because I am a Russian, and that is to say the least suited of men to be an exile, to remain myself in a psychological climate that isn't of my race. My compatriots and I carry our country about with us. Not all of it, but just enough for it to be faintly painful at first, then increasingly so, until at last it breaks us down altogether… I've got to live myself back into the atmosphere of my homeland. I've got to see real winters again, and springs that burst into being from one moment to the next. I've got to hear the Russian language echoing in my ears. I've got to talk to people who are my own flesh and blood, so that they can give me something I lack here - their songs - my songs.130
From 1932. Prokofiev began to spend half the year in Moscow; four years later he moved his wife and two sons there for good. He was afforded every luxury - a spacious apartment in Moscow with his own furniture imported from Paris and the freedom to travel to the West (at a time when Soviet citizens were despatched to the gulag for ever having spoken to a foreigner). With his uncanny talent for writing tunes, Prokofiev was commissioned to compose numerous scores for the Soviet stage and screen, including his Lieutenant Kije suite (1934) and Romeo and Juliet (1935-6). Prizes followed - he was awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize on no less than five occasions between 1942 and 1949 - and even though he knew that they were window-dressing, he was flattered by the recognition of his native land.
Still, in spite of all the accolades, Prokofiev's working life at home became steadily more difficult. Attacked as a 'formalist' in the campaign which began, in 1936, with the suppression of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Prokofiev retreated by turning his attention to music for the young: Peter and the Wolf (1936) is a product (and perhaps an allegory) of the Terror years (the hunt for the wolf has overtones of the assault on the 'enemies of the people'). Many of his more experimental works remained unperformed: the huge Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution (1937); the music for Meyerhold's 1937 Pushkin centenary production of Boris Godunov; even the opera War and Peace was not staged in Russia (in its final version) until 1959. After 1948, when Zhdanov renewed the Stalinist assault against the 'formalists', nearly all the music which Prokofiev had written in Paris and New York was banned from the Soviet concert repertory.
Prokofiev spent his last years in virtual seclusion. Like Shostakovich, he turned increasingly to the intimate domain of chamber music, where he could find expression for his private sadness. The most moving of all these works is the Violin Sonata in D Major (ironically awarded the Stalin Prize in 1947). Prokofiev told the violinist David Oistrakh that its haunting opening movement was meant to sound 'like the wind in a graveyard'.131 Oistrakh played the sonata at Prokofiev's funeral, a sad affair that was scarcely noticed by the Soviet public. Stalin had died on the same day as Prokofiev, 5 March 1953. There were no flowers left to buy, so a single pine branch was placed on the composer's grave.
Tsvetaeva returned to live with Efron and their son and daughter in a dacha near Moscow in 1939. Having hoped to rediscover the sort of writers' circles that she had left behind nearly twenty years before, it was a shock to find herself almost completely isolated on her return to Russia. As Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled, under Stalin 'it had become a matter of second nature to ignore people who had returned from the West'.132 Everything about Tsvetaeva made her dangerous to know -or be seen to know. She seemed alien and outmoded, a figure of the past, from another world. Few people recalled her poetry.
Two months after their return, Tsvetaeva's daughter Alya was arrested and accused of spying for the Western powers in league with the Trotskyites. Shortly after, they arrested Efron as well. Tsvetaeva joined the women in the prison queues whose dreadful burden was recorded by Akhmatova. Tsvetaeva never saw her husband or daughter again. She did not even find out what had become of them. * With her son, she was taken in by Efron's sister in Moscow. Thin and exhausted, her face grey and colourless, she scraped a living by translating poetry. Finally, after Pasternak had come to her aid, she moved to a village near the writers' colony at Golitsyno, on the road between Moscow and Minsk, where she found a job as a dishwasher and was allowed to take her meals. Some of the older writers there still recalled her poetry and treated her with a respect bordering on awe. But from the viewpoint of official Soviet literature Tsvetaeva had ceased to exist long ago. Her last book in Russia had been published in 1922 - and in the climate of 1939 there was very little chance that her poems would be published there again. She submitted a collection of her verse to the state publishers in 1940, but instead of her more patriotic or civic verse she chose to include many of her poems from the period when Efron was fighting for the Whites. Unsurprisingly, the collection was turned down as anti-Soviet. It was typical of Tsvetaeva's wilful refusal to compromise. She was incapable of reining herself in, even if at the risk of disaster for herself. She could not come to terms with the age in which she was compelled to live.
Shortly before she left France, Tsvetaeva had told a friend that, if she could not write in the Soviet Union, she would kill herself.
* Alya served eight years in a labour camp. Efron was shot in 1941.
Tsvetaeva was increasingly fixated on the idea of her suicide. She had often used it as a threat. After 1940 she wrote little verse, and the few lines that she wrote were full of death:
It's time to take off the amber, It's time to change the language, It's time to extinguish the lantern Above the door.1"
Her last poem, written in March 1941, was addressed to the young and handsome poet Arseny Tarkovsky (the father of the future film director), with whom she had been in love. It was a ghostly refrain which spoke about her own sense of abandonment, not just by Tarkovsky, but by all those unnamed friends whom she referred to here as the 'six souls':
I am no one: not a brother, not a son, not a husband, Not a friend - and still I reproach you: You who set the table for six - souls But did not seat me at the table's end.134
Tsvetaeva's son Mur was her last hope and emotional support. But the teenager was struggling to break free from his mother's suffocating hold. In August 1941, as the Germans swept through Russia towards Moscow, the two were evacuated to the small town of Elabuga, in the Tatar republic near Kazan. They rented half a room in a little wooden house. Tsvetaeva had no means of support. On Sunday 30 August her landlords and her son went off fishing for the day. While they were away she hanged herself. She left a note for Mur: