Sergei Prokofiev’s War and Peace – conceived just before Hitler’s invasion of Russia and still unpremiered at the composer’s death – is a love story, or possibly even two love stories. One traces Andrei Bolkonsky’s and Pierre Bezukhov’s love for Natasha Rostova, the other, the Russian people’s devotion to their homeland. The two are united by parallels and symbolism, but the first remains a story of Eros and individuals in a highly Europeanised world, while the second is a collective tale of national love for Mother Russia. Like the opera it inspired, Tolstoy’s novel takes up opposing worlds and scales – the French versus the Russian, the personal versus the national – yet it does so in a way that ultimately points to their indivisibility. The spirit of brotherly love runs through all levels of the text, from intimate family ties, to moments of epiphany that bridge the chasm between nations at war, to a philosophy of history that embraces the interconnectivity and interdependence of human existence. Prokofiev’s opera also celebrates this feeling of brotherhood and of belonging to a larger whole. Yet despite this shared ethical value, the opera’s divided structure and the treatment of love that this structure (and the mandates of Stalinist culture) imposed, brought Prokofiev’s War and Peace into stark opposition with the underlying philosophy of Tolstoy’s novel.
In choosing to adapt War and Peace in the Stalinist 1940s, Prokofiev was faced with both operatic conventions and Soviet ideological demands that ran counter to the philosophy and structure of Tolstoy’s sprawling, non-operatic, non-Soviet masterpiece. In the first place, Tolstoy’s famous depictions of the details of everyday family life lacked the dramatic force expected of a grand historical opera subject such as the 1812 war with Napoleon. Further, his emphasis on individual motivations and interests conflicted sharply with the Soviet ideal of collective, heroic purpose. Russian commentators on operatic adaptations have traditionally tended to regard fidelity to source text (especially to classics as illustrious as War and Peace) as a virtue, and War and Peace has been no exception.Footnote 1 Yet I wish to argue that it was precisely the opera’s non-Tolstoyan depiction of love – something recent scholars have talked little about – that became a central element in making Prokofiev’s new masterpiece dramatically effective as opera and acceptable for the Soviet stage. Taking into account the excruciating revision process Prokofiev was forced to undergo as he attempted to keep up with ideological shifts of the 1940s, we can trace the link between the philosophy of love put forth in the opera and its acceptability to Soviet norms.
Much of the scholarship on Prokofiev’s adaptation has focused on its more overtly political aspects: the dictates of Soviet officials during the revision process and the portrayal of Field Marshal Kutuzov, who became a stand-in for Stalin.Footnote 2 In Soviet Russia, however, even the depiction of love had political ramifications, and these have not been seriously explored.Footnote 3 This article will return to Prokofiev’s source text to examine how Prokofiev reworked Tolstoy’s vision of love to meet both operatic and Soviet demands (which sometimes – but not always – ran in tandem). In the process, both Peace and War became more traditional love stories, the first romantic in focus, and the second national, following the model of Mikhail Glinka and the Kuchka. Neither was true to Tolstoy’s philosophy of human connection.
Previous commentators on Prokofiev’s adaptation of War and Peace have tended to accept the removal of family scenes as a practical necessity, without considering the philosophical ramifications of their absence. In the novel, however, family love, and specifically the bond between siblings, serves as a model for broader human connection and brotherhood. This kind of love binds the individual characters in both peace and war, showing the sameness of the two worlds. In the opera, meanwhile, even in the first version of the libretto (before Soviet officials became involved), Prokofiev removed the sibling relationships in Peace and used choruses, rather than individuals, to represent this type of connection in War. As a result, Tolstoy’s ideal of family connectedness disappeared from the domestic side of the opera and reappeared – transformed and expanded – as the folk–national love that dominates and unifies War. This love and brotherly connection provided an acceptable alternative to Tolstoy’s gentry-family idylls, both operatically compelling and politically appropriate for Soviet realities. In War, then, Prokofiev makes the choral, communal love of ‘Mother Russia’ the operatic alternative to the intimate, novelistic family. In so doing, he brings back a form of love central to the nineteenth-century nationalist tradition – love of Russia – and combines it with the Tolstoyan model to create a dramatic, unifying alternative to the love plot that drives Peace.
Philip Bullock has noted the importance of the libretto for Soviet critics, as ‘the element of an opera that could be most readily analysed, understood and even censored within the terms established in literature’.Footnote 4 The letters Prokofiev received calling for revisions often referred to the music in fairly general terms (describing what it should evoke without recourse to musical terminology), whereas they noted specific lines in the libretto that should be cut or altered. Following this lead, I will focus primarily in what follows on the War and Peace libretto, examining aspects of plot, character and structure most accessible to critics with a stake in ‘Sovietising’ Tolstoy’s masterpiece, and will limit commentary on the music to the type of concerns raised by critics on the Committee on Arts Affairs.
Tolstoy’s unity in division
Although many early critics were bothered by the mixture of genres in Tolstoy’s War and Peace and felt that the stories of individuals’ lives worked at cross purposes with the vision of history endorsed by Tolstoy, later scholars have argued for the book’s internal coherence.Footnote 5 Tolstoy created this coherence, they contend, by embodying his philosophy of history in the fictional half of the work, both at the level of the individual’s experience and in the mass scenes of war.Footnote 6 Edward Wasiolek, for example, has suggested: ‘The point of the long theoretical discussion of history that dominates the later portions of War and Peace is to prove that necessity and freedom are resolved in the concrete historical act – the same point that Tolstoy has dramatised in the best moments of the domestic portions of the novel.’Footnote 7 The individual actions of the characters are in fact working towards the same ends as the theoretical passages, all illuminating a single, integrated worldview. Or, as Paul Debreczeny argues: ‘What gives the novel viable organic unity is that principles of historical analysis are applied to the portrayal of individual characters, and a sense of freedom informs the depictions of historical events.’Footnote 8
Alongside this (no longer) new wave of scholarship, I would suggest that Tolstoy’s depiction of love offers another instance where individual lives exemplify broader Tolstoyan truths. Tolstoy scholars have long noted the importance of family in his works as well as his lifelong dedication to the ideal of brotherhood, and siblings play a crucial role in linking these two themes.Footnote 9 Recognition of Tolstoy’s use of sibling bonds as the basis and model for his ideals of unity and brotherhood leads to a perplexing question, however, when we turn to the opera, where siblings and family life are virtually absent: how can Prokofiev retain Tolstoy’s philosophy of human connection and his ideal of brotherhood without recourse to the sibling bonds and familial intimacy on which Tolstoy bases them? Or, put another way: in an opera that came to focus on more grandiose aspects of the heroism and patriotism of the Russian people, was there no place for Tolstoy’s model of love and brotherhood?
For a Tolstoyan hero, love begins with the family, and the types of bonds a character forms in this tiny microcosm of society become emblematic of the bonds he or she will form with humanity at large. Natasha Rostova exudes warm, intuitive, all-embracing love for her brothers Nikolai and Petya, for her cousin Sonya, and for her parents, and she consistently reaches out – to friends, relations, strangers at a ball, wounded soldiers, anyone with whom she comes into contact – with the same type of spontaneous affection. The Bolkonskys, as soberly undemonstrative as the Rostovs are impulsive, share a more spiritual, cerebral bond, and interact with others using a similar spiritual intensity, formed of a desire for a deep connection based on a shared moral outlook. By contrast, Hélène Kuragina has incestuous relations with her brother Anatole and establishes her position in society through the channels of erotic desire.Footnote 10
Tolstoy carefully constructs a parallel between dominant family feelings and a character’s relations to the wider world. Compare, for example, Nikolai’s reunion with his family on his first leave from the army with the reception he receives when he returns to his regiment. In the first case, he is swarmed by his adoring relations: ‘more hugging, more kissing, more outcries, and tears of joy. He could not distinguish which was Papa, which Natasha, and which Petya. Everyone shouted, talked, and kissed him at the same time.’Footnote 11 Then, after his leave: ‘Rostov experienced the same feeling as when his mother, his father, and his sister had embraced him, and tears of joy choked him so that he could not speak. The regiment was also a home, and as unalterably dear and precious as his parents’ house.’Footnote 12
Nikolai experiences the regiment as a family of brothers, but we will never know whether the other soldiers share this view. Tolstoy only shows us the regiment through Nikolai’s eyes, keeping a tight control on our perception. This rootedness in the singular is important. Artistically, it allows Tolstoy to use an individual’s experience to represent a broader truth. Nikolai’s loving glance equates the feeling of family closeness that comes from an accumulation of shared experience (home) with the closeness of physical proximity and shared living conditions (army). Staying within Nikolai’s viewpoint, Tolstoy avoids engaging with the difference between true family love and this inherently broader and less personal family-like connection, and instead attempts to elide the two. Philosophically, the Tolstoyan expansion of love resists the urge to philosophise its way into abstraction, but remains rooted in the connection between discrete individuals. In Tolstoy’s world, one can only love concrete people, not abstract ideas. As he explained in his late religious treatise, The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894): ‘The man who … loves his family, knows whom he loves: Anna, Dolly, John, Peter, and so on’, whereas ‘humanity is a fiction, and it is impossible to love it’.Footnote 13
Somewhere between these two extremes – family and humanity – lies the nation. In The Kingdom of God – a work that was not part of the Soviet sanctioned Tolstoy corpusFootnote 14 – love of nation is the farthest stretch of this emotion. Tolstoy argues that love of self is natural to all people, and this love can be transferred outward to family, clan, tribe, or state, but there is a ‘weakening of sentiment in proportion to the extension of its object’; ‘Love of one’s own people who are of the same blood, the same tongue, and the same religion as one’s self is possible, though far from being so strong as love of self, or even love of family or clan. But love for a state, such as Turkey, Germany, England, Austria, or Russia is a thing almost impossible’ because ‘it is only an imagined sentiment’.Footnote 15
Tolstoy’s organic vision of love radiating out to those who share most differs from many traditional formulations of brotherhood. Christian brotherhood, for instance, necessitates loving indiscriminately, demanding that one not only love one’s neighbour (literally ‘close one’ in Russian (blizhnii)), but even enemies with the same feeling of selfless, brotherly tenderness. In biblical terms, the indiscriminate love required by ‘brotherhood in Christ’ leaves no place for individuals, as all are part of one body (1 Corinthians 12: 12–27). Similarly, many national or ethnic conceptions of brotherhood involve an undistinguishing, wider sense of connection, as in Benedict Anderson’s well-known formulation of the ‘imagined community’: ‘it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’.Footnote 16 By this theory, one might love one’s ‘brother Slavs’ without knowing or truly caring for any one personally – an idea Tolstoy ridicules in Part VIII of Anna Karenina.Footnote 17 Tolstoy remained sceptical about the feasibility of brotherhood at the group level, without recourse to individual bonds – face-to-face interactions or shared experiences, however brief – that affirm the other’s shared humanity. He held that one must be able to love real people in order to love the larger group they represent.
In War and Peace, Tolstoy manages to depict expansive love that remains rooted in actual human connections. During the army review, for example, Nikolai’s intense love for the Tsar spreads to all the men around him: ‘I love and forgive everybody now’, he thinks.Footnote 18 Even in this moment, Nikolai’s love is not focused on an abstract concept of Russia, but on the real men around him. Such moments can transcend even national boundaries, as when Nikolai exchanges a ‘brotherly smile’ with his host in a German village and exclaims: ‘Hoch Oestreicher! Hoch Russen! Kaiser Alexander hoch!’ to which the German replies: ‘Und die ganze Welt hoch!’ After this exchange ‘they looked at each other with joyful delight and brotherly love’.Footnote 19 The nations’ unity is based on the bond between two concrete but unrelated individuals who, roused by the excitement of impending war, sense their shared humanity. In another famous instance during Pierre’s trial, the French General, Davout, shares a look with him that saves Pierre. ‘At that moment an immense number of things passed dimly through both their minds, and they realized that they were both children of humanity and were brothers.’Footnote 20
The type of love Tolstoy idealises in the home – the warm, spontaneous affection and compassion exhibited by the Rostovs, or the more thoughtful, spiritual compassion displayed by the Bolkonskys – becomes the model for the type of love Tolstoy aimed to depict and foster on a larger scale. In Andrei’s moment of clarity that comes with his first, nearly fatal wound, he experiences the Christian love of all humanity that his sister, Marya, has preached. With his second wound, this love is applied to his greatest enemy: Anatole Kuragin. Through depicting family love and the need for belonging and brotherhood as existing equally in home and regiment, among intimates and between strangers brought together by the fortuities of war, Tolstoy found another way to bring together the seemingly opposed strands of War and Peace into an aesthetically and philosophically coherent whole. When the type of love that unites men on the battlefield is no different from the love they experience in their childhood home, the distance between these two worlds collapses. Prokofiev’s opera, by contrast, bypasses this unifying tendency, seeking at all times to keep war on a different emotional plane from peace. Rather than proving the indivisibility of wartime and peacetime reality, Prokofiev would rely on the contrast between the two in structuring his opera, and in fact would be forced to make this contrast increasingly extreme.
Moving away from Tolstoy: Prokofiev’s division
When Prokofiev and his librettist and second wife, Mira Mendelson, set about turning Tolstoy’s War and Peace into an opera in 1941, they tried to be faithful to Tolstoy in both language and philosophical outlook.Footnote 21 Assuming that their audience would know Tolstoy’s novel, the pair did not attempt to create a filled-in plot, but instead provided a series of vignettes that capture essential human emotions and states of being (much as Tchaikovsky had done in Eugene Onegin).Footnote 22 On the philosophical side, they were sensitive to Tolstoy’s belief that unity of purpose and selfless desire to serve the nation never moved history.Footnote 23 As Tolstoy explains in the novel:
It is natural for us who were not living in those days to imagine that when half Russia had been conquered and the inhabitants were fleeing to distant provinces, and one levy after another was being raised for the defence of the Fatherland, all Russians from the greatest to the least were solely engaged in sacrificing themselves, saving their fatherland, or weeping over its downfall … But it was not really so. It appears so to us because we only see the general historic interest of that time and do not see all the personal human interests that people had. Yet in reality those personal interests of the moment so much transcend the general interests, that they always prevent the public interest from being felt or even noticed.Footnote 24
Prokofiev’s musical model for capturing all these personal interests within the larger nation – represented by the chorus – was Musorgsky’s treatment of the narod in Boris Godunov, with prose recitative dialogue and the use of solo voices in the chorus to break up the sense of a monolithic whole.Footnote 25
Despite this attempt at fidelity, Prokofiev and Mendelson’s opera inevitably departed from Tolstoy’s unifying vision through the early decision to split War and Peace into two distinct halves.Footnote 26 The scene that originally inspired Prokofiev to tackle the project – Natasha’s reunion with the dying Prince Andrei – became the node that would link Peace and War, as it was the only scene in which the couple appeared together. The two halves were further unified in Prokofiev and Mendelson’s vision by a close parallelism.Footnote 27 It is routine to note that the siege on Natasha’s virtue in Part I by the seductive Anatole Kuragin and the saving of her honour by the bumbling Pierre is mirrored by the invasion of Russia in Part II by the equally lustful French and Russia’s rescue by Kutuzov and the humble Russian narod.Footnote 28 What this summary downplays, however, is that the two halves are based around two different kinds of love, an opposition that runs directly against Tolstoy’s philosophy of history and his ideals for human connection. Rather than making the societal level an extension of the personal, the opera has them governed by different forces and forms of attachment – romantic love versus folk–national connectedness. Put simply, in Soviet Russia, Prokofiev could not make history purely the background to a romantic love story after the manner of so many European historical operas. When dealing with history, however, he still chose to motivate the drama through a love story, turning from romantic love to the love of Russia, just as many nineteenth-century Russian ‘nationalist’ composers had done before him.
In so rigidly splitting Peace and War, then, Prokofiev’s original version of the opera, which he completed in 1942, takes a first major step away from Tolstoy. Although Prokofiev obviously had the constraints of Soviet acceptability in mind, I would propose that at this stage these changes were based more on the genre requirements of transposing novel into opera. In the revision process that followed, however, the opera would then be pushed further and further from the ideology of its literary source. When Prokofiev sent the opera to Moscow for review in 1942, he was hopeful for a speedy staging, given general enthusiasm for the project and the topical relevance of the wartime plotline. At his death over a decade later, the complete opera still awaited its premiere. Over those years Prokofiev would create a series of revised versions, desperate to appease censorship boards and members of the theatre so as to see his masterpiece performed; a process that has received careful study and documentation that will not be repeated here in detail.Footnote 29 Instead, I contrast Prokofiev’s initial vision from 1942 with the final version that made it to the Soviet stage (the version known to audiences today), in order to show the increasing distance between the opera’s depiction of love and Tolstoy’s original conception.
The piano–vocal score was first vetted in Moscow in 1942, after which Prokofiev received letters from Mikhail Khrapchenko (chairman of the Committee on Arts Affairs, 1939–48) and Semyon Shlifstein (Soviet musicologist and consultant to the Committee on Arts Affairs, 1939–44) with recommendations for revisions. Later Samuil Samosud (musical director of the Bolshoi Theatre) and many others became involved in requesting further changes and giving advice. The primary concerns of the original reviewers involved enhancing the opera’s emotional impact and making the Russian people appear more heroic. They were bothered by Prokofiev’s inclusion of too many everyday details and dialogue, which – while true to Tolstoy – diffused the dramatic energy and failed to capture the ‘greatness of the national spirit’ (velichie narodogo dukha) and the ‘spiritual heights and inner strength of the Russian people’.Footnote 30 While these comments might make dramatic sense for any opera, they bore greater weight in the Soviet context where the portrayal of ‘the people’ carried deep ideological significance.
The ‘personal interests of the moment’ on which Tolstoy’s philosophy of history rested were precisely what critics on the Committee of Arts Affairs found most objectionable. As Khrapchenko chided: ‘After all, we’re talking about the fates of the nation, the people, and not just the life path, joys and sorrows of individual distinguished representatives of the epoch.’Footnote 31 Khrapchenko also complained about the ‘abundance of conversation’ and Shlifstein explained that ‘the personal world’ should ‘yield its place to the expression of the people’s elemental principle’.Footnote 32 Clearly, the intimate family bonds that played such an important role in Tolstoy had no place in this vision. Peace, which indisputably had to remain focused on individuals, required much less reworking than War. While many scenes remained virtually the same, the one major change was the forced addition of the ball (scene 2) where Natasha and Andrei first meet and fall in love. In War, Prokofiev had to make myriad alterations, including a new scene depicting the war council at Fili, giving Kutuzov the opportunity for a patriotic aria after making his decision to surrender Moscow.Footnote 33
With the removal of many individuals from War and the increased emphasis on unified choruses, the final version of the opera separates the worlds of Peace and War even further than did the original version of 1942. The two halves are set in different spaces governed by different rules of time: the drawing room and ballroom capture the immediate present in which the individual experiences life, while the war-council hut and battlefield exist in historical time in which a nation carries out its destiny. These two fundamentally different chronotopes come with their own unique musical styles: one intimate and lyrical, interwoven with Western European dance rhythms; the other epic and triumphant, permeated with folk songs and patriotic hymns.Footnote 34 Perhaps most important, Peace addresses the lives of individuals, while War shifts to the national scale, or in Rita McAllister’s description, the opera offers ‘two sets of tableaux vivants, contrasting the personal and the communal’.Footnote 35 In other words, the personal love of Part I and the communal love of Part II have their corresponding conventional types of opera.
Peace and individual desire
Prokofiev’s Part I, Peace, is dominated by amorous love. In each scene Natasha is the object of male desire and, as in a typical French or Italian romantic opera, Eros provides the driving force of the action. The opera opens with Andrei below Natasha’s window on the Rostovs’ estate at Otradnoe, gaining a renewed faith in life as he is enchanted by her poetic soul. Although the scene draws heavily on Tolstoy, Prokofiev’s emphasis on romantic love turns away from Tolstoy’s depiction of more unrestricted spiritual searching. The opera privileges the influence of Natasha over the effects of the natural world in transforming Andrei’s outlook; his thoughts shift directly from: ‘There’s something entirely, entirely special in her, in this girl who wanted to fly away into the sky’ to (two lines later): ‘Where does this unwarranted spring-like feeling of gladness and renewal come from? No, life is not over at thirty-one; it does not pass in vain.’ For Tolstoy’s Andrei, it takes not only a girl on a moonlit night, but also a second viewing of the old ‘dying’ oak that has now sprung into leaf in order to bring about his spiritual rejuvenation. The second set of lines Prokofiev chose (‘Where does this…’) are taken from the moment of oak viewing, not from listening to Natasha. Debreczeny even argues that Tolstoy emphasises the impersonality of Andrei’s feelings when he first encounters Natasha: ‘She is not important as a person; what is important is Andrey’s reaction to a young creature to whom – he painfully realises – he means nothing.’Footnote 36
From original to final version of this first scene, Prokofiev heightened the focus on Eros and Natasha, making Peace a more traditional love story. The second major change he made to Peace, alongside the addition of the ball scene, was to create a duet for Natasha and Sonya on their balcony, giving Andrei ample time to become enthralled by his muse.Footnote 37 The words of the duet come from Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852), Russia’s first Romantic poet, who was well known for his translations and adaptations of English and German literature. More significantly, Tchaikovsky had already set the same poem as a duet for Liza and Polina in The Queen of Spades. Both operas use domestic music making to establish the time and place of the action, in this case rooting listeners in the early nineteenth century (the harp introduction underlines the associations with salon music).
As various scholars have noted, Tchaikovsky’s influence can be widely felt across Part I (though much more so in the final version with the added ball scene).Footnote 38 While many of the nineteenth-century Russian ‘nationalist’ composers kept romantic love as a minor embellishment to otherwise nationally focused plotlines, Tchaikovsky made it a focal point, creating a powerful musical idiom for the depiction of amorous desire, from the ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Overture via Swan Lake, Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, to Sleeping Beauty. Drawing on Tchaikovsky therefore not only helped to root War and Peace in the Russian operatic tradition, but also created a palimpsest that reinforced the romantic idyll in Peace.Footnote 39 The inter-text with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, moreover, is multivalent. Prokofiev reused portions of the incidental music he had composed for a dramatic adaptation of Pushkin’s novel (the project was planned for 1936, but aborted before making it to the stage) and recycled for Natasha, much of the music originally intended for his own earlier Tatiana.Footnote 40 Their themes of youthful love complement each other: Tatiana’s naiveté and isolation from society at the Larina estate during her early infatuation with Onegin are paralleled by Natasha’s innocence and countryside seclusion at Otradnoe, where she sings her duet with Sonya.
In Tolstoy’s more complex world, Andrei is searching for meaning and purpose beyond what romantic love can provide. His reawakening is specifically a desire to unite with a larger whole, to be connected with everyone: ‘everyone must know me, so that my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!’Footnote 41 These sentiments echo his feelings while in the army, such as before the Battle of Austerlitz: ‘if I want this – want glory, want to be known to men, want to be loved by them, it is not my fault that I want it and want nothing but that and live only for that. Yes, for that alone! … what am I to do if I love nothing but fame and men’s love?’Footnote 42 Such continuity between peace and war is not possible in Prokofiev’s divided world.
From the moonlit night, Prokofiev’s initial impulse was to skip over the romantic union of Andrei and Natasha and move directly to its rupture. In the 1942 version, he omitted the moment of first union between his hero and heroine, never bringing the couple together in Peace, and saving the vision of them together for the scene at Andrei’s deathbed in War. In the added scene 2, however, where the influence of Tchaikovsky is felt most strongly, Natasha is swept up by dance music – polonaise, mazurka and waltz, with their intimations of seduction and infidelity – as she and Andrei fall in love.Footnote 43 The scene also gave Prokofiev the opportunity to include two choruses – one a setting of a poem by Konstantin Batyushkov (1787–1855), the other an Ode by Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–65) sung during the Tsar’s arrival at the ball – that provide unifying moments of choral glorification and period colour (a peacetime equivalent of the army choruses in War). Along with the added duet in scene 1, these diegetic songs pay tribute to Russia’s early literary greats, adding a patriotic element to Peace and shifting the balance from recitative towards more ‘singable’ melody.Footnote 44
After Prokofiev, reluctantly, had added a moment of unity at the ball, he moved straight to the scene of Natasha’s humiliation at the Bolkonskys’, which depicts the disharmony caused by this intended match. In both original and final versions, the scene at the Bolkonskys’ (which became scene 3 once the ball had been added) emphasises the role of Andrei’s family in priming Natasha to be seduced. She enters with the firm belief that ‘[i]t’s not possible that they won’t love me. I am so ready to do everything that they wish, so ready to love the Old Prince because he is [Andrei’s] father, and the Princess is his sister. There’s no reason for them not to love me.’ Faced with the Old Prince’s rudeness and Marya’s coldness – conveyed in Prokofiev’s characteristic recitative dialogue style – Natasha’s feelings burst out in an aria (‘Perhaps he’ll come today…’) as she imagines Andrei’s return and her desperate need for the reassurance of his love. Romantic love is the singular exalting force that can bring forth truly lyrical music in Peace.
The rejection Natasha has just experienced by her future in-laws leaves her all the more susceptible to the attention and admiration of Anatole Kuragin in the next scene in Hélène’s drawing room, a bastion of French visitors and fashions. In Tolstoy’s novel, even more strongly than in the opera, Natasha’s amorous affairs are placed in a Western European context, both spatially and literarily removing her from the grounding base of family life. The abduction plot was a cliché of the eighteenth-century romance and gothic novel and at this point Natasha becomes a classic novel heroine.Footnote 45 The ball, where her most serious romantic attachment springs up, was itself a foreign import to Russia, its forms, music and modes of interaction all borrowed from the French, English and Italians. Tolstoy contrasts this kind of formulaic, European socialising to the ‘natural’ Russian music of the balalaika and Natasha’s ‘Russian dance’ that she performs on the rustic estate of a neighbour, familiarly known as ‘Uncle’. That experience she shares with her brother, safely ensconced among healthy forms of connection. At the opera house, when Natasha first encounters Anatole, however, she is dazedly watching a French grand opera.Footnote 46
From here, Anatole pursues her to his sister’s salon, where a French actress entertains the company with a recitation from Racine’s Phèdre. With biting irony, Tolstoy does not refer to the work by name, simply noting: ‘Mademoiselle George looked sternly and gloomily at the audience and began reciting some kind of French verses describing her guilty love for her son.’Footnote 47 He highlights both the French name of the actress (which is emphasised in the Russian text by the use of a different alphabet) and the fact that she is speaking in French, integrating into the drawing room a hint of the national struggle that would consume Russia. The casual reference to ‘some kind of’ verses (kakie-to stikhi) belittles any dignity the reading might have held, while the incest at the heart of Phèdre is of course also reflected in the incestuous relations between Hélène and Anatole. The foreignness and artificiality of these settings is important for Tolstoy because it contrasts so sharply with his beloved family contexts and the wholesomeness of Russian music and dance that he endorses. In Prokofiev’s opera, these Europeanised, sensually charged spaces and contexts make up the majority of Natasha’s world. Consequently, the forms of love she encounters are based on amorous desire, often in decadent or corrupt form, without the balance of the more sustaining familial love that permeate Tolstoy’s novel.
Tolstoy structured War and Peace around three main families: the Rostovs, the Bolkonskys and the Kuragins. In condensing the sprawling novel into a manageable operatic plotline, Prokofiev and Mendelson necessarily made heavy cuts, removing most of the ‘un-operatic’ family life.Footnote 48 This material would certainly not have been acceptable to the Committee on Arts Affairs, given their complaints mentioned above about the emphasis on ‘everyday details’ (bytovym podrobnostiam).Footnote 49 The concern was both dramatic and ideological, as such quotidian details diminished the heroic image of the period and its participants. The issue was of particular concern in War with its ideologically fraught portrayal of the narod, but I would suggest that the cutting of domestic life in Peace also had significant consequences, reshaping the characters in ways that have not been fully explored. For example, Tolstoy first introduces his Natasha in her home, caught up in childhood play with her siblings, cousin and a beau too young to be a serious suitor. It is this setting and these familial connections that most prominently define her. Embedded in the Rostov family, Natasha exhibits her spontaneous affection in heart-to-hearts with Sonya, night-time visits in bed with her mother, lighthearted play with Petya and intimate conversations with Nikolai that are infused with shared memories and associations.
Comparison of the treatment of the brother–sister pairs at the heart of each of the major families in the shift from novel to opera shows how Prokofiev’s libretto inevitably distorted Tolstoy’s vision. First, Prokofiev and Mendelson eliminated Nikolai Rostov from the opera entirely, and in so doing, removed Natasha’s primary connection in the novel, her anchor and pivot. Tolstoy’s Natasha shares many of her most unhindered moments of intimacy with her brother: the carriage ride after Uncle’s when they wish they could remain together forever, Nikolai harmonising with her when she sings, the tête-à-tête on Nikolai’s first morning home on leave from the army when she displays her burned arm, and their discussion of shared childhood memories and dreams before the mummers arrive. Nikolai’s love of Natasha offers a chaste, sustaining alternative to amorous love in Tolstoy; he dreams of her when away at war, and she connects him with his innocent childhood past.Footnote 50 In the opera, without her older brother present, she becomes almost entirely the object of erotic love.
The sibling bond in Prokofiev’s Bolkonsky family is also reduced, although with less drastic consequences for this less demonstrative, more private family. While Marya and Andrei are both present in Part I, they are never seen together and Andrei never speaks of his sister. Many of Marya’s finest moments in the book occur with her brother (giving him the icon before he departs for war, helping him tend for his newborn son), with her sister-in-law the little Princess Lise (who does not feature in the opera), or with her father at his death. For Tolstoy she plays a saintly didactic role, as a model of the kind of non-sexual, selfless caring he idealised and attributed to his unknown mother.Footnote 51 In the epilogue he writes: ‘[she] promised in her heart to do better and to accomplish the impossible – in this life to love her husband, her children, [her nephew] Nikolenka, and all her neighbours [vsekh blizhnikh], as Christ loved mankind’.Footnote 52
Such virtues are not ‘operatic’ in the sense of being externally dramatic, but are composed of the quotidian struggles of existence that fall beyond the conventional material of nineteenth-century grand opera. In Prokofiev’s version, similarly, we see Marya only as a secondary figure in Natasha’s love plot. In her first ‘aside’ where we hear her true thoughts, Marya asks: ‘What can I talk about now with this frivolous, dressed-up girl?’ (Act I scene 3). This is a corrupting moment for Marya’s sibling bond with Andrei, as she turns her brother’s fiancée into a rival, instead of a new sister.Footnote 53 In the novel, Marya overcomes her resentment and ends up a soul mate (and ultimately a sister-in-law) for Natasha. But the moment Prokofiev chooses to ‘operatise’ brings Andrei and Marya’s relationship more in line with that of Anatole and Hélène in the last of the major families: the Kuragins. Their corrupted, incestuous sibling bond is the one Prokofiev emphasises and fills out most fully, devoting scenes 4 and 7 to their shared milieu. Slanting his portrayal of siblings in this way allows Prokofiev to maintain Eros as the primary, if not exclusive, type of love present in Part I, in a way that flattens the characters and arguably cuts off much of their Tolstoyan (if not their operatic) potential.
The erotic love that permeates Part I of the opera is a project of personal fulfilment, focused exclusively on the possession of one individual. By loving Natasha, none of the characters is led to broader feelings of human connection (and the same applies for Natasha herself). Indeed, in Pierre’s final reflections in the closing scene of Part I, he admits that in his search for inner peace (soglasie s samim soboi), the attempt to help his ‘close ones’, and the ideals of brotherhood that he sought in Freemasonry were overcome in his heart by his feelings for Natasha. And Natasha, in turn, thinks only of herself as she catapults from one romance into another, throwing off Sonya and her family in her infatuation. Her love in the opera is wholly isolating, as can be clearly seen in Prokofiev’s treatment of the ball where Natasha first dances with Andrei. The stage directions state that they find themselves alone after the dance, and in the 1991 Kirov production, the rest of the guests literally disappear from the stage, visually confirming that the entire focus is on the romantic love between two individuals; the opera itself gets swept up in the couple’s romance.
The isolating self-absorption of Eros in Prokofiev’s opera contrasts with Tolstoy’s vision. At the ball at the Iogels’, ‘Natasha fell in love the very moment she entered the ballroom. She was not in love with anyone in particular, but with everyone. Whatever person she happened to look at she was in love with for that moment.’Footnote 54 Similarly, after dancing with Andrei at her first adult ball (the one Prokofiev depicts), she gives him a smile that says: ‘I’m happy and I love everybody, and you and I understand it all.’Footnote 55 Andrei himself is not so important as the object of her love, just as she was not important (as an individual) in his spiritual reawakening at Otradnoe. Tolstoy’s ball scene closes with Natasha’s thought that ‘all the people at the ball alike were good, kind, and splendid people, loving one another; none of them capable of injuring another – and so they ought all to be happy’.Footnote 56 She is experiencing something akin to universal brotherhood.Footnote 57
In Tolstoy, characters are at their best when, like Natasha in her joy at the ball, they can see all people as worthy of love. Tolstoy did not turn these moments of exaltation into a permanent state, but showed that they can be triggered by various kinds of interactions and emotions, like the glance that saves Pierre during his trial, or Nikolai’s love for the Tsar during the army review which spreads to all the men around him. The parallel between Natasha’s feeling of expansive love in peacetime and Nikolai’s feeling in the army is but one instance of the indivisibility of these two realities in Tolstoy’s novel. In both Peace and War, everything begins and ends with the individual; the only difference is that the mass scenes present the individual in aggregate. Tolstoy shows that people who move between the spaces of war and peace are not changed by the move; they do not become faceless members of ‘the chorus’ just because they happen to be at Borodino.
To this end, Nikolai is an invaluable asset to Tolstoy’s artistic and philosophical mission. Although not the most glamorous character, nor the first that enters anyone’s mind when thinking about the novel, Nikolai is essential to its fibre. He is not heroic in the world–historical Hegelian sense, only in the down-to-earth Tolstoyan one.Footnote 58 Wherever Nikolai goes, he is always Nikolai Rostov, and like a true Rostov, his world is always present and immediate. He serves as the perfect reminder that each member of the army is a person with individual needs and feelings, as well as being part of the organic whole. When shown the army through Nikolai’s perspective, we do not see it as an abstract force where men lose themselves in the patriotic struggle to rid Russia of her oppressor, as war becomes in Prokofiev’s opera.
With Nikolai absent from the opera, no parallelism existed between love in home and army, nor would such a parallel have served the artistic structure Prokofiev was obliged to adopt in order to make his message sufficiently grand for a Soviet wartime opera. Family love is not a uniting principle; there are no complete families in Part I and the only crossovers between the two worlds of Peace and War are Andrei, who is never seen with his family, and the orphaned Pierre, who feels out of place in both worlds. Prokofiev removed all healthy sibling relationships from Part I and upped the scale of Part II to the point where individual family bonds among soldiers are no longer there to serve as a model for expansive love. We are not only missing Nikolai, but also the moment when Pierre finds himself in the midst of battle and regards the artillery battery as a ‘family circle – separated from all else’.Footnote 59 Instead of drawing together peacetime and wartime reality through the type of love they exercise, Prokofiev relied on his structure of opposing love in the two halves.
While Prokofiev was clearly at home with romantic love plots at the time of composing War and Peace – with Romeo and Juliet recently completed and Cinderella (begun in 1940) well under way – he must have known that such a plotline would not be sufficient for a Soviet wartime opera based on a work such as War and Peace. The romantic love presented in Peace would have to be counterbalanced by something more powerful, less focused on individuals, and of greater use to the war effort. Platon Kerzhentsev, chairman of the Committee on Artistic Affairs, had stated back in 1937, when War and Peace was proposed as an opera, that it would need to focus on ‘the heroic struggle of the Russian people’, not on ‘the spirit of Pierre Bezukhov and Natasha Rostova’.Footnote 60 A look at Soviet literary scholarship on War and Peace offers a model for the way such a reading could be teased out of Tolstoy’s novel.
Lenin’s writings on Tolstoy focused on his depiction of contemporary Russia and consequently are difficult to apply to a historical work such as War and Peace. Khrapchenko, however, bequeathed the world a 660-page tome, Lev Tolstoy as an Artist (1963), that offers a standard party line on War and Peace. Quoting one of Tolstoy’s diary entries, in which Tolstoy claimed that for a work to be good, one must love the fundamental idea in it, and that ‘in War and Peace I loved the idea of the people’ (mysl’ narodnuiu), Khrapchenko reads War and Peace as a criticism of the falseness of aristocratic life and a tribute to the strength of the people as the ‘deciding force of societal development’.Footnote 61 According to Khrapchenko, ‘the fates of the people and of the individual characters in War and Peace are tightly interwoven’.Footnote 62
These comments adhere to the views Anatoly Lunacharsky (Commissar of Enlightenment, 1917–29) expounded in a 1927 article, where he called War and Peace ‘a portrayal of collective actions’ and praised the ‘protest against human egoism, vanity, superstition, and the striving to raise people to universal [obshchechelovecheskikh] concerns’.Footnote 63 Similarly, the literary critic S.P. Bychkov comments in a 1949 essay on War and Peace that over the course of the war, the heroes – Pierre, Andrei, Natasha, Marya and others – ‘became part of the life of the nation: the war required them to think on the scale of Russia as a whole, thanks to which their personal lives were immeasurably enriched’.Footnote 64 In a later, revised version of the article (published in 1955), he added a section explaining that the ‘collective image of the people’ is the main hero of the novel, and that individual characters’ worth is related to their position in relation to the people, with the most positive characters the closest.Footnote 65 Konstantin Fedin (writer and head of the Soviet Writer’s Union, 1959–71) similarly praised Tolstoy for the strength with which he depicts ‘that giant of history – the Russian people!’Footnote 66
A Soviet War and Peace, then, could not tell the story of individuals. Indeed, in Khrapchenko’s words, each of the heroes must learn that ‘it is precisely the renunciation of individualistic principles and ideals which signified the wider manifestation of human strength and possibility. Rejecting the avowal of one’s “I” as the centre of the universe opens before us the richness of our surrounding world, the beauty of life.’Footnote 67 From comments like this, it is clear that in a Soviet adaptation of War and Peace, it would not be enough for unity to be felt in the home, with extensive philosophical essays to show how the individual experience was a microcosm for the global scale. Instead, Prokofiev moved Tolstoy’s ideal of family unity out of the home and expanded it into the national love that comes to dominate Part II of the opera (which, as mentioned earlier, also linked his opera with nineteenth-century ‘nationalist’ models). Ironically, this solution actually dovetails with the path Tolstoy laid out in The Kingdom of God is Within You, where love begins with the self and expands outward to family (the most immediate extension of self), clan, and ultimately nation.Footnote 68 By this logic, to inculcate a stronger sense of national love, it would make sense to turn the nation into an extension of the family.Footnote 69
Prokofiev’s unity:War and national love
War takes up the metaphor of family love. As Russia is besieged, her children come together as one body to defend their motherland. Just as Tolstoy turns the blushing, virgin Natasha into a fertile mother in the epilogue of his novel, Prokofiev’s parallel for Natasha is the fertile Matushka Rus’, the mother of an entire people. In grand operatic predecessors, such as Les Huguenots or Les Troyens, the historical events often provided background for the individual love plots. In War and Peace, however, the individual love plot is subsumed by broader national concerns. Mother Russia herself emerges as the beloved in War, and thus the form of love that drives the action is familial, rather than romantic. Sometimes using Moscow as a synecdoche for Russia, the Russians rally around their love for ‘our mother, Moscow!’ (matushka nasha, Moskva) and refer to themselves as her sons. At one point the people’s words about Mother Russia are followed directly by Andrei musing about his love for Natasha, cementing the parallel between the two beloveds. At another moment, Andrei mocks the German generals who refuse to take into account ‘private individuals’ (chastnykh lits) as they affirm to each other: ‘the theatre of war must be widened’ (literally ‘carry over to a wider space’ (perenest’ v prostranstvo)). Andrei states: ‘[I]n their theatre of war was my father, who died of grief. The French have destroyed my home and are going to ravage Moscow.’ His lamentation draws a clear parallel between the people of Russia and his own family, between Moscow and his own beloved family estate.Footnote 70
In her seminal study of the Soviet novel, Katerina Clark notes a parallel between the social organisation of the traditional peasant family and the metaphors used by the State. Traditional Russian culture featured both the ‘small family’ (malaia sem’ia), composed of immediate blood relations, and the ‘great family’ (bol’shaia sem’ia), which included recruited members who lived with the family but did not share actual blood ties. In a parallel move, writers in the 1940s often referred to the nuclear family as the ‘small family’, and Soviet society as the ‘great family’.Footnote 71 This leap from immediate connections to the metaphorical national family is enacted by Part II of Prokofiev’s opera. Given the lack of complete families in Part I (there are no mothers at all, for instance), the only intact family in Prokofiev’s War and Peace is Mother Russia, Father Kutuzov, and their children – the Russian people.
General Kutuzov sings about ‘white-stoned mother-Moscow’, and in turn, the soldiers sing about him as a father: ‘Kutuzov leads us, our own father leads us.’ Prokofiev sets these words as a march-like chorus that both unites the people with a single voice and provides a rousing patriotic melody to move the audience. Over the course of successive revisions, as Seinen has shown, Kutuzov’s character became the most contentious issue.Footnote 72 Prokofiev was forced to transform him from Tolstoy’s wise, slightly comic figure who accepts that a leader cannot control the outcome of war, into a stand-in for Stalin – a heroic leader of foresight with the force and control over events to personally direct Russia’s victory.Footnote 73 In Tolstoy we see intimate moments, such as Kutuzov’s parting with Andrei, where he tells the young man: ‘for you I am not a Serene Highness, nor a prince, nor a commander-in-chief, but a father!’Footnote 74 Prokofiev’s Kutuzov could not sink to the level of these individual family bonds; as the symbolic father of a nation he had to remain elevated and aloof. In order to heighten Kutuzov, Prokofiev was made to ‘perpetrate an arioso’, just as Musorgsky had done to ‘restore Tsar Boris to full tragic dimension on the operatic stage’.Footnote 75 Kutuzov’s new aria, which appears in the added war council scene, raises him above prosaic recitative into the lofty realm of lyrical melody.Footnote 76 Prokofiev later integrated Kutuzov’s grand melody into the scene of Andrei’s death and the final chorus that closes the opera.Footnote 77
Along with Mother Russia and father Kutuzov, the people themselves are united in siblinghood, often referring to each other as ‘brattsy’.Footnote 78 In the final scene, when Pierre and the Russian prisoners are released from captivity, everyone embraces while exclaiming: ‘Brothers, little doves! Dear relatives!’ (Brattsy, golubchiki! Milye rodimye!). This ‘national family’ love that replaces Eros in Part II was ideologically necessary because it offered a model strong enough to unite a nation against its oppressor. But, unlike Tolstoy’s vision of unity, it did not grow out of individual family bonds.
In the opera, this type of brotherly love remains a distinctly Russian phenomenon. James Parakilas notes that grand operas map their ‘moral terrain … by divisions of the chorus that represent opposed nations, social groups or political factions’.Footnote 79 Using this type of traditional mapping, Prokofiev chose to have Russian and French choruses in War sing of opposing types of love. Like the pernicious Kuragins in Part I, the French in Part II stay rooted in lustful, amorous love. While the Russian narod is concerned with saving Moscow’s honour, drawing a parallel to a violated virgin (such as Natasha in Part I),Footnote 80 during their looting of Moscow the French soldiers sing a folk song about trying to seduce a girl (taking her to a green garden to pick ‘ripe cherries’). The melody comes from a traditional French folk song, ‘La belle si nous étions’, but Prokofiev has the soldiers sing it in Russian, and their lyrics diverge quite strongly from those of the French original.Footnote 81 Rather than a nostalgic ode to the joys of youthful love, the song becomes a lustful attempt to lure a girl into sin. Manipulating their song in this way, Prokofiev made the French soldiers a fitting counterpart to Anatole Kuragin.
The true love in War is Russia’s familial, folk–national love. The desire to heighten the people’s heroic status may explain the Committee on Arts Affairs’ request for more patriotic choruses, but these choruses serve an additional function as love songs for Mother Russia. The familial love they glorify is a collective venture that unites voices and people as a Russian family. While it might sound ridiculous for a commoner on the streets of the burning city to start speaking of his love for ‘matushka Moskva’, once the music shifts from individual voice lines to a chorus, we accept the expression of such grandiose, collective sentiments.Footnote 82
Such expression links War and Peace to the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian nationalist operas that similarly take Russia herself as the ultimate beloved. Glinka’s fairy tale opera, Ruslan and Liudmila (1842), ends not with a glorification of its eponymous couple, but with a celebration of the fatherland (otchizna).Footnote 83 Borodin’s Prince Igor (unfinished at the composer’s death in 1887; first performed 1890) begins with a chorus glorifying Rus’. In Act I of Musorgsky’s historical opera Khovanshchina (unfinished at the composer’s death in 1881; first performed 1886), the people of Moscow sing a lament for suffering ‘dear Mother Russia’ (rodnaia matushka Rus’).Footnote 84 In War and Peace, however, it is not grief, but love that has been collectivised. The people are not lamenting, but fighting to protect their beloved Mother Russia. Thus Prokofiev’s choruses, while participating in the generic conventions of European grand opera (by defining opposing nations), are at the same time filling a characteristically Russian function, helping to make Russia the opera’s ultimate beloved.
The frequent recurrence of patriotic choruses and their melodic themes in the orchestra became central to the musical fibre of War, encoding folk–national love into the musical structure of the opera. Seinen notes the final choral glorification of Kutuzov, but it is also a glorification of the Russian family.Footnote 85 Singing in unison, the Russian people triumphantly proclaim:
Glory to the Motherland, our sacred Motherland,
Glory to our native army,
Glory to Fieldmarshal Kutuzov.
Hurrah!
The opera celebrates motherland (rodina), kin (rodnoi), army (the people) and, finally, in pride of place, the father – Kutuzov (Stalin) – ending with a ‘hurrah!’ that reminds us that this is wartime patriotism.Footnote 86
In contradistinction to Tolstoy’s words about the near-impossibility of loving a nation, the Soviet person had to feel at one with the nation. In Tolstoy’s novel, moments of brotherhood are experienced through the eyes of the participants, but opera cannot control our vantage point in this way. Though music can help us to enter a character’s emotional state, the audience can physically view the action through no eyes but its own, which necessarily remain outside of the action.Footnote 87 However, as Carolyn Abbate has argued, this division between our perception and that of the characters is an essential feature of opera, where ‘music is not produced by or within the stage-world, but emanates from other loci as secret commentaries for our ears alone’.Footnote 88 The final version of War and Peace makes this ‘music for our ears’ a central asset. Characters who are ‘unaware that they are singing’Footnote 89 can express sentiments they would never have been fully cognisant of, let alone put into words, in historical reality. The collective love they express as a result was precisely what Prokofiev needed to convey.
Conclusion
As Prokofiev unwillingly moved further from Tolstoy, he took greater advantage of the potential of opera. The critics pushing him understood that national love could be powerfully evoked through music, and specifically through unison singing.Footnote 90 By emphasising text less in the final version and putting greater weight on the music, Prokofiev ultimately created a War and Peace that could stand as an operatic alternative to Tolstoy, rather than a pale imitation.Footnote 91 When the people forcefully express their love for matushka Moskva in song, their music proves more moving than the written word. Listening to their rousing final chorus, the viewer – Soviet or contemporary – is meant to be infected by the people’s feeling of patriotism and brotherly unity.
Just as Soviet citizens in wartime were supposed to shift into a collective consciousness, putting the good of the Soviet Union before their individual well-being, Prokofiev’s opera also shifts from depiction of an individual love interest to the glorification of national love. Natasha literally disappears from the opera after Andrei’s death: her individual plot and individual love lose meaning in the face of the national struggle to defend beloved matushka Rus’.Footnote 92 In this way, War and Peace follows the model of Dzerzhinsky’s Party-sanctioned opera of 1935, Quiet Flows the Don, in which the protagonist, Grigory, ‘transcends his feelings for his lover at the very end, thereby affirming the primacy of the political over the personal’.Footnote 93 The Soviet ideal for opera was that it would ‘convey the feelings of the masses’ and provide a ‘heroic uplift’.Footnote 94 According to Lunacharsky, whose ideas from the 1920s reappeared in the Committee of Arts Affairs in the 1930s,Footnote 95 the operatic stage could depict:
some mighty conflict and end it with a solemn apotheosis in victory … Then the theatre would enable people to lose their sense of separation in the midst of an organised collective experience that can never be forgotten – an experience almost as strong as an attack, when through bayonets, to the sound of a military march, they go forward to their death or to victory – an experience which would leave an imprint on their souls for the rest of their lives.Footnote 96
In ‘losing their sense of separation’, the audience members should feel themselves at home in the ‘great family’ of Mother Russia and her people.
In this Prokofiev was successful. After hearing the 1945 concert performance, one spectator wrote: ‘You achieved Tolstoy’s main goal – … you proclaimed – for those with ears to hear – the triumph of goodness and love.’Footnote 97 This love, though, was no longer the kind Tolstoy represented in War and Peace. The continuity between Peace and War was gone. The sibling ties that provided Tolstoy’s model for expansive feelings of love and brotherhood had been removed. But for the Soviet opera stage, Prokofiev’s national family singing the glory of the Motherland was more powerful than any model that could be drawn from Tolstoy.
