1 Asked by his friend Vladimir Dukel'skiy (Vernon Duke) ‘how he could live and work in the atmosphere of Soviet totalitarianism’, Prokofiev replied: ‘“Here is how I feel about it: I care nothing for politics – I'm a composer first and last. Any government that lets me write my music in peace, publishes everything I compose before the ink is dry, and performs every note that comes from my pen is all right with me. In Europe we all have to fish for performances, cajole conductors and theater directors; in Russia they come to me – I can hardly keep up with the demand. What's more, I have a comfortable flat in Moscow, a delightful datcha in the country and a brand-new car.”’ Duke, Vernon, Passport to Paris (Boston and Toronto, 1955), 344–345Google Scholar .

2 Prokofiev's published statements are collected in Prokof'yev o Prokof'yeve: stat'i i interv'yu, ed. Viktor P. Varunts (Moscow, 1991). See, for example, 87, 89, 90–91, 101, 127–29, 139.

3 These were statements he made in connection with the composition of his opera The Love for Three Oranges (1919). Prokofiev, Sergey, Diaries 1915–1923: Behind the Mask, trans. and ed. Phillips, Anthony (Ithaca, 2008), 369Google Scholar .

4 Prokof'yev, Sergey and Alpers, Vera Vladimirovna, ‘Perepiska’, in Muzïkal'noye nasledstvo: Sborniki po istorii muzïkal'noy kul'turï SSSR, ed. Bernandt, G. B., Kiselyov, V. A. and Pekelis, M. S. (Moscow, 1962), I, 432Google Scholar .

5 Hauptman, Ira, ‘Defending Melodrama’, in Melodrama, ed. Redmond, James (Cambridge, 1992), 287Google Scholar .

6 Born with the French Revolution, classic melodrama belongs to a modern state in which autocratic institutions and sacred beliefs have been overthrown, where there thus exists the need to re-establish moral boundaries. Intended for a popular audience, it spread from France to the rest of Europe (and to Russia), was exported to America, became the basis for silent film, and has been the default mode of Hollywood cinema ever since. Although in common parlance ‘melodrama’ evokes an outmoded and indeed crude form of expression, it has attracted scholarly attention in recent decades, following Peter Brooks's seminal study The Melodramatic Imagination, which analysed its major features and narrative properties in nineteenth-century literature (The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, 2nd edn (New Haven, 1995); the first edition was published in 1976). Brooks's work provided the foundation for a subsequent re-evaluation of melodrama in the fields of theatre and film, and scholars have since delved more deeply into its performative aspects. See, for example, the chapters in the collection Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook and Christine Gledhill (London, 1994).

7 These two understandings derive from the two traditions and forms of melodrama, the first concert-based and elite (Rousseau, Benda), the second theatre-based and popular (Pixérécourt). Peter Brooks's study, and the scholarship indebted to it, relates to the second form. The post-Brooks interest in melodrama and opera began with Emilio Sala's L'opera senza canto: Il mélo romantico e l'invenzione della colonna sonora (Venice, 1995). Other recent studies have been primarily concerned with nineteenth-century opera, most notably Smart, Mary Ann, Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera (Berkeley, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Jacqueline Waeber, in her work on the concert-based tradition, has accounted for three ways of defining melodrama in music, as a technique, genre and aesthetic. See En musique dans le texte: le mélodrame de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris, 2005). At present there is a move to develop, in line with other fields, a greater understanding of the melodramatic in musical terms, considered across a range of genres and contexts, in instrumental music as well as music for film and theatre, and opera. This was much in evidence, for example, at the international conference ‘Music and the Melodramatic Aesthetic’, held at the University of Nottingham, 5–7 September 2008, from which selected papers will be published, in Melodramatic Voices, ed. Sarah Hibberd (forthcoming, Ashgate).

8 For more details, see Taruskin, Richard, ‘Tone, Style and Form in Prokofiev's Soviet Operas: Some Preliminary Observations’, in Studies in the History of Music, vol. II, Music and Drama (New York, 1988), 215–239Google Scholar , here 223–4.

9 See Cassiday, Julie A., ‘Alcohol is our Enemy! Soviet Temperance Dramas of the 1920s’, in Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia, ed. McReynolds, Louise and Neuberger, Joan (Durham, NC, and London, 2002), 152–177CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Quotations from Lunacharsky promoting melodrama also appear in Daniel Gerould and Julia Przybas, ‘Melodrama in the Soviet Theatre 1917–1928: An Annotated Chronology’, in Melodrama, ed. Gerould (New York, 1980), 78, 82.

10 Meyerhold's allusions to ‘low forms’ of art such as melodrama were typical of (and influential on) wider European modernist practices in the theatre: ‘“Low forms” refers to those popular, sometimes folk, forms that lie outside the field of high art. Through these works’ crudeness, simplicity, emphasis on nonverbal elements, vitality, and naive emotionalism, modernist artists seek a revitalization of the higher forms. They see in them a source of “new blood” not eviscerated by overuse. Throughout Europe, artists turn to farce, melodrama, puppet theater, various European folk traditions (such as the balagan in Russian), and even non-Europeansources, such as Japanese Kabuki and Noh theaters.’ Kot, Joanna, Distance Manipulation: The Russian Modernist Search for a New Drama (Evanston, 2000), 64Google Scholar . A limited survey of references to melodrama by Soviet directors appears in Gerould, and Przybos, , ‘Melodrama in the Soviet Theater 1917–1928: An Annotated Chronology’, 75–92Google Scholar .

11 A systematic description of melodrama's most salient features was first attempted by the Russian formalist writer Sergey Balukhatïy in his essay ‘Poetics of Melodrama'. For Daniel Gerould, writing in 1978 (in the wake of interest generated by Peter Brooks's study), ‘Sergei Balukhatyi's Poetics of Melodrama remains to the present day the most thorough and incisive systematic analysis of the structure and technique of melodrama ever undertaken'. ‘Russian Formalist Theories of Melodrama’, Journal of American Culture, 1/1 (Spring 1978), 152–68, here 154.

12 Cassiday, ‘Alcohol is our Enemy!’, 157–9. On melodrama as a film genre, see Youngblood, Denise J., Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge, 1992), 167–174Google Scholar .

13 See Lars T. Lih, ‘Melodrama and the Myth of the Soviet Union’, in Imitations of Life, 178–207.

14 The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981).

15 William Sharp and Katerina Clark, ‘Structure of Melodrama’, in Melodrama, ed. Redmond, 269–80, here 274.

16 In the words of Cassiday, ‘the institution of socialist realism as the country's sole mode of artistic expression in 1932 canonized the melodramatic mode in all forms of soviet art’. ‘Alcohol is our Enemy!’, 171. For Lih, ‘melodramatic elements lie at the very heart of the constitutive myths of the prewar Soviet Union'. ‘Melodrama and the Myth of the Soviet Union’, 184.

17 Lih, 190.

18 ‘Pushed front and center was a new figure who was very much like the slanderous traître of classical melodrama: the dvurushnik.' Lih, 190.

19 Socialist realism extended to include public discourse (itself a form of fiction in Stalinist Russia), while works by Soviet dramatists ‘are not simply dramatizations of political doctrine, they are accurate expressions of the same narrative myths that energized political doctrine'. Lih, 203.

20 See Brandenberger, David, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA, 2002)Google Scholar .

21 Maksimenkov, Leonid, Sumbur vmesto muzïki: Stalinskaya kul'turnaya revolyutsiya 1936–1938 (Moscow, 1997), 67Google Scholar .

22 In a speech to the Moscow Composers’ Union in April 1937, the chairman of the State Committee for Artistic Affairs (KDI), Platon Kerzhentsev, stated that there were too many operas set during the Civil War, and that it was necessary to use more contemporary subject matter. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), fund 962, list 3, folder 268, 2–3.

23 See Frolova-Walker, Marina, ‘The Soviet Opera Project: Ivan Dzerzhinsky vs. Ivan Susanin’, this journal, 18/2 (2006), 181–216Google Scholar .

24 See Bullock, Philip Ross, ‘Staging Stalinism: The Search for Soviet Opera in the 1930s’, this journal, 18/1 (2006), 83–108Google Scholar .

25 Duke, Passport to Paris, 385. In one of his public statements on the opera, he wrote: ‘This is what attracted me to Valentin Katayev's story, I, Son of the Working People. It combines so many contrasting elements: the love of the young people, the hatred of the representatives of the old world, the heroism of struggle, mourning for the dead and the rich humour characteristic of the Ukrainian people.’ Sergey Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences, ed. Semyon Shlifstein, trans. Rose Prokofieva (Moscow, 1964), 118.

26 The novella was published in 1937 and the play based on it in February 1938, close to the time that Aleksey Tolstoy recommended it to Prokofiev. The first Moscow performance of the play took place on 25 September 1938 (with incidental music by Tikhon Khrennikov). Asecond production followed in Leningrad, 26 December 1938 (titled Shol soldat s fronta, with incidental music by Oles Chishko). In July 1939, a film appeared, Shol soldat s fronta, directed by Vladimir Legoshin. Prokofiev was occupied with the film music for Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky until November 1938, but decided on Katayev's story during the summer of 1938. Early in 1939 he began collaborating with Katayev on the libretto. The first two acts of the opera were completed in piano score by 9 April 1939, and the whole opera on 28 June.

27 It is possible that the novella had been commissioned to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet Union, commemorated in a front-page Pravda editorial: ‘[in] the fire of the Civil War … [w]orkers and peasants of all Soviet people, and most of all Russian workers, helped the Ukrainian people shake off their shoulder the German occupiers, Anglo-French interventionists, Polish invaders, [and] Petlyurist robbers'. ‘Dvadtsat’ let Sovetskoy Ukrainï’, Pravda, 24 December 1937.

28 The story takes place in a rural village in the spring following the signing of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty in February 1918, ending with the departure of German troops later in the year after the signing of the Entente. Ukraine had treaty obligations to provide requisitions to the German army, since the Central Powers were still at war in Western Europe. Young Semyon Kotko returns home after four years of fighting in the tsarist army, hoping to resume a normal village life and marry his sweetheart Sofya. With a new Bolshevik presence in his village, he is assigned property and livestock that had belonged to the former landowning class. But the village is threatened by the incursion of the Germans and their allies in search of supplies. Sofya's father Tkachenko secretly supports the invaders and opposes the revolutionaries, hoping for a reinstatement of the old regime and aiming to enhance his position within it. He objects to the marriage of his daughter to Semyon, and once the foreigners invade the village, Semyon is driven out under threat of murder and Sofya is promised to the son of a former landowner. Exiled villagers form a partisan force, and later in the year recapture their village (supported by the Red Army), leading to the execution of Tkachenko and a happy ending for Semyon and Sofya and their friends, who join Semyon's former battery (now part of the Red Army), having discovered that their personal happiness and the interests of Ukraine coincide with the revolutionary cause. Thus foreign and internal enemies are overcome and Bolshevik power supported and confirmed.

29 Gogol's status was confirmed by a new Marxist interpretation in 1936, followed by positive pronouncements by influential figures, including Stalin himself, in 1937, with Taras Bul'ba singled out as the author's most favoured work. Critics turned Gogol into a realist who had revealed the backwardness and corruption of tsarist Russia. In 1938 a series of articles in Literaturnïy kritik (no. 4) promoted Gogol's patriotic work, particularly Taras Bul'ba. See Robert L. Strong, ‘The Soviet Interpretation of Gogol’, American Slavic and East European Review, 14/4 (December 1955), 528–39. Meanwhile, Mykola Lysenko's classic historical opera Taras Bul'ba (uncompleted at the time of his death in 1912) was produced in a revised version at the Kiev Opera in 1937, and in a second revision in 1939. See Yekelchyk, Serhy, ‘Diktat and Dialogue in Stalinist Culture: Staging Patriotic Historical Opera in Soviet Ukraine, 1936–1954’, Slavic Review, 59/3 (Autumn, 2000), 597–624CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

30 The imitation of Taras is ‘superficial’, in the view of Robert Russell. Valentin Kataev (Boston, 1981), 95.

31 See Skorino, Lyudmila Ivanovna, Pisatel’ i yego vremya: Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo V. P. Katayeva (Moscow, 1965), 299–307Google Scholar . He probably assumed that there would be songs, dances and choruses based directly on the many references to music that he, like Gogol in Dikan'ka, had included in his text.

32 Like their literary counterparts Pushkin and Gogol, these composers of the Russian national past were receiving lavish attention from the mid-1930s; their music was praised especially for their use of folk materials. See for example, in Tsukkerman, V., ‘Rimskiy-Korsakov i narodnaya muzïka’, Sovetskaya muzïka, 10–11 (1938), 104–127Google Scholar , and Sovetskaya muzïka, 4 (1939) (Musorgsky edition).

33 The three young pairs in Tchaikovsky's Cherevichki, Rimsky-Korsakov's May Night and Musorgsky's Sorochintsï Fair respectively.

34 Both composers set new texts. The original ‘Oh, don't frighten my little heart’ (‘Oy, ne pugay, pugachen'ko’) is from the Rubets's collection of Ukrainian folk songs, Dvesti shestnadtsat’ ukrainskikh napevov zapisal i izdal A. I. Rubets (Moscow, 1872).

35 This was Musorgsky's solution to the problem of creating ‘authentic’ music for the Ukrainian peasant characters. On this point and for an authoritative discussion of the Little Russian comedy in general, see Taruskin, Richard, ‘Sorochintsï Fair Revisited’, in Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton, 1993), 328–394Google Scholar . Also useful on this topic is Gozenpud, Abram Akimovich, ‘Gogol’ v muzïke’, in Izbrannïye stat'i (Leningrad, 1971), 28–63Google Scholar .

36 ‘Pure’ modes are rare in Prokofiev's music, but can be heard also in his incidental music and film music to suggest the archaic, exotic or rustic, for example ancient Egypt, medieval Rus or indeed Ukraine – in the ballet On the Dnieper, op. 51 (1931–2).

37 It is heard most conspicuously in Semyon's flute melody (6), Frosya's entrance theme (27), Sofya and Semyon's duet (62), Tsaryov's accordion tune (77), Semyon's narration (86), the two matchmaking choruses in Act II (151 and 162) and the Nocturne at the beginning of Act III (224). This motif (in the form ) is familiar from many Russian melodies in folk, popular and art music. In all the opera's references to folk music Prokofiev was surely aided by his own experiences of authentic music making during his childhood in rural Ukraine.

38 Both are self-revealing statements that recall the signature tune of stage melodrama in which motivations are set out upon first appearances.

39 Throughout the opera, A flat is related to a pastoral Ukraine, and B minor (as in Alexander Nevsky and War and Peace) to the conflict with enemy forces. For more details on key associations in the opera, see Sabinina, Marina Dmitriyevna, ‘Semyon Kotko’ i problemï opernoy dramaturgii Prokof'yeva (Moscow, 1963), 247–249Google Scholar .

40 Taruskin and others have pointed out how the interruption of the engagement ceremony recalls Act III of Ivan Susanin, dramatically and musically. ‘Tone, Style, and Form in Prokofiev's Soviet Operas’, 224. The similarity is undeniable, although there is an important difference too, relevant to the present argument: in Susanin the invasion is prepared by the many references to the conflict with the Poles in Act I, and a second act devoted to a representation of their court and preparations for action; their arrival in Act III is thus not unexpected. Both Sigrid Neef and Walter Zidaric make comparisons to Susanin, and also to Boris Godunov and Prince Igor, in the apparent belief that this is an epic opera. See their chapters ‘“… allem widerstehen, was nicht Geist bedeutet”. Prokofjew und die Sowjetmacht’, 1–59 (here 20–2), and ‘“Siméon Kotko” – le premier opéra soviétique de Prokofiev’, 199–213 (here 205–6), in Sergej Prokofjew in der Sowjetunion: Verstrickungen – Miβverständnisse – Katastrophen: Ein internationales Symposium, ed. Ernst Kuhn (Berlin, 2004).

41 Sabinina, ‘Semyon Kotko’, 105–6. She makes reference to V. Tsukkerman, who had suggested during the opera's immediate reception that the work is both tragic and comic. ‘Neskol'ko mïsley o sovetskoy opere’, Sovetskaya muzïka, (December 1940), 66–78, here 68–9.

42 ‘Melodrama rarely maintains a single dramatic tone, but alternates the comic in situation, character, and speech with the intensely tragic.’ Sergey Balukhatïy, quoted in Gerould, ‘Russian Formalist Theories of Melodrama’, 157.

43 The setting and ambience of Act I compares with the enclosed garden or rural scene of the first act in classic melodrama, which then ‘moves from the presentation of virtue-as-innocence to the introduction of menace or obstacle'. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 30–31.

44 Music that is representative of movement can of course be heard in Prokofiev's other operas, but in Kotko it is pervasive, fundamental to the style, and the actor-singers are explicitly required to move and gesture along with it.

45 Nest'yev argues that this is the first opera of Prokofiev to include ‘human’ qualities. ‘“Semyon Kotko” S. Prokof'yeva’, 8. Robinson calls the characters ‘realistic’, and states that this is in contrast to Meyerhold's practice. ‘Love for Three Operas: The Collaboration of Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Prokofiev’, Russian Review, 45 (1986), 287–304, here 303.

46 Sabinina claims that with this opera there ‘begins a new period of Prokofiev's operatic work, a period that is characterised by conscious striving towards realism'. ‘Semyon Kotko’, 284.

47 Sabinina, 272–4.

48 Sabinina, 274. While it is true that by the end of his career Stanislavsky also gave greater attention to physical action, this was both limited and remained in the service of his ideal of representing psychological states, which, indeed, is how Sabinina understands the function of gesture in Kotko.

49 Sabinina mentions Meyerhold only in passing (270), and admits that there is a great deal of research yet to do on his collaboration with Prokofiev (this remains true today). At the time that she wrote (1960), Meyerhold's rehabilitation had only recently begun (from 1955), so this may have been a factor in her reluctance to acknowledge his involvement.

50 This also applies to the stage design by Tïshler, which brings together realistic and stylised, figurative folk motifs. The sketches show a rural scene surrounded by a ‘basket’ effect, a decorative frame for the scene by a drop curtain at the front of the stage forming a ring of straw, and wood at the bottom. For reproductions of sketches for the set designs see Meyerkhol'd i khudozhniki, ed. Alla A. Mikhailova (Moscow, 1995), 286–7. For Act II, the staging featured a cross-section of a hut, revealing both the main room and Sofya's bedroom. Tkachenko, his wife Khivrya, and the workman are on the left, Sonya on the right, and characters move back and forth. The split stage is very similar to the double action in a matchmaking scene in the film Merchant Bashkirov's Daughter (Doch’ kuptsa Bashkirova), alternative title Drama on the Volga (Drama no Volge), dir. Nikolay Larin, 1913, a film that has been described as ‘the most sensational rural melodrama of the time'. Alyssa DeBlasio, ‘Choreographing Space, Time, and Dikovinki in the Films of Evgenii Bauer’, The Russian Review, 66 (October 2007), 671–92, here 682.

51 As Robert Leach points out, ‘by the early 1920s Meyerhold had discovered and utilized virtually every device of the theatre we now associate with Weimar Germany, especially with Piscator and Brecht … in every case the Russian preceded the German by years'. Vsevolod Meyerhold, Directors in Perspective (Cambridge, 1989), 170.

52 Meyerhold was impressed with Prokofiev's first opera The Gambler (1917), believing that it would ‘overturn the entire art of opera’ (Prokofiev, Diaries 1915–1923: Behind the Mask, 141), and assisted with its subsequent revisions; he suggested the topic for the next, Love for Three Oranges, which achieved some of his modernist objectives (see Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music [Oxford, 2005], IV, 499); he made plans (subsequently unrealised) to produce all three of Prokofiev's earlier operas in the Soviet Union; and he commissioned incidental music from him for a production of Pushkin's Boris Godunov. The following are useful sources for the history of collaboration between Prokofiev and Meyerhold: Prokof'yev, Sergey, ‘Pis'ma k V. E. Meyerkhol'du’, Muzïkal'noye nasledstvo, ed. Kirilenko, K. and Kozlova, M., ii/2 (Moscow, 1968), 214–243Google Scholar ; Glikman, Isaak, Meyerkhol'd i muzïkal'niye teatr (Leningrad, 1989), 309–350Google Scholar ; Fevral'skiy, Aleksandr, ‘Prokof'yev i Meierkhol'd’, in Sergey Prokof'yev: Stat'i i materialï, ed. Nest'yev, I. V. and Edel'man, G. Ya., 2nd edn (Moscow, 1965), 94–120Google Scholar ; and Medvedeva, Irina, ‘“Chornoye leto” 1939 goda’, in Sergey Prokof'yev: Vospominaniya. Pis'ma, Stat'i, ed. Rakhmanova, M. P. (Moscow, 2004), 317–366, here 323–7Google Scholar .

53 ‘Meyerhold not only passionately supported the idea of writing an opera on this novella, but gave his agreement to produce it on the stage of the Stanislavsky Theatre and took up active participation in its creation. Katayev recalled that the three of them frequently met at Prokofiev's apartment to discuss the libretto and the music. As a result of these meetings the future work's content was deepened and its innovative form determined.’ Fevral'skiy, ‘Prokof'yev i Meyerkhol'd’, 118, quoting from Kristi, G., ‘Stanislavskiy i Meyerkhol'd’, Oktyabr', 3 (1963), 185Google Scholar .

54 One of Meyerhold's ambitions throughout his career was the reform of opera. Writing in 1925, he expressed his ideal of a singer-actor who would be easily audible to the audience without undue vocal exertion, thanks to a light and transparent orchestration that would be the opposite of the Wagnerian orchestra, highlighting the winds over strings and brass – very similar to what we have encountered in Act I of Kotko. Gladkov, Aleksandr, Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses, trans. and ed. Law, Alma (Amsterdam, 1997), 156–157Google Scholar . In 1929, Ivan Sollertinsky, with his friend Shostakovich's The Nose in mind (which had been inspired by and created under the guidance of Meyerhold – see Laurel Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford, 2000), 45–6), had recommended that Soviet opera should follow Meyerhold's methods (though not as specifically realised in The Nose), including ‘the use of both speech and song, perhaps even Sprechstimme, and the rejection of the large operatic orchestra’ (quoted in Frolova-Walker, ‘The Soviet Opera Project’, 186). In comparison with Prokofiev's previous operas, the expanded range of vocal techniques in Kotko, including spoken dialogue, suggests the influence of Meyerhold, while it also bears a comparison to the concert form of melodrama, recitation with musical accompaniment.

55 ‘There are peculiarities of my work that distinguish it from other theatres. This is the reintroduction into theatre of forgotten elements.’ Meyerkhol'd: k istorii tvorcheskogo metoda. Publikatsii Stat'i, ed. N. V. Pesochinskiy and E. A. Kukhta (St. Petersburg, 1998), 69.

56 In 1925, he made a statement in support of melodrama during a speech on his production of Aleskey Fayko's Uchitel’ Bubus: ‘A reconsideration of the basic principles of theatre is taking place on our dramatic stage, and that trend towards melodrama which has appeared in recent times, in the revolutionary period, this trend has a lot of justification. We cultivate melodrama not in the way that Vadim Shershenevich has or anyone else who brings the mechanical devices of melodrama onto the stage because melodrama is always a success. We do it not for that purpose, but because humanity itself requires from the theatre that in the theatre operate all the elements to which the theatre has been accustomed since ancient times. In the theatre there always needed to be musical accompaniment and dance.’ In ‘“Uchitel’ Bubus” i problema spektaklya na muzïke (Doklad, prochitannïy 1 janvarya 1925 g.)’, in Vsevolod Meyerhold, Stat'i, pis'ma, rechi, besedï (Moscow, 1968), II, 76. Jonathan Pitches describes ‘the essence of the genre Meyerhold wanted – the mix of tragedy and comedy, melodrama and farce'. In Meyerhold's use of music, ‘he was again distancing himself from the naturalistic theatre and marking his allegiance to the popular theatre – the theatre of the music hall, of melodrama, of circus and pantomime'. Vsevolod Meyerhold (London, 2003), 103, 54.

57 Vsevolod Meyerhold Meyerhold on Theatre, trans. and ed. Edward Braun (London, 1969), 147.

58 The director was persecuted for many years, and any evidence of ‘Meyerholditis’ in the theatre was strongly condemned. One of the most forceful denunciations was published as ‘An Alien Theatre’, Pravda, 17 December 1937. The resolution by the KDI of 7 January 1938 shutting down his theatre appeared in Pravda, 8 January 1938. Meyerhold was also one of the main targets in the attack on Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth in 1936.

59 See the comments by Mary Ann Smart, who uses the evidence of scores to read gesture into opera performance. Mimomania, 5.

60 Preserved as ‘Zamechaniya na repetitsiyakh operï “Semyon Kotko” vo vremya postanovki yeyo v Gosudarstvennom opernom teatre im. K. S. Stanislavskogo. Avtograf. 22 Fevralya– 22 Marta 1940.’ RGALI, fund 1929, list 1, folder 15.

61 23 February, 29 February and 22 March respectively.

62 In his own words: ‘For the spectator, every scenic movement, every stage gesture, is an algebraic sign, and he must know why it is made'. Meyerkhol'd: k istorii tvorcheskogo metoda, 67.

63 My argument draws mainly from the two most thorough descriptions of the core properties of stage melodrama, Brooks and Balukhatïy. According to Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger, ‘Peter Brooks's conceptualization of the genre's prescriptive functions applies to Russian melodramas of every type and period'. ‘Introduction’, Imitations of Life, 11.

64 The music of the German soldiers stands for ‘evil’ in a much more immediate way than did the religious chant of their ancestors in Nevsky, or the dance rhythms of the Polish enemy in Susanin.

65 RGALI, fund 1929, list 1, folder 15. 29 February.

66 In Tchaikovsky's opera, Vakula's words are: ‘Who knows, my girl, if your heart can feel my pain, my terrible pain'.

67 See Balukhatïy, quoted in Gerould, ‘Russian Formalist Theories of Melodrama’, 155–7 and 160, and Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 35–6.

68 Anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist troops under Petlyura.

69 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 44.

70 Brooks, 36.

71 RGALI, fund 1929, list 1, folder 15.

72 The theme from Act II, scene 10 is here blared by the brass in hammering chords.

73 Katayev describes trumpets in the novel.

74 Daniel Albright singles out Lyubka's motif as an example of ‘a hieroglyph: an affect icon’, a description that supports the present argument about visual symbolism in the opera rather than psychological expression. Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago, 2000), 57–62.

75 See Brooks, Peter, ‘Body and Voice in Melodrama and Opera’, in Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, ed. Smart, Mary Ann (Princeton, 2000), 118–134Google Scholar , here 120. There was of course a tradition of madwomen on the operatic stage, particularly in Italian opera of the early nineteenth century.

76 As he stated in a speech to the Stanislavsky opera troupe. Meyerkhol'd, Stat'i, pis'ma, rechi, besedï.

77 Balukhatïy, quoted in Gerould, ‘Russian Formalist Theories of Melodrama’, 155.

78 Here the theme directly recalls ‘Russia under the Mongol yoke’ from Nevsky (an obvious historical parallel) in its texture of winds four octaves apart.

79 On the bandura, see Lutsiv, Volodymyr, ‘Kobza-Bandura and “Dumy” and their Significance in the History of the Ukrainian People’, Ukrainian Quarterly, 13/1 (Spring 1966)Google Scholar and Kononenko, Natalie, Ukrainian Minstrels and the Blind Shall Sing (New York, 1998)Google Scholar .

80 Meyerhold wanted Semyon to be tied to a telegraph pole and to resemble an image of Saint Sebastian (a symbol of martyrdom). See Medvedeva, ‘“Chornoye leto” 1939 goda’, 321. The sketch for Act V can be seen in Meyerkhol'd i khudozhniki, 287.

81 The method of execution of those condemned in the show trials of the late 1930s.

82 Overall there has been ‘an uninterruptedly “unhappy” line of development for the chief character until the denouement with its final “happy” reversal'. Balukhatïy, quoted in Gerould, ‘Russian Formalist Theories of Melodrama’, 155.

83 Gerald Abraham, ed., The New Grove Russian Masters 2: Rimsky-Korsakov, Skryabin, Rakhmaninov, Prokofiev, Shostakovich (London, 1986), 150.

84 This was probably partly due to a poor performance. According to Grigoriy Shneyerson, ‘K sozhaleniyu, spektakl’ okazalsya daleko ne na vïsote proizvedeniyem Prokof'yeva'. Sergey Prokof'yev: Stat'i i materialï, 266.

85 RGALI, fund 1929, list 2, folder 117, 12–12(reverse). ‘Semyon Kotko. Obrïvki razgovorov na prem'yere 23 June 1940 i posle neyo.’ This document includes Prokofiev's confident responses to some of the questions and criticisms put to him by audience members.

86 Gladkov, Meyerhold Speaks, Meyerhold Rehearses, 165.

87 Semyon Shlifshteyn, ‘Semyon Kotko’, Sovetskoye iskusstvo, 29 June 1940. An earlier review in Vechernyaya Moskva by A. Groman (25 June 1940) also made positive comparisons with Musorgsky, and praised the variety in the opera's construction: ‘The subtle and well considered juxtaposition [sopostavleniye] of lyrical, comic, and tragic scenes imparts a extraordinary vitality to the action'.

88 Izrail’ Nest'yev, ‘“Semyon Kotko” S. Prokof'yeva’.

89 Khubov, Georgiy, ‘Opernïye idealï’, Teatr (December 1940)Google Scholar .

90 On 15 October 1940 the Moscow Union of Composers recommended the opera to the Stalin Prize Committee. RGALI, fund 1929, list 2, folder 620.

91 Tsukkerman, ‘Neskol'ko mïsley o sovetskoy opere’, 74–8.

92 Aleksandrov, A., ‘Muzïka i slovo v opere’, Sovetskaya muzïka (October 1940), 19–23Google Scholar , and Khristiansen, L., ‘Voplotit’ chuvstva sovetskogo cheloveka’, Sovetskaya muzïka (October 1940), 25–27Google Scholar .

93 The production of Kotko experienced a minor hiccup due to the impact of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which had been signed in August 1939, between the completion of composition and the start of rehearsals. Following a discussion about the politically sensitive nature of the opera, uniforms were changed from German to haydamak. However it is unlikely that anyone was fooled by the regime's sudden volte face after years of anti-German propaganda; and as bureaucrats pointed out, the enemy's ‘music remained German’, and could be heard in the opera as such as a subtext (Pokrovskiy, ‘Mozhno, nakonets, dopustit’, chto v eto selo nemtsï ne doshli. No v muzïke yest’ chotkost’ i ritm, ukazïvayushchiye na to, chto eto imenno nemtsï.’ Chichenovskiy, ‘Eto dazhe ne plokho. Pust’ muzïka budet nemetskaya. Eto budet zvuchate podtekstom, no etogo nam nikto ne smozhet inkriminirovat'.’ RGALI, fund 1929, list 2, folder 117, 4.) In any case, no clear evidence has emerged that Kotko's failure was due in the main to its encounter with contemporary politics.

94 This passage was crucial for the masterplot – which is still present, even though I suggest it was submerged and diminished rather than enhanced in transposition. At first Remenyuk says Semyon cannot have a squad to achieve personal goals, because ‘This otryad is not yours and not mine, but belongs to the worker-peasant Red Army.' Semyon responds: ‘Then my peasant fate [dolya] is doomed?’ Remenyuk: ‘No, Semyon. The whole laboring nation is fighting for your fate.’ This is the key message of the novella, and the crucial moment in the masterplot is Semyon's return. His statement in the opera, ‘Ne khozhu ya ot lyudey otoyti’, is not fully clear in its intended message, though it should probably be along the lines of ‘I realize that Remenyuk is right, that I have to fight together with the people, even though my personal fate is thereby doomed.' The order for Semyon from Remenyuk to attack the village that follows is meant to show the truth that fighting with the larger collectivity is the way to achieve peasant goals. However, this is not made entirely clear in the opera, nor is it given musical emphasis. The speedy resolution of the issue keeps the attention on the (melo)drama as I have described, and the reception of the opera by Prokofiev's contemporaries proves that this section did not have the expressive force it required of the librettists and especially the composer in execution.

95 Models for High Stalinist literature and opera such as Taras and Susanin, in contrast, conformed to the standards of epic poetry, which ‘portrays an ideal reality and ideal heroes’ and presents a struggle ‘waged not for narrow, petty goals, not for personal interests, not for the well-being of the individual hero but for the people's highest ideals'. Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore, trans. Ariadna Y. Martin, Richard P. Martin et al., ed. Anatoly Liebermann (Manchester, 1984), 152, 149.

96 RGALI, fund 1929, list 2, folder 11.

97 At the end of Chapter 21, ‘At the Balta Market'.

98 Thinking in pan-Slavic terms, evidently, since Napoleon did not invade Ukraine.

99 Khubov, ‘Opernïye idealï’, 23.

100 N. Panchekhin, ‘Nit’ pravdï’, Sovetskaya muzïka (October 1940), 27–9; Tsukkerman, ‘Neskol'ko mïsley o sovetskoy opere'. A. Shaverdyan, ‘Sovetskaya opera’, Sovetskaya muzïka (March 1941), 3–20.

101 ‘Sovetskaya opera’, Sovetskaya muzïka (October 1940), 3–11, here 10–11.

102 Nest'yev, ‘“Semyon Kotko” S. Prokof'yeva’, Sovetskaya muzïka (September 1940), 14.

103 Tsukkerman also complained of the ‘severe lack of subjective, individual lyricism in the opera’, which would have been required for the communication of such content. ‘Neskol'ko mïsley o sovetskoy opere’, 68.

104 Shaverdyan, ‘Sovetskaya opera’, 5.

105 According to Shaverdyan, it also enjoyed a ‘considerable success with the public'. Shaverdyan, 5.

106 Cherevichki, the Little Russian comedy most flattering to the imperial court, was produced at the Bolshoy in 1941. In the same year a new ballet, Taras Bul'ba (1940), by popular song composer Vasiliy Pavlovich Solov'yov-Sedoy, was performed in two productions, at the Bolshoy and Kirov. May Night and Sorochintsï Fair received new productions at the Bolshoy after the war (1947 and 1952 respectively).

107 RGALI, fund 962, list 3, folder 772. ‘Stenogramma soveshchaniya po obsuzhdeniyu operï K. D. Makarova-Rakitina “Ya sïn trudovogo naroda”.’ 22 June 1940. This was the record of the meeting of 22 June 1940, on the day before the premiere of Kotko, when it was mentioned during a discussion of another new opera on Katayev's novel, by K. D. Makarov-Nikitin, that had been commissioned by the KDI in 1938 (Solodukha, Ya., Sovetskaya muzïka, [July 1939], 56Google Scholar ).

108 Similarly, Stalin himself criticised A. E. Korneychuk's 1941 play V stepyakh Ukraine (In the Steppes of Ukraine) for being ‘too jolly’, for as he wrote to the author, ‘there is the danger that the revelry [razgul] of merriment in the comedy may distract the spectator's attention from its content'. Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents on Contemporary History (RTsKhIDNI), fund 588, list 1, file 4674, 1–2, quoted in Andrey N. Artizov and Oleg Nikolayevich Naumov, eds., Vlast' i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiya. Dokumenty TsK RKP(b)–VKP(b), VChK–OGPU–NKVD o kul'turnoy politike. 1917–1953 (Moscow, 1999). Incidentally, Prokofiev would compose the music for the film based on Korneychuk's play, Partizanï v stepyakh Ukrainï (1943, dir. Igor Savchenko).

109 Khubov, ‘Opernïye idealï’, 18.

110 Sollertinsky, ‘Dramaturgiya opernogo libretto’, Sovetskaya muzïka (March 1941), 21–31. He had changed his views on opera dramatically (compare with footnote 49), chastened by severe criticisms, during the Lady Macbeth scandal, of his influence on Shostakovich. Fay, Shostakovich, 89.

111 Khubov, ‘Opernïye idealï’, 23.

112 The song operas Tikhiy Don and V buryu end in this way, as do films on heroic subjects such as Aleksander Dovzhenko's Shchors (1939), a film set in Civil War Ukraine that was commissioned and supervised by Stalin himself throughout a long and difficult series of revisions. Dovzhenko finally won official approval with Shchors, and it received the Stalin Prize in 1941. It was announced that he was to follow it with Taras Bul'ba.

113 Israel V. Nest'yev, Prokofiev, trans. Florence Jonas (Stanford, 1961), 318.

114 ‘Sovetskaya opera’, Sovetskaya muzïka (October 1940), 6.

115 The child is a powerful symbol of the union of personal and collective goals, while the sweeping away of old agrarian practices and push towards industrialisation is exemplified by his parents’ occupations as supervisors in factories.

116 By coincidence, at the time of Meyerhold's arrest he was working on preparations for a mass athletic display in Red Square, the music for which he had commissioned from Prokofiev. See Simon Alexander Morrison, The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years (Oxford and New York, 2009), 96–98.

117 A. Gruvich, ‘“Shol soldat s fronta”. P'yesa V. Katayeva v teatre im. Vakhtangova’, Pravda, 27 September 1938. The effects and the language were doubtless among the features of the novella and play that Prokofiev found ‘rather lively'.

118 In 1937 and 1938, articles emphasised ‘again and again Stalin's demand for the closest union of Soviet republics against foreign intervention . . . In the case of the Ukraine the problem was particularly acute.’ Robert S. Sullivant, Soviet Politics and the Ukraine, 1917–1957 (New York, 1962), 228, 234.

119 It would be difficult to over-emphasise the level of anxiety in the Party leadership towards a region that had endured forced collectivisation, extreme famine in the Holodomor, severe political repression involving the destruction of the nationalists by 1934 and removal of opposition to central control, and in the later 1930s, Ukraine's own Terror, a series of purges of Party members and perceived disloyal elements. See Nahaylo, Bohdan and Swoboda, Victor, Soviet Disunion: A History of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR (New York, 1990)Google Scholar . Ukrainians ‘were the major object of Stalin's hatred . . . Stalin saw disloyalty in all Ukrainian communists as well as the Ukrainian masses.’ Krawchenko, Bohdan, Social Change and National Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Ukraine (Basingstoke, 1985), 141CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

120 Taras Shevchenko was a highly controversial figure, having been a trenchant critic of Russia under the Tsars. In the late 1930s, the Party embarked on a ‘Battle for Shevchenko’ (George Luckyj, ed., Shevchenko and the Critics: 1861–1980, trans. Dolly Ferguson and Sophia Yurkevich [Toronto, 1980], ix) that would offer a pro-Russian interpretation of his works, since ‘control of Ukraine directly depended upon controlling Shevchenko's heritage and its influence upon the masses.’ (Bohdan Rubchak, ‘Introduction’, in Shevchenko and the Critics: 1861–1980 30). In March 1939 there were large-scale celebrations of the 125^th anniversary of Shevchenko's birth, with emphasis determinedly on his ‘revolutionary-democratic’ (socialist) rather than nationalistic (Ukrainian) side. (Yekelchyk, Stalin's Empire of Memory, 23–4).

121 Kobzarï, the blind bards who symbolised Ukraine's painful history, were persecuted throughout the 1930s as part of the attempt to curb any remaining nationalist elements. Hiroaki Kuromiya states that ‘[i]n the 1930s, many bandurists were indeed arrested and even executed as Ukrainian nationalists and separatists'. The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s (New Haven, 2007), 109. Shevchenko had found inspiration for one major collection of poetry, Kobzar, in their folk singing (Rubchak, ‘Introduction’, in Luckyi, Shevchenko and the Critics, 44).

122 See the remarks by McReynolds and Neuberger, ‘Introduction’, in Imitations of Life, 5.