AFTER. THE MUSIC PURGE
845
he was naturally held responsible for whatever protection the "for–
malists" had enjoyed prior to their denunciation. A first offender,
and a convinced Bolshevik from the periphery of the Union
(Ar–
menia), he represents to the Politburo the achievements of a national–
culture policy dear to its initiator Stalin. Of all the purged six, he
has been the most played since his purge. As a Party member, he
has continued, moreover, to serve on Union subcommittees.
If
Katchaturian appears now as on his way out of trouble, Pro–
kofiev seems to be in no such position. Not a product of Soviet culture
but of pre-revolutionary Russia, a traveled man long resident in such
centers of "bourgeois corruption" as Paris and the U.S.A., an asso–
ciate of the Russian emigre enterprise, Serge de Diaghilev's Ballet
Russe, and a resident of the Soviet Union only since 1933, this com–
poser is being referred to more and more in the Soviet press as an
incorrigible case. The recently deceased Boris Asafiev, Acting President
of the Composers' Union (Stalin being of course Honorary Pres–
ident), also Khrennikov and Marion Koval, editor of
Sovietskaya
Muzyka
and a party-line whip, have all denounced him. Consistently
and, one surmises, deliberately nowadays, his name is linked with
such "servile and corrupt musical business men" as Stravinsky, such
"degenerate, blackguard, anti-Russian lackeys of the Western Bour–
geoisie" as Diaghilev. His latest opera, moreover, composed under
the purge, has been found unacceptable.
The latter, based on a story by Boris Polyevoi and entitled
The
Lite of a Real Person,
deals with a Soviet flier and hero who lost
both legs in the war. In December of last year the conductor Khaikin,
who seems to admire Prokofiev deeply, organized in Leningrad a
public reading of the opera. He apparently overstepped in this case
his prerogatives, for the Leningrad papers scolded him severely, and
Khrennikov called the incident "a fatal one for Prokofiev." Khren–
nikov specified further that "this opera shows that the traditions of
Western modernism have captivated his consciousness." Moreover,
"to him an acute dramatic situation is an end in itself; and the over–
play of naturalistic details seems more important than the creation
of musically truthful and convincing images of a Soviet hero with his
life-asserting, ebullient will and his bold outlook into the future."
Khrennikov also regrets that Prokofiev did not submit the work to
his
comrade-composers for criticism before its unfortunate concert
