Sergei Prokofiev is known best as a magnificent musician. As his persistent
gravitation towards music with words might suggest, though, he was also a
talented and dedicated writer, in particular a diarist. Fortunately he was
not a compulsive one. For nearly thirty years, he wrote down what happened
to him and what he felt about it when he thought these matters worth
recording, clearly with an eye (or rather, in his case, ear) tuned to
posterity and the scrutiny of strangers. His entries seem to have been made
not daily, but in extended sequences; if he left the diary aside for a
while, the next time he picked up his pen he explained why. More important
than this judiciousness is the sensitive literary intelligence he brought to
his writing. Except for one short sequence in 1914 and then something of a
fizzling out at the end of 1923, far from being aide-memoire jottings of
dates, people and places, Prokofiev’s diaries offer carefully wrought,
polished narrative prose, put together with a sense of pitch and timing
reminiscent of his best music. And on the whole they bustle along with the
same cocky gait; there is occasional high seriousness, and a sense of
occasion when the occasion merits, but there is never any pontificating.
Obviously, a healthy dose of vanity is required for someone to undertake
self-writing on this scale, but Prokofiev also possessed enough
self-knowledge to be his own best editor. Pruning would have damaged the
integrity of what the author left. Anthony Phillips rises to all the demands
made by Prokofiev’s lucid but delicately nuanced Russian. His translation is
accurate almost without a lapse, his tone is consistently faithful to the
original, and from time to time he pulls out something truly brilliant.
Political exigencies meant that these diaries survived through a combination
of selfless resolve on the part of some brave individuals, and a dash of
sheer luck. Deposited by the author in the United States after he was
surprised to get them back during his first return visit to Russia in 1927,
they were sequestered after his death by the Soviet government, and
consigned to what was meant to be an impenetrable archive. Developments
after 1991 facilitated access to the diaries by the composer’s family by his
first marriage, and then came the formidable chore of producing a printable
text from the manuscript, which, after 1914, the composer habitually coded
by deleting vowels. This labour was accomplished by Prokofiev’s elder son
Svyatoslav with the help of his son Serge and the latter’s wife, Irina.
Svyatoslav Sergeevich wrote an admirable analytical preface for the Russian
edition, published in France in 2002. Phillips opens the first volume of the
English text with a translation of it before adding an illuminating one of
his own.
In September 1907, when the diaries begin, Prokofiev was a sixteen-year-old
student at the St Petersburg Conservatoire specializing in piano and
conducting, and in 1914 he graduated. It was appropriate to make the break
between volumes here, rather than at the obvious watershed of 1917; to do so
underlines the composer’s devotion to art above all else that eventually
emerges as the strongest theme of his diaries, constantly implied but
sometimes articulated with categorical resolve. After 1918, outside Russia,
Prokofiev gives significantly more space to political developments, but for
him they seem to have been at best an unavoidable nuisance. The diaries open
with a disarmingly self-congratulatory account of how Prokofiev networked
his way through the personal and administrative hazards of the Conservatoire
to assert his authority as a composer. He won the piano prize in 1914 with a
programme that included his own Concerto No 2 (Op 16), an unprecedented
triumph and also a display of chutzpah that offended many of his seniors. By
this time he had already launched a performing career in Moscow as well as
in the capital, and in doing so had managed to meet just about all the
leading entrepreneurs in Russian musical life as well as the hostesses of
the opulent salons that flourished during the golden age of the Russian
urban bourgeoisie. Prokofiev never lost his buoyant awareness of his own
gifts and frank demand for acknowledgement of them – though he never assumed
that because of them the world owed him a living. He earned his rewards with
the concentrated labour he put into the realization of what his talent
vouchsafed. The intensity of this labour becomes even greater in the second
volume, where we find Prokofiev dealing with the collapse of the secure
home-based world he had seemed poised to conquer. He got himself away from
the Revolution in 1918 and set about building a new career that was
physically outside, but never emotionally detached from, Russia. By 1923, he
had ridden the whirlwind and, despite constant setbacks, emerged with his
stature enhanced in all respects. He was now internationally recognized,
both as concert pianist and composer, and his personal life was stable,
though he was still far from secure financially.
Dedicated professional that he was, Prokofiev still definitely “had a life”.
The amount of space devoted to his personal relationships and pastimes in
the diaries as a whole equals that concerning music, and these subjects are
approached with similar relish. Prokofiev was gregarious and extrovert, and
a bit of a dandy. He was also hyper-competitive, and could be waspish, but
he was never really malevolent, delighting in teasing and playing japes
rather than genuinely hurtful put-downs. He was capable of some remarkably
cool references to his own passionate nature. On November 3, 1910, he
observes: “I cannot bear not feeling on top form; the more vigorous I am,
the happier I feel generally. My ideal of physical energy is a fly on a
summer’s day. Ridiculous it may be, but I often think of this when I watch
them in summer: there is the pure undiluted life-force, free from the merest
hint of listless inertia”. He sent off blizzards of postcards and letters to
his business contacts and his friends, and he duly records the wittiest of
them in his diary, as well as his favourite spoken one-liners. In pre-1914
Petersburg, the telephone had just come into regular use among the well-off,
and the young Prokofiev spent hours talking to his acquaintances. An adored
only child, he inhabited with assurance the comfortable social milieu he was
born into. He expected deference and service from his social inferiors, and
expresses none of the guilt about them familiar from so many Russian
intellectuals. Before 1914 he was a member of one of the modish Sokol
physical fitness clubs. Above all, he was an enthusiastic walker, regularly
declaring his need for fresh air, in search of which (and even more,
perhaps, to get away from parental supervision) he makes enormous excursions
on foot to the rather unprepossessing countryside beyond the city limits of
Petersburg, as often as possible with girls of his own age. He describes
these places as if they were some backward foreign country inhabited by
sinister natives. He kept up his exercise regime, but less systematically
and if anything with less of a sense of alienation, after he left Russia.
Prokofiev gives a cold-blooded and also bleakly convincing account of his
relationship with his father, recorded after the latter’s agonizing death
from colon cancer in late July 1910. (This loss, incidentally, had the
useful consequence of exempting Prokofiev from military service, as the only
son of a widow.) It is not the only dispassionate assessment of matters one
would have thought too personal to invite such a treatment. Among his
contemporaries, Prokofiev’s constant sounding board was the composer Nikolai
Myaskovsky, with whom an unshakeable friendship was already in place when
the diaries begin. There were other close male friends, who, unlike
Myaskovsky, turned out to be wannabes. The suicide of one of them, Max
Schmidthof, in April 1913, is described in a long entry thoroughly
Dostoevskian in its intensity; Prokofiev was haunted for years afterwards by
memories of their times together. As for women, the cornerstone of
Prokofiev’s life was his mother Mariya Grigorievna, with whom he was living
for all the time described here – with the exception, worrisome for him, of
the period between March 1918 and July 1920, when she was left behind in
Revolutionary Russia, and when he is relatively open about his feelings for
her. Prokofiev carefully registers his fraught and manipulative negotiations
with younger women during his youth, when burgeoning sexuality is
straitjacketed by strictly supervised conventions of linguistic and physical
propriety, the reflection of which in the diaries is almost as fascinating
as the discussion of music. This society and many of its conventions
collapsed in 1917–18. Afterwards, now outside Russia, Prokofiev had several
intense affairs, before meeting the twenty-year-old aspiring singer Lina
Codina in New York in October 1919. He eventually managed to cohabit with
her under the same roof as his mother, and she was pregnant when he married
her in September 1923.
Prokofiev was always impatiently striving forward; the only retrospective
activity he seems truly to have enjoyed, it has to be said, was writing and
rereading his own diary. In the first volume he outgrows his childhood, then
his conservatoire teachers, and simultaneously one personal relationship
after another, with men and women alike. As he noted in March 1913, “I have
a great technique for parting with people”. Crossing the English Channel for
the first time in the same year, he was already thinking of his first voyage
one step further, to America, and he had complete confidence that this would
come to pass. His focus on success in America rather than just in Europe
marks him out from older Russians; but by 1922, after spending about a year
there, he declares that he has outgrown America as well. There is one
curious exception to this instinctive futurism: Prokofiev’s taste in Russian
literature, which preferred the work of the generation immediately preceding
his own, epitomized here by Konstantin Balmont – it is hard to fathom
Prokofiev’s soft spot for this lecherous scrounger – while among his close
contemporaries, the greatest crop of Russian poets ever, he seems to have
taken serious notice only of Anna Akhmatova.
The diaries are studded with accomplished set pieces, the best of them
concerning the composition and performance of music. In June 1911, some of
Schoenberg’s early piano pieces arrive at the Petersburg Conservatoire and
“we were all appalled at the hideous absence of music and senseless
dissonances”. After a couple of weeks, Prokofiev undertakes to perform this
unprepossessing stuff, and gives a captivating description of the way its
radically new sound world comes to make sense to him as he does so. In
January 1916, he goes through the same process from a different viewpoint
when coaxing an initially almost mutinous orchestra to a triumphant
performance of what became his Scythian Suite (Op 20). A few months later he
successfully pitches his opera The Gambler to the august Director of the
Imperial Theatres. And so on. After 1918, Prokofiev was obliged to continue
pitching, but now with even more sceptically inclined foreign impresarios
(apart from Diaghilev, of course). In this connection the diaries culminate
with the white-knuckle preparations for the first production of Love for
Three Oranges in December 1921; for once – and because, Prokofiev thought,
she was herself an artist – the self-styled “Directa” of the Chicago Opera,
Mary Garden, turned out to be an uncritically enthusiastic supporter.
The accounts Prokofiev gives of his own creative methods are, by contrast,
remarkable for the critical powers of self-analysis and clear exposition
they demonstrate. His version, set down in August 1912, of how his Piano
Concerto No 1 (Op 10) came into being is as impressive in its way as the
music. In his entry for June 16, 1913, he wrote an equally penetrating
comparison of improvisation and composition. There is also a mass of
insider’s testimony, here, concerning the human and practical problems that
had to be surmounted in order to get new music performed, published and
reviewed. Recording was not yet integrated into the Russian musical scene
when Prokofiev began; his readers will constantly pine for the unrealized
soundtrack to the musical events he describes with such immediacy. As with
so much in the composer’s youth, technology was soon to transform the
situation: Prokofiev made his first piano roll in New York in September
1918, and duly provides an acerbic description of the process.
There is no point in even trying to list the notable figures from the
performing arts who parade through these pages; it is harder to think of
someone who was anyone in the period who does not appear than of someone who
does. To take just one example from the first volume: the Director of the St
Petersburg Conservatoire in Prokofiev’s time was Aleksandr Glazunov. Except
in his attitude towards innovatory music, including Prokofiev’s, Glazunov
was amiable and rather bumbling. His alcoholism was evidently regarded by
colleagues and students alike, in the usual Russian way, as a natural
affliction to be accommodated rather than condemned or medically treated.
Anyone who rushes to the stereotype of Glazunov as somehow “typically
Russian”, though, should modify their attitude by considering the equally if
not more “Russian” Prokofiev’s sense of being utterly different from the
older man in all respects. The superb indexes in both volumes will enable
those in search of particular figures to hunt them down with great
efficiency. If they use these books selectively for this purpose, though,
they will deprive themselves of an intellectual and aesthetic treat, because
reading the diaries in sequence gives a marvellous impression of the dozens
of unfortunates whose musical careers never got very far, the harassed
rank-and-file support staffs, and the abject hangers-on and gormless
groupies.
For Prokofiev, next in importance after his music – and not excepting young
women – came chess. Intercut with the account of his triumphant graduation
recital is a pungent eyewitness account of the world championship of 1914,
which was going on in St Petersburg at the same time. After it, the composer
took part in several simultaneous matches against Capablanca and once beat
him; this was the beginning of a friendship that blossomed later in New
York. The diaries contain accounts of numerous games before and after this
high point, with the scores duly noted; some of them were played by
telephone. Besides chess, the composer was also addicted to bridge, and
played as often as he could, with a wide variety of partners and in many
different contexts, including on board several ocean liners; his winnings
and his losses are meticulously recorded.
That Prokofiev was writing for others beside himself is obvious, if only from
the fact that very little in his diary is obscure or enigmatic. Given all
this deliberation, all this shaping, it is intriguing to assess whether the
composer did indeed confide “everything, without exception” to his diary, as
Svyatoslav Prokofiev claims in his foreword. These books are certainly
bursting at the seams. The entries both home and abroad abound in shrewdly
perceived details of everyday life – food and drink, clothes, travel
arrangements, dentists’ procedures, treatments for the sore eyes and fingers
that plagued Prokofiev as he grew older, even perfume – that are relatively
unusual in the accounts left by intellectual men. Prokofiev was a very
perceptive tourist; he observes with relish such hotspots as Waikiki Beach
in August 1918, especially striking coming as this does so soon after his
accounts of the central Petersburg streets during the February 1917
Revolution and the Moscow streets that October. But about money, religion
and sex, the topics about which all autobiographical writers tell lies, the
less culpable ones by omission, it must be said that the reader expecting
“everything” is left tantalized. There are many unusually detailed
references to Prokofiev’s earnings, but nothing substantial about his
general financial situation before 1917. He tells us in April 1916 that it
is ten years since he last took Communion, but that is all. And though he
notes many encounters that are clearly near misses, when did Prokofiev
actually lose his virginity? Perhaps this was what he meant in one of his
very few gnomic passages, noted for May 15, 1913: “This morning, after a
struggle with myself, I accomplished an important task. I felt very proud of
myself”.
Phillips’s footnotes, generous and wide-ranging, are as polished as the text
they illuminate. They include some real gems, such as the deadpan
biographical note on the truly weird Theosophist Edouard Schuré (1841–1921),
whom Prokofiev happened to be reading in July 1916. Admirably, some notes
from Volume One are repeated in Volume Two rather than being referred back
to, so that the books can stand alone. Apart from its value in terms of
specifically musical history, the first volume is a precious addition to the
existing memoir literature about the extraordinarily vibrant atmosphere
created and inhabited by the intelligentsia of St Petersburg in the years
before 1914. This literature is already enormous; the richness and diversity
of Prokofiev’s diaries, though, make this atmosphere thicker, more palpable,
than with any other writer I have come across, not excepting Nabokov; and,
as always, it is impossible to avoid the sense of hovering tragedy that
hindsight compels.
There are no shattering revelations in these diaries. Apart from the existing
testimony of others, the substance of them is well known from the
publication of Prokofiev’s two autobiographies and a good deal of his
correspondence, which includes the extensive exchanges with Myaskovsky.
Anthony Phillips judiciously points out instances where the evidence of a
diary entry conflicts with the autobiographies and other testimony. For the
English-speaking reader the first volume of the diaries has been assimilated
and contextualized in David Nice’s biography of Prokofiev (reviewed in the
TLS, November 28, 2003). But this familiarity does not diminish the value of
the translated diaries as the first-person testimony of an extraordinarily
articulate musician during the gestation and initial flowering of his
career, which happened to coincide with a period of momentous historical
change. The third volume, taking the story up to 1936, is in preparation,
and grateful readers of the first two will wish Phillips a fair wind with
it.
Sergei Prokofiev
DIARIES
Volume One, 1907–1914: Prodigious Youth
835pp. 978 0 571 22692 0
Volume Two, 1915–1923: Behind the Mask
775pp. 978 0 571 22630 6
Translated and annotated by Anthony Phillips.
Faber. £30 each.
G. S. Smith is Professor Emeritus of Russian in the University of
Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of New College. He is the author of D. S. Mirsky:
An Anglo-Russian life, 1890-1939, 2000.
