A career in the West

Was Sergey Prokofiev a better diarist than a composer? We embark on this new volume with the 23-year-old enfant terrible living in St Petersburg. We are there during the ten days that shook the world, and although initially unshaken, Prokofiev escaped the turmoil of revolution and in 1918 headed for San Francisco. The following years take us to most of the rest of America, as well as to Paris, London, Barcelona and Tokyo.

Both volumes of diaries — the previous one, Prodigious Youth, covering 1907-1914 — are beautifully presented and meticulously annotated, representing an extraordinary achievement by their translator Anthony Phillips. Although Isaiah Berlin thought Prokofiev ‘the stupidest of the great composers’, on the evidence of these diaries, full of tantalising vignettes and aperçus, he comes across as highly intelligent. But a great composer? He was accomplished, proficient, skilful and galvanised; and doubtless would have agreed with Baudelaire that intoxication was the secret.