Sergeis Failed Monument: The

Aesthetics of Traumatic Realism in

Prokofievs Ode to the End of War
(1945)

Gabrielle Cornish
Eastman School of Music
gcornish@u.rochester.edu

International Symposium on Prokofiev and the Russian Tradition

February 25-27 2016
Socialist Realism and the
Demands of Trauma
Representation
Boris Iofans proposed design for Palace of the Soviets, ca. 1933
Part 1: Slow
Part 2: From the Cantata for the Twentieth
Anniversary of October, fast, workman-like
Part 3: Slow, but more ornate
Part 4: Birth of joy
Part 5: Russian, joyous (3rd theme)
Part 6: Part 2, elaborated
Part 7: Part 5
Part 1: Part 1, against background of parts 1 and 5
Coda: Solo, 4 timpani, F major, extract from part 2

(Morrison, 292)
[Traumatic realism] produces the traumatic
event as an object of knowledge and to
program and thus transform its readers so that
they are forced to acknowledge their
relationship to posttraumatic culture.

(Rothberg, 103)
Sergeis Failed
Monument
 Selected Bibliography
Clark, Katerina. Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the
Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2011.

Etkind, Alexander. Hard and Soft in Cultural Memory: Political Mourning in Russia and

Germany. Grey Room 16 (2004), 36-59.

Frolova-Walker, Marina. Stalin and the Art of Boredom. Twentieth-Century Music 1,

no. 1 (2004), 101-124.

Kryolva, Anna. Healers of Wounded Souls: The Crisis in Private Life in Soviet

Literature, 1944-1946. The Journal of Modern History 73, no. 2 (2001), 307-331.

Morrison, Simon. The Peoples Artist: Prokofievs Soviet Years. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2009.

Nestyev, Israel. Prokofiev. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960.

Rehding, Alexander. Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in

Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.