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 Sergei Prokofiev

A Biography

by Harlow Robinson

Published by Plunkett Lake Press, December 2018

© 1987 by Harlow Robinson

Originally published in 1987 by Viking Penguin Inc.

Reprinted 2002 by Northeastern University Press.

Cover by Susan Erony

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For more information, visit www.plunkettlakepress.com

 CONTENTS

Foreword to the 2002 reissue

Preface and Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE ~ MARCH 5, 1953
PART ONE
1 ~ SERYOZHENKA
2 ~ HARMONY AND REVOLUTION
3 ~ THE BAD BOY OF RUSSIAN MUSIC
4 ~ FREE ARTIST
5 ~ OUT IN THE WORLD
6 ~ BATTLE OF THE PIANOS
7 ~ LET US BE LIKE THE SUN
8 ~ FUGITIVE VISIONS
PART TWO
9 ~ AMERICA
10 ~ A SCYTHIAN IN PARIS
11 ~ ETTAL
12 ~ A TALE OF THREE SERGES
13 ~ THE PRODIGAL ON TOUR
14 ~ CHOSES EN SOI
15 ~ OUR MUSICAL ADVANCE POST
16 ~ A NEW SIMPLICITY
PART THREE
17 ~ FROM MACY’S TO MOSCOW
18 ~ LESSONS IN SOVIET REALITY
19 ~ MIRA
20 ~ BEHIND THE LINES
21 ~ SWAN
22 ~ BEFORE THE STORM
23 ~ UNDER FIRE
24 ~ “MY SOUL HURTS”
AFTERWORD: REFLECTIONS ON PROKOFIEV’S STYLE
NOTES TO THE TEXT
APPENDIX I ~ SERGEI PROKOFIEV: A CHRONOLOGY
APPENDIX II ~ CATALOGUE OF PROKOFIEV’S WORKS (BY GENRE)
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
For my parents, and for Robert Holley
 It’s no misfortune to be born in a duck’s nest from a swan’s
egg.
Sergei Prokofiev, “The Ugly Duckling”
(after the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen)
 Foreword to the 2002 reissue

No matter who the subject is, biographies always reflect the times
in which they are written. This one is no exception.
When I was researching and writing about the life and music of
the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) in the late
1970s and early 1980s, the Cold War was still alive and raging. Not
long after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979,
President Carter announced an American boycott of the 1980
Moscow Olympics. At that moment, I was a graduate student in
Moscow on a Fulbright grant, spending most of my days in the chilly
reading room of the Soviet Central State Archives of Literature and
Art, going through Prokofiev’s manuscripts and papers for my
doctoral dissertation on his operas. During President Ronald
Reagan’s first term in office, the ideological hostility between the
United States and the Soviet Union only intensified. In November
1982, the Soviet Communist Party chief, Leonid Brezhnev, died and
was replaced by the former KGB boss, Yuri Andropov. At that
moment, too, I was in Moscow, now an assistant professor, but
rummaging again (still!) through Prokofiev’s archives and
interviewing those who had known and worked with him in
preparation for writing this biography. It should come as no surprise
that some of these people were reluctant to take the risk of speaking
frankly and openly to an American scholar — although many of them
did, sometimes requesting anonymity. Soon after Andropov came to
power, a Korean Airlines passenger plane was shot down by Soviet
aircraft near the island of Sakhalin and Reagan denounced the
U.S.S.R. as the “Evil Empire.” Even Hollywood got into the act,
producing such viciously anti-Soviet films as Red Dawn, in which
matinee idol Patrick Swayze plays a high school jock leading guerilla
resistance to a brutal Soviet invasion of a small Colorado town. That
film appeared in 1984, the same year I was spending the summer in
the reading rooms of Leningrad libraries in continued pursuit of
Prokofiev.
 I admit it: the otherness of Russia at the height of the Cold War
was one of its main attractions for me. It was hard to get there and
difficult to stay. If you studied Russian and Russian culture in those
days, people assumed that you were either a Communist
sympathizer or a spy in training. I was neither. Instead, I was
obsessed with something else: the art and career of one of the
greatest, and most enigmatic, composers of the twentieth century.
As it happens, my biography of Prokofiev appeared (in March
1987) at another crucial period in recent Russian history. About two
years earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev had been named the new
Communist Party First Secretary, and big changes were already afoot
in Moscow. New slogans — glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika
(“restructuring”) — were replacing rigid Communist propaganda, and
Soviet artists and scholars were beginning to taste a freedom of
expression they had not even dared to dream about. By the time I
returned to Moscow in spring 1988, glasnost was in full bloom and
the days of the old Soviet system were numbered. Prokofiev’s official
Soviet biographer, Israel Nestyev, who had since the Stalinist period
been dutifully following the Party line in his many works on the
composer and his music, even invited me to his apartment
overlooking Gorky Street for drinks and zakuski. During our
conversation, he let me know (somewhat apologetically) that he, like
many others, was now reexamining his role in upholding the
bankrupt ideology of a corrupt and inhumane system for so many
years. In Nestyev’s case, this meant denigrating the music Prokofiev
wrote abroad before he returned to the bosom of mother Soviet
Russia in the late 1930s. Although he dedicated most of his life to
serious research on Prokofiev, as a young man Nestyev had also
participated in writing some of the official attacks launched in 1948
against the alleged crime of “formalism” committed by Prokofiev and
other composers.
The Soviet Union finally ceased officially to exist in late 1991, just
a few months after the muted celebration of the hundredth
anniversary of Prokofiev’s birth the preceding April.
 The Cold War may be over, but Cold War attitudes have continued
to color Prokofiev’s legacy and reputation. Like all prominent creative
artists who lived and worked under the Soviet regime (including
such figures as the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the film
director Sergei Eisenstein), Prokofiev came under new scrutiny for
the extent to which he had collaborated with and supported what
was now regarded as an evil and corrupt system. As is the case with
all revolutions (and what happened in the Soviet Union in the late
1980s was surely a revolution, both cultural and political), all those
associated with the old regime were now perceived as somehow
tainted. Prokofiev came under attack for having enjoyed the
privileged status of an officially approved (at least most of the time)
artist in a totalitarian society — the same status enjoyed by Richard
Strauss in Nazi Germany. Once again, Prokofiev was castigated for
his decision to leave Europe for the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s — his “ill-
advised retreat from Paris to Moscow,” as the New Yorker music
critic Alex Ross wrote in his review of the Metropolitan Opera’s
brilliant new production of The Gambler in April 2001.
And yet those who have experienced the Soviet system firsthand
have tended to be more generous. The Soviet Maestro Valery
Gergiev, who conducted The Gambler at the Met and who has been
a tireless champion of Prokofiev’s music (especially the works of the
Soviet period) both in Russia and abroad, spoke eloquently to this
issue at the official launch of the Serge Prokofiev Association as a
formal foundation in London in May 2001. “I cannot agree with
those who simplistically see Prokofiev’s return to the Soviet Union as
the biggest mistake of his life,” Gergiev said to a select audience that
included prominent musicians and all the surviving members of the
Prokofiev family. “If he had not returned, we would not have his
Fifth Symphony, or Alexander Nevsky, or the Sixth Symphony, or War
and Peace and so many other great works that continue to find new
audiences today.”

In the years since Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography was published,

two members of Prokofiev’s immediate family have passed on. Both
were essential primary sources for my work, and I feel fortunate that
I came to know both of them over a long period. Lina Llubera
Prokofiev, the composer’s first wife, died in London on January 3,
1989, at age ninety-one. Not only did this remarkably resilient and
multi-talented woman outlive her husband by thirty-six years (she
never remarried); she also outlived Prokofiev’s much younger second
wife, Mira Mendelson-Prokofiev, by twenty-one years. Beautiful,
dynamic, highly opinionated, chic, and acerbic, Lina moved easily in
the glamorous world of Parisian high society and counted numerous
celebrities among her large circle of friends and acquaintances. I
first met Lina in London in the autumn of 1978, when she had
already passed her eightieth birthday. Just four years earlier, she had
finally been given permission to leave the U.S.S.R., where she had
been living without the right to travel abroad since 1938. Her
memory faded in and out, but she still looked and sounded youthful.
By then she had survived experiences tragic enough to kill most
people. After our first meeting in London, I met with Lina numerous
times in Paris and New York.
After her arrest in 1948 (described later in these pages), Lina was
found guilty of fabricated charges of spying and treason against the
Soviet state and sentenced to twenty years in labor camp. She spent
six years in the Abez camp near Vorkuta, in the Russian far north
near the Arctic Circle, then two more in a camp in the Mordovian
Autonomous Republic, before being released in June 1956, in the
post-Stalin amnesty given to almost all political prisoners. Until
leaving Russia in 1974, she lived in Moscow. Some sense of the
horrors Lina experienced in Soviet labor camps can be gained from
excerpts from an interview with a fellow prisoner in the Abez camp,
Evgeniia Taratuta, published in Moscow in 1991. Taratuta came to
know Lina in the camp, and recalled how they heard the news of
Prokofiev’s death in 1953.
“When they learned of Stalin’s death, almost all of the inmates
broke into uncontrollable sobbing. No one knew about the death of
Prokofiev, who died the same day — Lina Ivanovna didn’t know
either. The following summer, when Lina Ivanovna, Evgeniia Taratuta
and some other women were hauling slops as usual, someone came
running from the library and said: they have just announced on the
radio that a concert was held in Argentina in memory of the
composer Prokofiev. Lina burst into tears and, without saying a
word, walked away.”1
Unfortunately, Lina never wrote her own book, as she repeatedly
spoke of doing. She did, however, establish the Serge Prokofiev
Association, a charitable trust dedicated to “furthering the
knowledge and study of Prokofiev’s life and work.” Created in 1983
(and, as previously mentioned, formally launched in 2001), it is
housed at Goldsmiths College in London.
Oleg, the second son of Lina and Prokofiev, died unexpectedly and
prematurely at age 69 in 1998 in London, where he had lived for
many years with his large family. I met Oleg, an accomplished artist,
around the same time I met Lina, in 1978, and had many
opportunities subsequently to speak with him at great length about
his father and other matters. Like his mother, Oleg had suffered
many misfortunes and difficulties in his life, at least in part through
being the son of a famous Soviet composer. Oleg and I collaborated
in several public appearances in New York, most notably for a large
Prokofiev celebration and symposium sponsored by the New York
Philharmonic in 1995 in connection with the orchestra’s special
performance of the score from Ivan the Terrible during a screening
of the film. At that symposium, Oleg spoke movingly of the
experience of growing up as Prokofiev’s son, and the sad and lonely
years he and his brother, Sviatoslav, endured after Lina’s arrest in
1948. Shortly before he died, Oleg graciously examined and
endorsed the manuscript of my Selected Letters of Sergei Prokofiev,
published by Northeastern University Press in 1998. Oleg also
translated and edited (with Christopher Palmer) his father’s Soviet
Diary 1927 and Other Writings, published by Northeastern University
Press in 1991. I feel the loss of Oleg deeply, for his dedication to his
father’s art and legacy was always an inspiration.
Happily, Oleg’s children and his brother, Sviatoslav, are still with us.
Sviatoslav’s son Sergei (who bears an uncanny physical resemblance
to his grandfather) has been very active in the work of the Serge
Prokofiev Association.

Glasnost, and then the collapse of the Soviet Union, brought an

end to Soviet-style censorship. Novels critical of the Soviet system —
Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Evgeny Zamiatin’s We, works of
Solzhenitsyn — were finally published in Russia, and many
previously forbidden topics could be discussed and investigated.
Archives containing materials on many previously hidden aspects of
Soviet history were opened to scholars for the first time. Victims of
Stalinist and other Soviet repression came forward to tell their
stories. Manuscripts previously considered too critical or sensitive
were also finally published. This process has affected research on
Prokofiev, although there have been no startling new revelations. In
1991, for the centennial celebration of Prokofiev’s birth, a volume of
materials on Prokofiev was published by Sovetskii kompozitor in
Moscow. Included were the full text of Prokofiev’s diary of his trip to
the U.S.S.R. in 1927, along with reminiscences of the composer by
friends and family members. Some of this material touched upon
issues that had not been addressed in Soviet literature on Prokofiev
but had been known from sources published in the West (including
my biography) — especially the fate of Lina, and the details of
Prokofiev’s early relationship with Mira Mendelson. Probably the
most interesting and significant inclusion was an excerpt from Mira
Mendelson-Prokofiev’s account of her relationship with the composer
between 1938 and 1941, material that had previously been judged
too personal and sensitive for publication in Soviet Russia. Here Mira
reveals that she first met Prokofiev in the summer of 1938 in the
Caucasus resort of Kislovodsk — not in 1939, as was previously
believed and reported in my biography. They did not initiate a
romantic relationship until 1939, however, also in Kislovodsk.
Otherwise, Mira’s account confirms the facts as presented in Sergei
Prokofiev: A Biography.
New details also emerged concerning the fate of theatre director
Vsevolod Meyerhold, one of Prokofiev’s closest friends and artistic
collaborators. As I describe in the pages that follow, Meyerhold was
arrested in June 1939, while in the final stages of rehearsing the
premiere production of the opera Semyon Kotko. I originally wrote,
“Less than one year later, Meyerhold was executed in prison”. In May
1988 the writer Arkadi Vaksberg revealed more of the terrible story
in Literaturnaya Gazeta. Five months after his arrest, Meyerhold
confessed to being a British and Japanese spy, a Trotskyist since
1923 and a “wrecker” of the Soviet theatre. Meyerhold later
disowned his false confession, describing in a letter to one of the
prosecutors how it had been obtained: “I was laid on the floor face
down, I was beaten with a rubber whip on feet and back; they sat
me in a chair and beat my legs, causing internal bleeding, and then
they beat these red-blue-and-yellow-weals with the same rubber
whip, causing such excruciating pain that it felt like they were
pouring boiling water over me — I shouted and wept from the pain.
They beat me on the face with their hands. The interrogator always
repeated: ‘You will write [your confession], or we will beat you
again, just leaving your head and right hand. The rest we will turn
into bloody flesh.’ So, on 15 November 1939, I signed.” Meyerhold
was shot on February 2, 1940.2
New accounts and details also emerged of what happened at the
infamous 1948 Composers’ Congress convened by Andrei Zhdanov
(a Politburo member, former Party boss of Leningrad and Stalin’s
loyal watchdog for ideology and culture), at which Prokofiev,
Shostakovich and other leading Soviet composers were denounced
for “formalism” and serious deviation from the reigning aesthetic of
Socialist Realism. One of the leading spokesmen for the
government’s position in 1948 was Tikhon Khrennikov, a thirty-four-
year-old composer, and later the powerful general secretary of the
Soviet Union of Composers for more than forty years. Khrennikov is
still alive in Moscow today, having outlasted virtually all of the
composers and musicians whose lives and careers he frequently
complicated and sometimes even destroyed. Amazingly, Khrennikov
kept his official post as head of the Composers’ Union even when
there was a democratic opportunity to replace him in the late 1980s,
in the heyday of glasnost. His colleagues actually voted to retain him
— and at a time when many other heads of artistic unions were
being sacked. The only thing that finally forced Tikhon Khrennikov
from office was the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.
In June 1997 I finally had the opportunity to meet this legendary
personage at his apartment in the prestigious Arbat neighborhood of
Moscow. Khrennikov’s spacious study contains many personal gifts
and tributes from prominent musicians and celebrities. There is a
huge vase presented “with love from the workers of Uzbekhistan.” In
a bookcase, I noticed a photo of Lina Prokofiev in her wedding
dress. In the inscription, she thanks Khrennikov for many years of
friendship. It may seem odd that Lina would have developed a
friendship with the bureaucrat who frequently attacked her husband
for his ideological deficiencies, but such is the byzantine world of
twentieth-century Russian music.
“My wife and I helped Lina when she returned from the labor
camps in the late 1950s, after Prokofiev’s death,” Khrennikov, still
remarkably spry and alert at age eighty-two, explained. “Nobody
else would have anything to do with her then.” And in fact I
remember Lina Prokofiev once telling me of Khrennikov’s kindness to
her at that terrible time in her life. Perhaps in helping Lina,
Khrennikov was also attempting to assuage his guilt for having
assailed an ailing Prokofiev at Party plenums in the last years of
Stalin’s regime. In his conversation with me, Khrennikov also insisted
that he had always admired Prokofiev’s music.
“I was a person of my times,” Khrennikov repeatedly told me. “It’s
very hard for anyone who did not live here through those times to
understand them and the way we lived.”
In 1994 Khrennikov published his memoirs, Tak eto bylo: Tikhon
Khrennikov o vremeni i o sebe (That’s The Way It Was: Tikhon
Khrennikov On Himself and His Times). It sold out almost
immediately. In it Khrennikov devotes an entire chapter to his
account of the 1948 party attack upon composers, including
Prokofiev. Khrennikov portrays his behavior as though he had no
choice in the matter, as though he was a passive instrument of
political forces and personalities beyond his control. He claims he
was summoned to Party headquarters and told to deliver a prepared
report denouncing the artistic deviations of Prokofiev, Shostakovich,
Miaskovsky and others. In his skewed perception, those who wrote
the report are more at fault than he was for reading it to the
Composers’ Congress.
In his book Khrennikov also states that Prokofiev was present at
the meetings convened by Zhdanov in February 1948 to make
official the resolutions outlined at earlier meetings in January. This
contradicts other reports that Prokofiev did not attend, which I used
as the basis for my account in Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography.

And so, Zhdanov’s presentation was met with a unanimous

storm of applause. As I have already said, Prokofiev was
sitting in front of me, and in front of him, a certain M. F.
Shkiriatov. I can’t remember who was sitting to Prokofiev’s left,
but Prokofiev kept turning that way and conferring with
someone while Zhdanov was speaking. And this Shkiriatov
kept on turning around and trying to call Prokofiev to order.
Finally Prokofiev lost his patience and blurted out:
“And who are you to tell me what to do?”
There was actually something comic about the situation, and
even Zhdanov interrupted his presentation and started to
laugh.
And you might well ask: Who was this Shkiriatov? At that
time he was a ruler of destinies — a representative of the
Party Control Commission, in 1933 he entered the All-Union
Central Commission on purging the Party. So this Shkiriatov
answered Prokofiev’s question:
“I’m a nobody, just a person like you.”3

Despite all that has happened in Russia during the fifteen years
since this biography was first published, I am happy to say that with
the exception of the few details described above, my account of
Prokofiev’s life and times remains both accurate and valid. I am
grateful to William A. Frohlich, director of Northeastern University
Press, for deciding to reprint this biography, which will now be
available again to the many individuals who have contacted me in
recent years wanting to purchase a copy. Today I look at the pages
that follow with a combination of pride, gratitude and amazement.
Did I really do this? Was it really that long ago?
In bringing Prokofiev’s remarkable story to life, I have also
immeasurably enriched my own.

Brookline, Massachusetts
Fall 2001
 Preface and Acknowledgments

I never met Prokofiev in the flesh, but I have met him many times
in his music. When I was about ten, my parents took the family to a
performance of Love for Three Oranges by a community group at
the local high school. It was the first opera I ever saw. What
impressed me most deeply then was not so much the odd, jerking
rhythms and violent harmonic contrasts (though I liked those, too),
but the plump pieces of artificial citrus fruit — swollen to unnatural
size — that rolled out on stage in Act II. When three princesses —
each singing sadly about something — emerged from them, my
curiosity turned to amazement. I turned with wide eyes to my
brother, whose similar wonder was reflected in the same tiny lines of
joyful concentration that furrowed his brow when he was reading his
favorite books.
A few months ago — about twenty-five years after that first
meeting — I met Prokofiev again, this time in Romeo and Juliet at
the Maly Theater in Leningrad. Arriving ticketless at the theatre only
moments before the curtain was to rise, I was uncertain whether I
could get in. I approached the box office window, which had been
made tiny to protect the little old ladies who sit behind it from abuse
when they announce that the performance is (as usual) sold out.
Suddenly a slip of paper was thrust into my hand and a small
number of rubles specified. “Run,” the babushka said as she took the
diminutive bills, “or you’ll be late.” I sprinted up the staircase
indicated by the anxious usher, opened a small door and found
myself in the lavishly appointed box once occupied by the Tsar and
his family. Suffusing the gold-velvet upholstery in a muted glow, the
lights dimmed as I squeezed through to my seat in the front row —
the best one in the house.
Though I have seen Romeo and Juliet many times in many
theatres, and many performances better than the one I saw on that
bitter January night in icy Leningrad, this Romeo was a special one. I
felt that Prokofiev had wanted me to be there.
 Between this Oranges and this Romeo came many other meetings
with Prokofiev: in his symphonies and concertos, his ballets and
operas, his suites and songs. Listening to this beguiling music made
me want to know more about its creator, so I read whatever I could
find (mostly in Russian). Very soon, I discovered that the peculiarly
nomadic life Prokofiev led had largely eluded his biographers. Gaping
lacunae yawned before me as I worked to follow the twisting route
of his personal and artistic odyssey; it was like coming to the most
important pages of a suspense novel only to find them torn out.
Ultimately, I came to see that these gaps resulted both from logistic
problems (Prokofiev rarely stayed in one place for long, dashing
between America, Europe and the Soviet Union) and political bias.
It became clear to me that Prokofiev’s life and music had been
recounted and interpreted from two equally unsatisfying and
incomplete points of view. One was the official Soviet version,
propounded by generations of Soviet musicologists and writers, that
insisted (at least until quite recently) upon regarding Prokofiev’s
decision to leave Russia in 1918 as the biggest mistake of his life.
The other was the “Western” version, argued with particular
vehemence by members of the Russian emigration, which has
insisted on the opposite: that his decision to return to the Soviet
Union in 1936 was the biggest mistake of his life. Unfortunately,
Prokofiev’s complicated personal life in the U.S.S.R. only contributed
further to this political polarization. As in most things, of course, the
truth — some of which, at least, I hope to illuminate in the pages
that follow — lies somewhere in between these two extreme
positions.
I have tried to provide a more complete and balanced portrait of
this remarkably misunderstood genius, drawing extensively on
Russian-language sources previously unavailable to the English-
speaking audience. My goal is to encourage greater appreciation of
Prokofiev’s tart and tender music, presenting it as part of a wider
human and historical struggle. Strong and mysterious bonds linked
Prokofiev’s art to his personality and to his national identity. The
nature of these bonds, and the sources of the prolific talent from
which music flowed so forcefully, with a nearly biological urgency,
are my subject here.

My long pursuit of Prokofiev has led me to many places — New

York, Paris, London, Moscow, Leningrad — and to many
extraordinary people. Writing this book would not have been
possible without their help. But most of all, I am deeply grateful for
the cooperation, encouragement and inspiration I received on my
research trips to the U.S.S.R., where I uncovered a great deal of new
information that is appearing for the first time in this book. The
generosity and erudition of the staff at the Central State Archives of
Literature and Art in Moscow made the many hours I spent there
rewarding and memorable. I am also grateful to the staff of the
manuscript division of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library in Leningrad,
and to the many Soviet scholars, librarians, musicians and friends
who eagerly shared with me their personal and musical memories of
a man they obviously adored.
I would also like to acknowledge the help of the following
institutions: Boosey and Hawkes Music Publishers, Ltd.; the British
Museum; the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris — particularly the music
Division and the Library of the Paris Opera; Houghton Library of
Harvard University; the Music Division of the Library of Congress;
and the Slavonic Division and the Lincoln Center Library of the
Performing Arts of the New York Public Library. My work was aided
by generous and much appreciated grants from the International
Research and Exchanges Board, the Fulbright-Hayes Program, the
State University of New York Research Foundation and the American
Council of Learned Societies.
While it would take many pages to list all those individuals who
provided help and encouragement along the way, I would like to
extend special thanks to Simon Karlinsky, Robert Hughes, Malcolm
Brown, Michael Heim, Phillip Ramey, Edmund White, Jeff Langley,
Ming Tcherepnin, Pyotr Souchinsky, the late Boris Schwarz, and to
the surviving members of Prokofiev’s immediate family: Mme. Lina
Llubera-Prokofiev, Oleg Prokofiev and Sviatoslav Prokofiev. I must
also thank the members of the Biography Seminar of the New York
Institute for the Humanities, who offered support, criticism and a
sense of humor at a crucial stage in my work. Maxine Groffsky, my
resilient agent, provided advice and energy in formulating the
project. With their intelligence and enthusiasm, my subtle editor,
Amanda Vaill, and her efficient assistant, Giovanni Favretti, made the
job of putting it together not only an education but an adventure.

Two final notes involve problems that are the curse of those who
write about Russia in languages other than Russian. The first is
transliteration. In the body of the text, I have chosen to use
popularly accepted spellings of Russian names (e.g., Prokofiev, not
Prokof’ev) and places, rather than transliterating according to the
scholarly Library of Congress system. Where there were several
possible popular spellings (as in the case of Koussevitsky), I have
made an arbitrary choice. In the notes and bibliography, however, I
have employed the Library of Congress system. If I have erred, it is
on the side of accessibility and readability, and I happily accept that
responsibility.
The second is dating. The Western calendar was adopted in the
U.S.S.R. in 1918. In the nineteenth century, the Russian calendar
(commonly referred to as Old Style) lagged behind the Western
calendar (New Style) by twelve days, and in the twentieth century
(until 1918) by thirteen days. In the interest of authenticity, I have
chosen to use Old Style dates in Part I, since it is set for the most
part in Russia and ends in early 1918. In those sections of Part I
which take place in Europe, however, I have used New Style dates.
In other words, when in Russia, Old Style; when in Europe, New
Style. Don’t despair: where there is potential for confusion, I have
provided both.
All translations from the Russian and French are mine unless
indicated.

Brooklyn, New York

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Ruth and I stood on the front porch for awhile in the moonlight,
gazing out over our once-peaceful little world.
"Harry, what will become of him?"
"I don't know.... He'll have to decide for himself. He became a man
tonight, you know. I'd like him to stay, but I imagine he'll want to go to
Earth. He's got a mind that just won't stop. The best thing we can do
is try to teach him the things he'll need to survive in that cock-eyed
world, and turn him loose. It's no good trying to hang onto your kids
once they're grown up, Mommy."
She shivered a little and moved closer to me. "I suppose you're right.
I think I know now why mothers hate to see their children grow up."
I put my arm around her and gave her an affectionate squeeze. "He'll
be all right.... You know, in a way I'm almost glad this happened.
Maybe—just maybe—Adam has given us the answer. Maybe the
thing to do is not to keep them Kids all their lives, but to let them
grow up more slowly, in their own time instead of to some prescribed
formula. The world has kept getting more complicated all the time,
and a kid just can't grow up in it as easily as before."
When we were in bed, just before I put out the light, I said, "I guess I
can answer your question now, Mommy. I don't still think these
twenty years were wasted. If I had it to do over again, I'd still want to
be Daddy of Fairyland."

CHAPTER V
The next morning at breakfast time I went upstairs and knocked on
the door of Adam's room. He called to me to come in and I opened
the door then stopped, one foot over the threshold.
Across the room, admiring his bewhiskered face in the mirror, was
Santa Claus!
"Ho-ho-ho!" he boomed, in a perfect imitation of my own Santa-
voice. "Merry Christmas, Daddy!" He tugged at the beard and there
was the grinning face of Adam-Two. "I found it in the closet," he said.
"Do I look the part?"
I laughed. "For a minute I thought you were the real thing."
He looked away. "I—I guess you know I'll want to go to Earth to live."
I nodded. "It will be pretty rough at first. You realize that?"
"Yes, I expect it will.... Daddy, I'm sorry I messed up Christmas for
the Kids yesterday. I'd kind of like to make up for it by playing Santa
for them today. Will you stand by me in case some smarty-pants tries
to snatch my beard off?"
I grinned at him, but I didn't say anything because I discovered there
was a strange kind of lump in my throat.
"I was thinking, too," he went on, "that maybe I could come back with
the supply ship each Christmas and—and do the same thing, if you'd
like me to."
I cleared my throat. "That—that would be fine, Adam."
He hesitated again, then blurted, "It isn't right, you know. Fairyland, I
mean. It isn't fair to kids not to let them grow up. And it isn't the
answer to all the things you told me are wrong about the world."
"I know, Adam. I know."
"Sooner or later they'll realize that, on Earth."
"I think they already have," I said.
He scratched his chin under the beard. "Then some day they might
decide to close Fairyland, mightn't they? So I was thinking, maybe
each Christmastime you and Mommy could choose two or three of
the older Kids and sort of get them ready for the world. The way you
did me. Then I could take them back to Earth with me, and help them
get started. You could tell the other Kids they went to live with Santa
Claus."
I stared at him in amazement. This—this Kid, I couldn't think of him
any other way—yesterday had been little more than a juvenile
delinquent. Today he was a mature, thinking adult who in a few
sparse words had provided the answer to the question that had been
gnawing at me for two weeks: what was to become of Fairyland?
I felt the way a father must feel when he suddenly realizes his boy
has grown up, and has turned out all right. Kind of proud, and more
than a little grateful.
I gripped Adam's hand. "Son, you've got yourself a deal! Come along
and let's surprise the Kids!"
We went down the stairs arm in arm, and I called to Ruth: "Hey,
Mommy! Guess what. There really is a Santa Claus, after all!"
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAIRYLAND
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