[ANPPOM-Lista] The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev by Simon Morrison

[Carlos Palombini]

 The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev by Simon Morrison – review

A disturbing biography of the woman who married a superstar composer only
to find herself in the Gulag
  The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev by Simon Morrison – review

A disturbing biography of the woman who married a superstar composer only
to find herself in the Gulag

   -  <http://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=180444840287&link=http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/30/love-wars-prokofiev-morrison-review&display=popup&redirect_uri=http://static-serve.appspot.com/static/facebook-share/callback.html&show_error=false&ref=desktop>Stephen
   Walsh <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stephen-walsh>


   - The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian>, Saturday 30
   March 2013

 [image: Lina Prokofiev in 1921]
Composer’s moll … the future Mrs Prokofiev, convalescing from appendicitis
at a Paris clinic in March 1921

The three volumes of Sergey Prokofiev's diaries, now complete in Anthony
Phillips's compelling translation, provide what is probably the most
complete picture we possess of any significant 20th-century composer.
Prokofiev<http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2003/jan/17/classicalmusicandopera.artsfeatures1>wrote
them, it seems, not for publication but for his own satisfaction, and
did not try to conceal the disagreeable aspects of his character or
behaviour. He appears to have written them up periodically from elaborate
notes taken in the immediate shadow of the experiences they describe.

The diaries are well written because he was a natural writer; they are
candid because spontaneous. And because he was famous when young, travelled
widely and met everyone, they contain endless details about his
contemporaries, and his often caustic opinions of them, their
music<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/music>,
their playing or their wives. Incidentally, Phillips's footnote biographies
of practically everyone mentioned are not the least dazzling aspect of his
editorial work: astonishing that Faber accepted them all, since they must
have extended the already immense text by a good quarter.

Frustratingly, though, the diaries stuttered to a halt, for no obvious
reason, in the spring of 1933, and were apparently never resumed. From St
Petersburg, through Paris, America, various European tours, and the first
two or three trips back to (by this time Soviet) Russia, the narrative is
complete. Almost from the minute Prokofiev decides firmly that his future
lies in Russia, the diary ceases. Phillips doesn't advance any reason for
this, and it would probably be facile to suggest that it had anything to do
with the inadvisability of committing intimate thoughts to paper in the
Soviet Union of the 1930s. It's true that Prokofiev and his wife Lina, who
was his willing companion when he finally settled in Moscow in 1936, knew
that they were under constant observation, their phones tapped and their
footsteps shadowed. But Prokofiev was sanguine about such matters,
preferring to believe that artists would be favoured under Stalin and that
he himself, as a world superstar, would always receive favourable treatment.

What actually happened to him has been well documented by previous
biographers. What happened to his wife has also been related, but in
less detail, and always (if with regret) from the point of view of the
composer himself. Simon Morrison's book, based on new research in Soviet
and Prokofiev family archives, reverses this emphasis, and to disturbing
effect.

Born in Madrid in 1897 to a Spanish father and a Russian mother, both
singers, Lina Codina was brought up from the age of 10 in New York, where
she met the 27-year-old Prokofiev at a piano recital he gave in 1919. After
a fitful courtship (Prokofiev was attractive, susceptible, and had
high-profile admirers), they eventually married when Lina became pregnant
with the first of their two sons in 1923. For the next 13 years she led the
life of itinerant composer's moll, often travelling with him, sometimes
even participating (as a singer) in his concerts, but always engaged in a
battle with his music for a share of his attention.

The diaries suggest a spasmodic concern for her well-being. Quite apart
from the essentially private act of composition, Sergey's favourite
entertainments – chess, bridge – tended to exclude her, and at social
events he would be lionised while she was to some extent neglected. As a
singer, she inhabited an awkward penumbra in his vicinity. A nervy
performer, she would often lose her voice and withdraw. His reports of her
variable standard of performance express sympathy rather than the pain it
caused her. Besides, she was, he thought, a fussy traveller, moody and
sometimes quarrelsome.

The return to Russia was always, for him, a homecoming. For Lina – though
she had visited as a child and spoke the language – it was an adventure
whose successful outcome depended on his love and support. Alas, both were
swiftly withdrawn. When she joined him there in August 1935 after a
five-month separation, he immediately disappeared to the Caucasus, then to
western Europe on another tour that lasted till early 1936, leaving her to
fend for herself and their two small sons. That year they moved into an
apartment that Morrison describes as "impressive enough to be showcased to
tourists from England" (a fair sample of his prose style), but that
actually covered a mere 60 square metres, the size of a large farmhouse
kitchen.

The question now, according to Morrison, was whether the marriage could
survive their enforced togetherness. For as long as Prokofiev continued to
tour in the west it hung in the balance. But after 1938, when even he was
refused foreign travel, the situation became critical. For two or three
years they stuck it out, but in March 1941 he packed a bag and left for
good. For more than two years there had been another woman, a literature
student called Mira Mendelson. Mira wrote bad poetry and aspired to
membership of the Party; but having set out to capture Prokofiev, she made
herself useful, helping to write his articles and libretti.

Lina's life meanwhile went steadily downhill. She lived alone with her sons
through the Moscow siege and everything that entailed (she dug tank traps
rather than tend livestock on a collective farm). Her car and piano were
requisitioned. Not surprisingly she began to look for a way out. She talked
to embassy acquaintances and once-influential friends, and might have got
out in 1941 if her contact hadn't been killed by a German bomb. Instead she
stayed on, increasingly under suspicion because of her unconcealed
inquiries about leaving, until one night in February 1948 there was a phone
call. When she descended to the street to pick up a parcel she was dragged
into a car, carted off to the Lubyanka, and her flat ransacked while her
sons looked on in despair.

Morrison's detailed and harrowing account of Lina's eight years in a
sub-Arctic gulag contains few surprises for anyone who knows their
Solzhenitsyn<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/author/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn>.
What's uniquely appalling about the story is the sense that she had no
business being in Russia in the first place, that its social and political
struggles were not hers, that a profound emotional injustice lay at the
heart of her entire destiny. She had gone to Moscow solely for her husband,
and he no longer loved her. Had his fate been linked to hers, hers might
have made some sense, however grim. But, although Prokofiev was one of the
composers condemned by the central committee in February 1948 – a
terrifying experience that destroyed his work and undermined his health –
he was never arrested, though he was deprived of his livelihood. He lived
only another five years, and died in March 1953 on the same day as Stalin,
which meant that no flowers were available for his funeral. Lina, by
contrast, lived on for 33 years after her release in June 1956, and did
eventually manage to leave the Soviet Union, apparently with the help of
one Yury Andropov, head of the KGB.

Morrison tells a good story, without excess or indulgence, and with
touching empathy for his heroine. Lina Prokofiev was no saint: she was
truly a *femme moyenne sensuelle*, good-looking but not specially talented,
a spirited, sharp-tongued arguer. She needed these qualities to help her
stand her ground against a self-centred genius whose work came first and
whose sense of the world began and ended with his own interests. For sure
what happened to his abandoned wife was partly his fault. Whether it is
expiated by *Romeo and Juliet* or the *Fifth Symphony* is a matter of taste.

• Stephen Walsh's
*Stravinsky*<http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/music/9780712667234/stravinsky-a-creative-spring-russia-and-france-v>is
published by Pimlico. To order
*The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev* and *Sergey Prokofiev Diaries
1924-1933: Prodigal Son*, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service
on 0330 333 6846 or go to
guardian.co.uk/bookshop<http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/home.do>
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/30/love-wars-prokofiev-morrison-review

carlos palombini
ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini<http://www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011>
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