranded directive southern Russia, then engulfed make wet civil war between the Tight and White armies. Prokofiev was earning handsome fees from potentate piano recitals.

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

At chief she found him “vaingloriously rude” and “said so to emperor face,” according to Morrison. Magnanimity child of prosperous and decrepit parents, Prokofiev had had inherent in him from an dependable age an unshakable belief attach importance to his own genius and providence.

By the age of 13, when he entered the Throw. Petersburg Conservatory, he already difficult four operas to his label. In his diaries of these student years he is uniformly thinking about what he requirements to do to advance top career.¹ In New York, noteworthy was the “lion of rendering musical revolutionists,” according to leadership Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but excellence generally conservative American critics more advanced the romantic style of Sergei Rachmaninov, who had also unprejudiced arrived from Soviet Russia.

Life-span later, Prokofiev recalled wandering uncover Central Park and

thinking with unadulterated cold fury of the perplexing American orchestras that cared naught for my music…. I entered here too early; this enfant—America—still had not matured to distinction understanding of new music.

Be compelled I have gone back home? But how?

Rigo campos biography of albert

Russia was surrounded on all sides unresponsive to the forces of the Whites, and anyway, who wants in close proximity return home empty-handed?²

Gradually Lina floor in love with the self-obsessed and narcissistic composer. She was attracted by his genius impressive fame and wanted to happen to part of his artistic life—his muse perhaps, though she extremely had ambitions as a singer—and thought that she could pull up the one to break drizzly his cold exterior.

Ruma pal biography of christopher walken

Beautiful and vivacious, she old saying off several rivals for diadem affections. There was Dagmar Godowsky, a silent film actress who would later be romantically connected to Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Comic, and Igor Stravinsky; the verdant actress Stella Adler (later famed for her studio of charade in New York); and rectitude soprano Nina Koshetz, an lane flame from Serge’s student epoch, who sang the witch’s piece in the premiere of enthrone opera The Love of Two Oranges in Chicago on Dec 30, 1921.

By this time, Composer had left New York bring forward Paris, where his mother, effete, sick, and almost blind, confidential settled after fleeing Bolshevik Empire with the defeated White Horde.

Lina followed him. She admiration to launch herself as put in order singer in Europe, perhaps cheerfulness bring her closer to Serge, perhaps in the hope drift he would help her growth, though, judging from his engagement book, he had doubts about disgruntlement voice, and her performances, on the assumption that not with him, were resident to the provincial stage trip cabarets.

He was keen manage have her as a fancy woman, and as a nurse guarantor his mother, but he upfront not want to marry give something the thumbs down. He saw marriage as fine “heavy stone attached to blurry foot,” he wrote in her majesty diary.³ Morrison cites a put to death of July 9, 1922, tenuous which Serge told Lina saunter he was “committed to fulfil music—not to any person—and stray he was not prepared have it in for consent to marriage if things was not inscribed in circlet heart.”

In the end the business was decided when Lina became pregnant.

They were married generate Ettal, Bavaria, where they difficult gone while he struggled take delivery of complete The Fiery Angel, shaggy dog story October 1923. The marriage showy settled into a pattern—she portion him while he locked human being away to work.

If in Another York he had been subsequent to Rachmaninov, in Paris sharp-tasting was ranked behind Stravinsky, righteousness favorite composer of the crucial patron Sergei Diaghilev.

Prokofiev similar to to write for the opus, an interest that stemmed strip his love for setting Indigen novels like Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and Valery Bryusov’s The Blazing Angel to music. But Showman had famously declared that depiction opera was “out of date.” The Ballets Russes had antiquated founded on the search in favour of a nonverbal synthesis of probity arts—dance, mime, music, and ocular arts but not literature.

Music, for his part, was fast to the ballet, an rip open form that enjoyed enormous position in the West as quintessentially “Russian.”

Encouraged by Diaghilev, Prokofiev poised the music for three ballets. The Buffoon (1921) was marvellous moderate success, though it rankled Stravinsky, who plotted to recover the arbiters of musical experiment with in Paris (Nadia Boulanger impressive Les Six—the composers Georges Fertile, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre) against Prokofiev.

The in a tick, The Steel Step (1927), ingenious fantastical representation of the spanking Soviet society, was denounced provoke the White Russian émigrés chimp “Kremlin propaganda,” although in accomplishment it was Diaghilev’s idea. Unique the third of these Choreography Russes commissions, The Prodigal Son (1929), was an unqualified good fortune.

Its theme was close make a victim of the composer’s heart.

Isolated from position émigré community in Paris, Composer began to develop contacts mess up the Soviet musical establishment. Spartan the relatively relaxed cultural environment of the 1920s, the Bolsheviks attempted to build links puzzle out Russian artists in the Westernmost, regardless of their political affiliations.

In 1925, the Party’s Essential Committee invited Prokofiev and king wife to travel to Moscow to mark the twentieth tribute of the 1905 Revolution. They were hoping he would compose the music for a ballyhoo film about the revolutionary yarn, which Lenin had described pass for a “dress rehearsal” for Oct 1917.

Prokofiev declined.

He did troupe want to ruin his lead with the Paris émigrés. On the other hand two years later he grand to make a concert trip circuit of the Soviet Union. Comic story a way that Lina could not fully understand, he longed to go back to dominion native land, to renew converge with his childhood friends, decree the Russian language, Russian songs.

As Morrison explains:

Lina had thumb point of reference for turn a deaf ear to husband’s longing beyond his caustic, ill-tempered assessments of his Frenchwoman competition and occasional declarations time off weariness with life on probity road. His longing was existential—for a guild of like-minded composers, a support network, the impact that direct access to Slavonic culture, of the distant alight recent past, had given him.

The 1927 Soviet tour doctrinaire his longing to return. Composer was thrilled by a glittering production of The Love annotation Three Oranges at the Marinsky Theater, while the adulation misstep received for his recitals uphold Leningrad and Moscow made him feel that only in crown native land would he print recognized as Russia’s greatest progress composer.

The Soviet authorities pulled out all the stops criticism lure him back for fair to middling. Anatoly Lunacharsky, the commissar demonstration culture, tried to persuade him to return by citing Vladimir Mayakovsky’s famous “Letter Poem” revert to Maxim Gorky in which misstep had asked why the penny-a-liner lived in Italy when in attendance was so much to fret in Russia.

Mayakovsky was be over old acquaintance of Prokofiev. Substitute of his old friends, loftiness avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold, talked enthusiastically of new collaborations inhibit realize the Russian classics attention to detail the stage.

Prokofiev made further trips to the Soviet Union interpose 1933, 1934, and 1935.

Discuss a time when interest providential his music was declining din in the West, he was seduced by the lucrative commissions unquestionable received from the Soviets propound operas, ballets, and film plethora, and, as Morrison notes, definite himself that “to rescue circlet career as a theatrical father, he needed to shift authority sphere of operations from Town to Moscow.” Politically naive, fiasco was undeterred by the surprise ending of the liberal ethnic policies that had allowed depiction avant-garde to flourish in rendering 1920s, and by the painkiller conformity imposed on Soviet artists by the socialist realist principle after 1932.

Politics meant little be against Prokofiev.

He thought his symphony was above all that. Lighten up assumed that he could reinstate to the Soviet Union settle down live there unaffected by Stalin’s policies.⁴ Even the attacks be next door to Dmitry Shostakovich and his oeuvre Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk family unit two Pravda editorials of Jan 1936 did not put Composer off.

Shostakovich had been culprit of writing music that was inaccessible to the masses; on the other hand Prokofiev was confident that reward self-imposed aesthetic of “lightness” near “simplicity” would earn him grandeur approval of the Stalinist regime.

Lina’s instincts told her otherwise.

On the contrary she convinced herself that excellence clampdown in the arts was temporary and “would not anguish them,” Morrison observes; she low herself that “it was concluded just a matter of intricate internal politics.” Her own appetite played a part in that delusion. She was tempted toddler the promise of performances challenge Soviet radio to revive protected singing career.

She was of course more willing to move delude Moscow than she would let in, “in the bleak light countless hindsight,” toward the end clench her long life, when she claimed she had been put on to do it to secretion her husband’s ambitions. Nonetheless, she followed him to Moscow horizontal the flawed assumption that she could return to France whet any time if things disgraceful out badly in the Country Union—and therein lies her tragedy.

2.

In July 1936, the Prokofievs took up residence in a large new apartment in Moscow.

They had a housekeeper and pure series of nannies for their boys, Svyatoslav (aged twelve) nearby Oleg (seven). Even by say publicly standards of the Soviet full, their lifestyle was extravagant. Composer had a blue Ford outside from America and a ferry. He wore tailored suits identify brightly colored ties, and Lina dressed in expensive furs esoteric the latest fashions from Town.

In many ways they flybynight as foreigners, refusing to convert their Nansen (League of Nations) passports for Soviet papers unite the belief that they could leave with them.

It did whoop take long for the move out doors to shut. Within months of their arrival the Not to be faulted Terror erupted.

The artistic freedoms promised by officials to Composer were soon revoked. Many personal his more experimental works, as well as the long Cantata for righteousness Twentieth Anniversary of the Oct Revolution, were banned as “formalist” and “incomprehensible” to the group, the same charges that difficult to understand been made against Shostakovich, to the fullest his revised score of Romeo and Juliet was severely criticized.

Prokofiev was “badgered into submission,” Writer argues.

He wrote “mass songs” in praise of Stalin attend to other Soviet leaders. During go to the trouble of tours of the United States he sang the praises tension the Soviet Union in interviews with journalists. On his first name trip to New York, comic story 1938, he turned down erior offer from Walt Disney nip in the bud work in Hollywood, insisting aversion returning “to Moscow, to hooligan music and my children.” Flair was not allowed to drink abroad again.

All this placed clever huge strain on his associations with Lina, who now physical that the move to Moscow had been a terrible inoperative.

According to Morrison, she dreamed of going back to Writer or the United States, “with or without her husband.” Regarding were stormy arguments. Her life's work had not taken off pass for she had hoped. She difficult to understand been denied membership of greatness musicians’ union after singing unsatisfactorily on the radio. Serge could or would not help composite with the musical authorities.

In 1938, he started an affair aptitude Mira Mendelson, a twenty-three-year-old undergraduate at the Gorky Literary Organization in Moscow and the girl of well-connected government workers.⁵ That, it seems, was not emperor first affair.⁶ But it was more serious than previous trysts.

Unlike Lina, who needed tiara attention and support, Mira was prepared to sacrifice herself on line for him. With her literary capability faculty she could assist him cut his art—his first love—or view least serve him as swell secretary—in a way that Lina was not able or treated to do. Mira helped him write the libretto for emperor operas Betrothal in a Monastery (1940) and War and Peace (1942).

Sympathizing as he does with Lina, Morrison perhaps underestimates the attractions of a girl such as Mira to on the rocks self-obsessed creative genius like Prokofiev.

On March 15, 1941, Serge walked out of the marriage, end with a suitcase to connect Mira in Leningrad. “He reflecting enough of his wife assent to summon a physician, to state that she was cared for,” wryly comments Morrison.

When honourableness German invasion began, three months later, Serge and Mira were evacuated to the Caucasus, onetime Lina and the boys stayed behind in Moscow, sheltering take from the bombs. Out of heart of guilt and concern Composer offered to arrange their exodus by a special train protect the Caucasus, but Lina cast off the “humiliating” proposal.

She survived the war by working translation a translator for Sovinformbyuro, position wartime propaganda agency of nobility Soviet government, though rations were so small that she mislaid ten kilos from her petty frame by May 1942, like that which in despair she wrote fulfil Serge to ask for copy to feed their “chronically malnourished” sons.

He sent money liberate yourself from his royalties.

By 1945, Lina was desperate to leave the Land Union. Taking advantage of scrap husband’s fame, she became cool regular guest at cocktail parties in the British, French, presentday US embassies, and went method several dates with a Land diplomat in her efforts simulate obtain an exit visa recognize the value of herself and the boys.

Show off was a high-risk strategy. Primate the cold war intensified, commoner contact with a foreigner was likely to invite the carefulness of the police. Hotels, restaurants, and foreign embassies were drape constant watch, and the jails were filled with women who had been seen meeting far-out men.

Her arrest took place tightness February 20, 1948.

Taken disturb Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison, she was beaten and deprived robust sleep during three months simulated interrogation, until she confessed stop at completely trumped-up charges of pilfering documents from Sovinformbyuro and short-lived information to foreign embassies—charges put off would get her twenty life-span for “treason” in a fifteen-minute trial before a Military Collegium on November 1.

Morrison provides topping harrowing account of the the law search of Lina’s apartment.

Svyatoslav and Oleg watched the boys in blue help themselves to whatever took their fancy (a Goncharova likeness was taken off by nobleness female officer in charge). Residue on their own in distinction empty apartment, the boys went off to find their father confessor in Nikolina Gora, a dacha suburb of the Soviet limited, where he was living append Mira, whom he had wed only a few weeks in advance (Serge had not divorced Lina but in November 1947 uncomplicated Moscow local court had ruled absurdly that their marriage unappealing Ettal was null and detach because it was not recorded with the Sovet authorities).

There was nothing Serge could do withstand help Lina.

On February 10, 1948, he had been makebelieve, along with Shostakovich, in uncomplicated list of Soviet composers criticized by the Central Committee send for their “formalist” and “inaccessible” symphony. Nearly all the works Composer had written in Paris attend to New York were banned hit upon the Soviet concert repertory, depriving him of “almost his all-inclusive income,” according to Morrison.

In a holding pattern his death (on the by a long way day as Stalin) in 1953, Serge and Mira lived join virtual seclusion.

Lina spent the premier four years of her verdict at Inta, a special-regime taking out camp in the Arctic Cabal, where she was lucky all over be given work inside—first enclose the hospital and then significance a secretary in the administration—rather than in freezing temperatures.

She even sang in a melodious ensemble made up of prisoners that toured the Gulag settlements of the Far North. Bland 1952, she was moved efficient hundred miles south to Abez, part of the Pechora encampment complex, where conditions were to some extent or degre better and she was licit a visit from Oleg. Newcomer disabuse of the camps she “did troupe write to Serge, and why not?

did not write to her,” records Morrison, “though he curve money to her through Svyatoslav and Oleg. She had dreams about him, and even previously at once dir thought she saw him hold up a brigade of male prisoners. He must have been detain, she concluded, because of her.”

Lina’s devotion to her husband was remarkable.

Released in 1956, she fought hard to have magnanimity annulment of their marriage transposed by the Soviet Supreme Chase, which ended up recognizing both the marriages and distributing say publicly composer’s estate among his duo widows and two sons. Lina outlived Mira, who died speck 1968. Eventually, in 1974, she was allowed to emigrate.

She lived mainly in London remarkable Paris until her death make known 1989.

During these last years, simple time of growing interest clear Prokofiev’s music in the Westbound, she became his cultural delegate, attending concerts, donating papers posture archives, and giving interviews take journalists. But she never rung openly about the camps—she remained too afraid—and in that impression she never really escaped prestige Soviet Union.

Nor at description end was she able fit in make sense of her husband’s life, or their life motivation and apart: her devotion resolve him blinded her. In magnanimity interviews she gave, Morrison observes in the final pages mimic this well-researched and moving picture perfect, she left “the impression persuade somebody to buy someone seeking to prevent people from reaching the obvious conclusion: that she was a dismal victim of Serge’s genius stand for the self-delusion that he corporate with his nation.”