NATASHA

According to Berberova, Prokofiev had been heard to say on more than one occasion: 'There is no room for me here while Rachmaninov is alive, and he will live another ten or fifteen years. Europe is not enough for me and I do not wish to be second in America.'¹²⁶

In 1920 Prokofiev left New York and settled in Paris. But with Stravinsky already ensconced there, the French capital was even harder for Prokofiev to conquer. The patronage of Diaghilev was all-important in Paris - and Stravinsky was the impresario's 'favourite son'. Prokofiev liked to write for the opera, an interest that stemmed from his love for setting Russian novels to music: War and Peace, Dostoevsky's Gambler and Briusov's Fiery Angel were all turned into operas by him. But Diaghilev had famously declared that the opera was an art form that was 'out of date'.¹²⁷ The Ballets Russes had been founded on the search for a non-verbal synthesis of the arts - dance, mime and music and the visual arts but not literature. Stravinsky, by contrast, was committed to the ballet, an art form that enjoyed enormous kudos in the West as quintessentially 'Russian'. Encouraged by Diaghilev, Prokofiev composed the music for three ballets in the 1920s. The Buffoon (1921) was a moderate success - though it rankled with Stravinsky, who subsequently plotted to turn the arbiters of musical taste in Paris (Nadia Boulanger, Poulenc and Les Six) against Prokofiev. The second, The Steel Step (1927), which handled Soviet themes, was denounced by the Paris emigres as 'Kremlin propaganda', though in fact its idea was Diaghilev's. Only the last of Prokofiev's ballets, The Prodigal Son (1929), was an unqualified success. Its theme was close to the composer's heart.

Prokofiev became a lonely figure in Paris. He had a small circle of Russian friends which included the composer Nicolas Nabokov, the conductor Sergei Koussevitsky and the poet Konstantin Balmont. For seven years he laboured on his opera The Fiery Angel (1927), a work he always thought of as his masterpiece but which he never saw performed. Its central theme - the unconquerable divide between two worlds - spoke in many ways of his own separation from Russia.

Isolated from the emigre community in Paris, Prokofiev began to develop contacts with the Soviet musical establishment. In 1927 he accepted an invitation from the Kremlin to make a concert tour of the Soviet Union. On his return to Petersburg he was overcome by emotion. 'I had somehow managed to forget what Petersburg was really like', he recorded in his diary of the trip. 'I had begun to think that its European charm would pale in comparison with the West and that, on the contrary, Moscow was something unique. Now, however, the grandeur of the city took my breath away.'¹²⁸ The lavish production of his Love for Three Oranges (1919) in the Marinsky Theatre made him feel that he had at last been recognized as Russia's greatest living composer. The Soviet authorities pulled out all the stops to lure him back for good. Lunacharsky, the commissar of culture who had allowed him to go abroad in 1917 ('You are a revolutionary in music, we are revolutionaries in life… I shall not stop you'),¹²⁹ now tried to persuade the composer to return to Soviet Russia by citing Mayakov-sky's famous open 'Letter-Poem' to Gorky (1927), in which he had asked him why he lived in Italy when there was so much work to do in Russia. Mayakovsky was an old acquaintance of Prokofiev; on the eve of Prokofiev's departure for America Mayakovsky had dedicated a volume of his poems 'To the World President of Music from the World President of Poetry: to Prokofiev'. Another of his old friends, the avant-garde director Meyerhold, talked enthusiastically of new collaborations to realize the Russian classics on the stage. Missing these old allies was a crucial factor in Prokofiev's decision to return. 'Foreign company does not inspire me', he confessed in 1933,

because I am a Russian, and that is to say the least suited of men to be an exile, to remain myself in a psychological climate that isn't of my race. My compatriots and I carry our country about with us. Not all of it, but just enough for it to be faintly painful at first, then increasingly so, until at last it breaks us down altogether… I've got to live myself back into the atmosphere of my homeland. I've got to see real winters again, and springs that burst into being from one moment to the next. I've got to hear the Russian language echoing in my ears. I've got to talk to people who are my own flesh and blood, so that they can give me something I lack here - their songs - my songs.¹³⁰

From 1932. Prokofiev began to spend half the year in Moscow; four years later he moved his wife and two sons there for good. He was afforded every luxury - a spacious apartment in Moscow with his own furniture imported from Paris and the freedom to travel to the West (at a time when Soviet citizens were despatched to the gulag for ever having spoken to a foreigner). With his uncanny talent for writing tunes, Prokofiev was commissioned to compose numerous scores for the Soviet stage and screen, including his Lieutenant Kije suite (1934) and Romeo and Juliet (1935-6). Prizes followed - he was awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize on no less than five occasions between 1942 and 1949 - and even though he knew that they were window-dressing, he was flattered by the recognition of his native land.

Still, in spite of all the accolades, Prokofiev's working life at home became steadily more difficult. Attacked as a 'formalist' in the campaign which began, in 1936, with the suppression of Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Prokofiev retreated by turning his attention to music for the young: Peter and the Wolf (1936) is a product (and perhaps an allegory) of the Terror years (the hunt for the wolf has overtones of the assault on the 'enemies of the people'). Many of his more experimental works remained unperformed: the huge Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution (1937); the music for Meyerhold's 1937 Pushkin centenary production of Boris Godunov; even the opera War and Peace was not staged in Russia (in its final version) until 1959. After 1948, when Zhdanov renewed the Stalinist assault against the 'formalists', nearly all the music which Prokofiev had written in Paris and New York was banned from the Soviet concert repertory.

Prokofiev spent his last years in virtual seclusion. Like Shostakovich, he turned increasingly to the intimate domain of chamber music, where he could find expression for his private sadness. The most moving of all these works is the Violin Sonata in D Major (ironically awarded the Stalin Prize in 1947). Prokofiev told the violinist David Oistrakh that its haunting opening movement was meant to sound 'like the wind in a graveyard'.¹³¹ Oistrakh played the sonata at Prokofiev's funeral, a sad affair that was scarcely noticed by the Soviet public. Stalin had died on the same day as Prokofiev, 5 March 1953. There were no flowers left to buy, so a single pine branch was placed on the composer's grave.

Tsvetaeva returned to live with Efron and their son and daughter in a dacha near Moscow in 1939. Having hoped to rediscover the sort of writers' circles that she had left behind nearly twenty years before, it was a shock to find herself almost completely isolated on her return to Russia. As Nadezhda Mandelstam recalled, under Stalin 'it had become a matter of second nature to ignore people who had returned from the West'.¹³² Everything about Tsvetaeva made her dangerous to know -or be seen to know. She seemed alien and outmoded, a figure of the past, from another world. Few people recalled her poetry.

Two months after their return, Tsvetaeva's daughter Alya was arrested and accused of spying for the Western powers in league with the Trotskyites. Shortly after, they arrested Efron as well. Tsvetaeva joined the women in the prison queues whose dreadful burden was recorded by Akhmatova. Tsvetaeva never saw her husband or daughter again. She did not even find out what had become of them. * With her son, she was taken in by Efron's sister in Moscow. Thin and exhausted, her face grey and colourless, she scraped a living by translating poetry. Finally, after Pasternak had come to her aid, she moved to a village near the writers' colony at Golitsyno, on the road between Moscow and Minsk, where she found a job as a dishwasher and was allowed to take her meals. Some of the older writers there still recalled her poetry and treated her with a respect bordering on awe. But from the viewpoint of official Soviet literature Tsvetaeva had ceased to exist long ago. Her last book in Russia had been published in 1922 - and in the climate of 1939 there was very little chance that her poems would be published there again. She submitted a collection of her verse to the state publishers in 1940, but instead of her more patriotic or civic verse she chose to include many of her poems from the period when Efron was fighting for the Whites. Unsurprisingly, the collection was turned down as anti-Soviet. It was typical of Tsvetaeva's wilful refusal to compromise. She was incapable of reining herself in, even if at the risk of disaster for herself. She could not come to terms with the age in which she was compelled to live.

Shortly before she left France, Tsvetaeva had told a friend that, if she could not write in the Soviet Union, she would kill herself.

* Alya served eight years in a labour camp. Efron was shot in 1941.

Tsvetaeva was increasingly fixated on the idea of her suicide. She had often used it as a threat. After 1940 she wrote little verse, and the few lines that she wrote were full of death:

It's time to take off the amber, It's time to change the language, It's time to extinguish the lantern Above the