G.S.. Smith : Prokofiev in his own words

Review of Sergei Prokofiev, Diaries Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (Faber), at TLS (18.06.2008 Issue) :

Sergei Prokofiev is known best as a magnificent musician. As his persistent gravitation towards music with words might suggest, though, he was also a talented and dedicated writer, in particular a diarist. Fortunately he was not a compulsive one. For nearly thirty years, he wrote down what happened to him and what he felt about it when he thought these matters worth recording, clearly with an eye (or rather, in his case, ear) tuned to posterity and the scrutiny of strangers. His entries seem to have been made not daily, but in extended sequences; if he left the diary aside for a while, the next time he picked up his pen he explained why. More important than this judiciousness is the sensitive literary intelligence he brought to his writing. Except for one short sequence in 1914 and then something of a fizzling out at the end of 1923, far from being aide-memoire jottings of dates, people and places, Prokofiev’s diaries offer carefully wrought, polished narrative prose, put together with a sense of pitch and timing reminiscent of his best music. And on the whole they bustle along with the same cocky gait; there is occasional high seriousness, and a sense of occasion when the occasion merits, but there is never any pontificating. Obviously, a healthy dose of vanity is required for someone to undertake self-writing on this scale, but Prokofiev also possessed enough self-knowledge to be his own best editor. Pruning would have damaged the integrity of what the author left. Anthony Phillips rises to all the demands made by Prokofiev’s lucid but delicately nuanced Russian. His translation is accurate almost without a lapse, his tone is consistently faithful to the original, and from time to time he pulls out something truly brilliant.