<div id="main-article-info">
<h1>The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev by Simon Morrison – review</h1>
<p id="stand-first" class="stand-first-alone">A disturbing biography of the woman who married a superstar composer only to find herself in the Gulag</p>
</div><div><div>
<div id="article-header">
<div id="main-article-info">
<h1>The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev by Simon Morrison – review</h1>
<p id="stand-first" class="stand-first-alone">A disturbing biography of the woman who married a superstar composer only to find herself in the Gulag</p>
</div>
<ul id="content-actions" class="share-links trackable-component"><li class="full-line facebook">
<span class="facebook-share">
<a class="facebook-share-btn" href="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">
<span class="facebook-share-icon"></span></a></span><span><span><a class="contributor" rel="author" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stephen-walsh">Stephen Walsh</a></span></span> </li></ul></div><ul class="article-attributes trackable-component b4">
<li class="publication">
<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian">The Guardian</a>,
Saturday 30 March 2013
</li></ul>
<div id="article-wrapper" class="trackable-component">
<div id="main-content-picture">
<img src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2013/3/25/1364224944168/Lina-Prokofiev-in-1921-010.jpg" alt="Lina Prokofiev in 1921" height="276" width="460">
<div class="caption">Composer’s moll … the future Mrs Prokofiev, convalescing from appendicitis at a Paris clinic in March 1921</div>
</div>
<div id="article-body-blocks">
<p>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. <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2003/jan/17/classicalmusicandopera.artsfeatures1" title="">Prokofiev</a>
wrote them, it seems, not for publication but for his own satisfaction,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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/music" title="More from guardian.co.uk on Music">music</a>,
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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Morrison's detailed and
harrowing account of Lina's eight years in a sub-Arctic gulag contains
few surprises for anyone who knows their <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/author/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn" title="">Solzhenitsyn</a>.
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.</p><p>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 <em>femme moyenne sensuelle</em>, 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 <em>Romeo and Juliet</em> or the <em>Fifth Symphony</em> is a matter of taste.</p><p>• Stephen Walsh's <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/data/book/music/9780712667234/stravinsky-a-creative-spring-russia-and-france-v" title=""><em>Stravinsky</em></a> is published by Pimlico. To order <em>The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev</em> and <em>Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1924-1933: Prodigal Son</em>, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or <a href="http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/home.do" title="">go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop</a></p>
</div></div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/30/love-wars-prokofiev-morrison-review">http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/mar/30/love-wars-prokofiev-morrison-review</a><br><br>carlos palombini<br></div>
<a href="http://www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011" target="_blank">ufmg.academia.edu/CarlosPalombini</a><br><br><div></div><div></div><div></div></div>
<div style id="__af745f8f43-e961-4b88-8424-80b67790c964__"></div>