A lost Ukrainian?

The case for Prokofiev

As Ukraine reclaims its heritage, there’s been debate over whether certain composers should now be considered Ukrainian rather than Russian. One case is Prokofiev (above, aged 7), born and raised in a rural estate in Ukraine – where his parents had moved for the sake of his Russian agronomist father’s career – until, aged 13, he was admitted to the St Petersburg Conservatory.

Prokofiev used elements of the Ukrainian alphabet when writing to his mother, and his love of Ukraine is evident in several of his works, most particularly his first Soviet opera, Semyon Kotko (1939).

Set during the Civil War (and, implicitly, Ukraine’s war of independence),

Act III presents an idyllic summer’s evening then destroyed by invaders portrayed with brutal, relentlessly advancing ostinatos (surely resonant after the Holodomor).

Most remarkably, and contrary to Stalinist doctrine proscribing ‘bourgeois nationalist art’, Prokofiev followed this with a choral setting of a poem by the celebrated Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (1814-61), Zapovit (‘My Testimony’), a prayer that Ukrainians may ‘break your heavy chains, and water your freedom with the blood of our enemies’.