‘I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nevertheless and not by truth,’ Stravinsky told Robert Craft.1 There are modernist writers – Proust, Nabokov – who see childhood joys as a vital stimulus to art. For Jean-Paul Sartre, on the other hand, it was recollected disgust that shaped the adult self: ‘I loathe my childhood and all that survives of it’.2 Stravinsky’s relations with his early life lay somewhere midway. In Chroniques de ma vie and his late conversations with Robert Craft he underlined the importance of the sound environment in which he grew up and his early exposure to professional music making. Yet he also stressed the emotional, aesthetic and psychological distance between that early world, where the values of his parents and teachers prevailed, and his own adult self. He constantly emphasised, too, his solitude, with just his brother Guri and his German nurse, Bertha Essert, as soulmates in the family apartment on Kryukov Canal, and few companions and friends beyond.