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on Stalin's orders, in 1934. Gorky's death in 1936 may also have been a consequence of the plot. For some time he had been suffering from chronic influenza caused by lung and heart disease. During the Buk-harin show trial of 1938 Gorky's doctors were found guilty of the writer's 'medical murder'. Perhaps Stalin used the writer's natural death as a pretext to destroy his political enemies, but Gorky's involvement with the opposition makes it just as likely that Stalin had him killed. It is almost certain that the NKVD murdered Gorky's son, Maxim Peshkov, in 1934; and this may have been part of a plan to weaken Gorky.¹²³ Certainly the writer's death came at a highly convenient time for Stalin - just before the show trials of Zinoviev and Kamenev, which Gorky had intended to expose as a sham in the Western press. Gorky's widow was adamant that her husband had been killed by Stalin's agents when she was asked about this in 1963. But the truth will probably never be known.¹²⁴

Prokofiev was the other major figure to return to Stalin's Russia -at the height of the Great Terror in 1936. The composer had never been known for his political acumen but the unhappy timing of his return was, even by his standards, the outcome of extraordinary naivety. Politics meant little to Prokofiev. He thought his music was above all that. He seemed to believe that he could return to the Soviet Union and remain unaffected by Stalin's politics.

Perhaps it was connected with his rise to fame as an infant prodigy in St Petersburg. The child of prosperous and doting parents, Prokofiev had had instilled in him from an early age an unshakeable belief in his own destiny. By the age of thirteen, when he entered the St Petersburg Conservatory, he already had four operas to his name. Here was the Russian Mozart. In 1917 he escaped the Revolution by travelling with his mother to the Caucasus and then emigrated via Vladivostok and Japan to the United States. Since Rachmaninov had recently arrived in America, the press inevitably made comparisons between the two. Prokofiev's more experimental style made him second best in the view of the generally conservative American critics. Years later, Prokofiev recalled wandering through New York's Central Park and

chinking with a cold fury of the wonderful American orchestras that cared nothing for my music… I arrived here too early; this enfant- America - still

had not matured to an understanding of new music. Should I have gone back home? But how? Russia was surrounded on all sides by the forces of the Whites, and anyway, who wants to return home empty-handed?¹²⁵

According to Berberova, Prokofiev had been heard to say on more than one occasion: 'There is no room for me here while Rachmaninov is alive, and he will live another ten or fifteen years. Europe is not enough for me and I do not wish to be second in America.'¹²⁶

In 1920 Prokofiev left New York and settled in Paris. But with Stravinsky already ensconced there, the French capital was even harder for Prokofiev to conquer. The patronage of Diaghilev was all-important in Paris - and Stravinsky was the impresario's 'favourite son'. Prokofiev liked to write for the opera, an interest that stemmed from his love for setting Russian novels to music: War and Peace, Dostoevsky's Gambler and Briusov's Fiery Angel were all turned into operas by him. But Diaghilev had famously declared that the opera was an art form that was 'out of date'.¹²⁷ The Ballets Russes had been founded on the search for a non-verbal synthesis of the arts - dance, mime and music and the visual arts but not literature. Stravinsky, by contrast, was committed to the ballet, an art form that enjoyed enormous kudos in the West as quintessentially 'Russian'. Encouraged by Diaghilev, Prokofiev composed the music for three ballets in the 1920s. The Buffoon (1921) was a moderate success - though it rankled with Stravinsky, who subsequently plotted to turn the arbiters of musical taste in Paris (Nadia Boulanger, Poulenc and Les Six) against Prokofiev. The second, The Steel Step (1927), which handled Soviet themes, was denounced by the Paris emigres as 'Kremlin propaganda', though in fact its idea was Diaghilev's. Only the last of Prokofiev's ballets, The Prodigal Son (1929), was an unqualified success. Its theme was close to the composer's heart.

Prokofiev became a lonely figure in Paris. He had a small circle of Russian friends which included the composer Nicolas Nabokov, the conductor Sergei Koussevitsky and the poet Konstantin Balmont. For seven years he laboured on his opera The Fiery Angel (1927), a work he always thought of as his masterpiece but which he never saw performed. Its central theme - the unconquerable divide between two worlds - spoke in many ways of his own separation from Russia.