A new period seemed to begin in his work just before his death, he seemed to be feeling his way along new paths. Perhaps this music would have been more profound than what we have, but it was only a beginning and we don't know the continuation.
Prokofiev had two favorite words. One was "amusing," which he used to evaluate everything around him. Everything-people, events, music. He seemed to feel that "amusing" covered Wozzeck. The second was "Understood?" That's when he wanted to know whether he was making himself clear.
Those two favorite words irritated me. Why the simple-minded cannibal's vocabulary ? Ellochka the Cannibal, from Ilf and Petrov's story,* had a third vocabulary word in her arsenaclass="underline" "homosexuality." But Prokofiev managed with just two.
Prokofiev was lucky from childhood, he always got what he wanted.
He never had my worries, he always had money and success and, as a result, the personality of a spoiled Wunderkind.
Chekhov once said, "The Russian writer lives in a drainpipe, eats woodlice, and sleeps with washerwomen." In that sense, Prokofiev was never a Russian, and that's why lie was stunned by the turn his life took.
Prokofiev and I could never have had a frank talk, but I feel that I know him, and I can imagine very well why that European man pref erred to return to Russia.
Prokofiev was an inveterate gambler and, in the long run, he always
•nya 11£ (Ilya Amoldovich Fainsilberg; 1 897-1937) and Yevgeny Petrov (Yevgeny Petrovich Kataev; 1 903-1 942); popular satirists and collaborators. Sentences and jokes from their novels The Twelve Chairs and The'Golden Calf are widely quoted in Soviet life; several characters from these novels have taken on the aura of folklore.
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won. Prokofiev thought that he had calculated perfectly and that he would be a winner this time too. For some fifteen years Prokofiev sat between two stools-in the }Nest he was considered a Soviet and in Russia they welcomed him as a Western guest.
But then the situation changed and the bureaucrats in charge of cultural affairs started squinting at Prokofiev, meaning, Who's this Parisian fellow ? And Prokofiev decided that it would be more profitable for him to move to the U.S.S.R. Such a step would only raise his stock in the West, because things Soviet were becoming fashionable just then, they would stop considering him a foreigner in the U.S.S.R., and therefore he would win all around.
By the way, the final impetus came from his cardplaying. Prokofiev was deeply in debt abroad and he had to straighten out his financial affairs quickly, which he hoped to do in the U.S.S.R.
And this was where Prokofiev landed like a chicken in soup. He came to Moscow to teach them, and they started teaching him. Along with everyone else, he had to memorize the historic article in Pravda
"Muddle Instead of Music." * He did look through the score of my Lady Macbeth, however. He said, "Amusing."
I don't think that Prokofiev ever treated me seriously as a composer; he considered only Stravinsky a rival and never missed a chance to take a shot at him. I remember he started telling me some vile story about Stravinsky. I cut him off.
There was a period when Prokofiev was frightened out of his wits.
He wrote a cantata with words by Lenin and Stalin-it was rejected.
He wrote songs for solo, chorus, and orchestra, also praising Stalinanother failure. Meyerhold began work on Prokofiev's opera Semyon Kotko-and he was arrested. And then, to top it off, Prokofiev ran over a girl in his Ford. It was a new Ford and Prokofiev couldn't handle it. Moscow pedestrians are undisciplined, plow right under cars.
Prokofiev called them suicidal.
Prokofiev had the soul of a goose; he always had a chip on his shoulder.
Prokofiev had to swallow many humiliations, and somehow he man-
•The sadly famous editorial article in Pravda "Muddle Instead of Music" Uanuary 28, 1 936), inspired by Stalin, attacked Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth and began the broad government campaign against formalism in various fields of literature and art (sec Introduction).
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aged. He wasn't allowed abroad, his operas and ballets weren't produced, any clerk could give him orders. And the only thing he could do was give them the finger in his pocket.
A characteristic example is the orchestration of Prokofiev's balletsto this day the Bolshoi does not use his orchestrations. Even accepting the fact that orchestration was not Prokofiev's forte (I made corrections when I performed his First Piano Concerto at a very young age) and that orchestration was always work for him, and hard work, which Prokofiev always tried to palm off on someone else, the Bolshoi treated his ballets barbarically. It should be known that their production of Romeo and Juliet has Pogrebov as Prokofiev's co-composer. The Stone Flower too. A striking man, that Pogrebov, a percussionist and hussar of orchestration. He orchestrated with hellish speed and solidity.
For a while he was taken with the idea of writing an opera based on a Leskov story, that is, a Prokofiev Lady Macbeth. He wanted to show me up and prove that he could write a real Soviet opera, without the crudity and naturalistic touches. But he dropped the idea.
Prokofiev was always afraid that he was being overlooked-cheated out of his prizes, orders, and titles. He set great store by them and was overjoyed when he received his first Stalin Prize. This naturally did not further our relationship, or improve the friendly atmosphere, so to speak.
The animosity was revealed during the war. Prokofiev wrote several weak opuses, for instance the 1 94 1 Suite and "Ballad of the Boy Who Remained Unknown." I expressed an opinion of these works that was commensurate with their worth. Prokofiev did not remain in my debt for long.
In general, he scanned my works without a close reading, but he voiced rather definitive-sounding opinions on them. In his lengthy correspondence with Miaskovsky, Prokofiev makes quite a few disparaging remarks about me. I had an opportunity to see the letters, and it's a shame they haven't been published. It must be the will of Mira Alexandrovna Mendelson.* She probably didn't want Prokofiev's harsh judgments made public. I was not the only one he criticized in
•Mira Alexandrovna Mendelson-Prokofieva (1915-1968), Prokofiev's seoond wife. The correspondence between Prokofiev and Miaskovsky was published after Shostakovich's death. As was to be expected, it was bowdlerized.
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his letters, there were many other composers and musicians.
Personally, I don't see why his sharpness should be an obstacle to their publication. After all, they can use ellipses. Say, if Prokofiev wrote "that idiot Gauk,"* they could print it as "that . . . Gauk."
I'm rather cool about Prokofiev's music now and listen to his compositions without any particular pleasure. I suppose The Gambler is the opera of his that I like the most, but even it has too many superficial, random effects. Prokofiev sacrificed essential things too often for a fl.ashy effect. You see it in The Flaming Angel and in War and Peace.
I listen and remain unmoved. That's how things are now. Once it was different; but this was a long time ago. And then my infatuation with Mahler pushed Stravinsky and certainly Prokofiev into the background. Ivan lvanovich Sollertinsky insisted that Mahler and Prokofiev were incompatible.
Everyone knows about Sollertinsky now, every idiot, but this is not the kind of popularity that I would have wished for my late friend; they've turned him into a laughingstock. It's the fault of Andronikov t and his television appearances in which he depicts Sollertinsky as some kind of fool.