Prokofiev, Lina e a Profunda Falta de Caráter do Artista Militante

Novo livro sobre o compositor soviético Sergei Prokofiev e sua esposa Lina. Prokofiev ao lado de Máximo Gorky foi um dos poucos artistas a voltarem a Rússia após o golpe comunista de 1917. Sua vida ilustra de maneira perfeita como pensa e atua um artista esquerdista. Ele migrou para a URSS basicamente porque não conseguia competir na civilização com Rachmaninoff e Stravinsky e pensava que as benesses do novo regime garantiriam uma vida de luxo e privilégios irrestritos. Usou a lógica de que é melhor ser peixe grande em lago pequeno do que ser peixe pequeno em lago grande. Com um bom mau caráter logo que pode Prokovfiev bicou sua esposa Lina que teve que se virar para poder criar os dois filhos antes de ser mandada para um Gulag onde vegetou por oito anos. Enquanto isso Prokofiev vivia com uma vadia 20 anos mais nova do que ele. Lina’s life began to unravel almost as soon as they returned to Moscow. Their marriage had staggered on in part because Sergei was almost always travelling. Once they were forced to live together without a break, he found companionship elsewhere with a young woman half his age called Mira Abramovna Mendelson. She was the daughter of two party apparatchiks and a student at the prestigious Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow. There was nothing especially interesting about the girl, as Lina discovered during her jealous investigations. But Mira did enjoy one advantage over her rival: she had no interest or desire other than to devote herself entirely to Prokofiev. Lina tried every possible trick to keep Sergei within the family fold but Mira turned out to be the more ruthless of the two. Whenever Prokofiev appeared to be wavering in favour of his wife, Mira would threaten to kill herself unless he immediately returned. The couple began cohabitating in 1941 when he was 47 and she was 23. Lina was left in an appalling predicament. She was a 44-year-old mother with two adolescent sons and no obvious means of support in a city that was under intense aerial bombardment. Prokofiev and Mira had been evacuated, along with the city’s other prominent artists, to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan.