According to your brother Oleg, your father's third passion (next to music and chess) was literature. I know he was particularly fond of Chekhov, Nabokov, and Pushkin. He also wrote many of the librettos to his own operas and several short stories. His skill as a writer is readily apparent in his two autobiographies and his 1927 diary. Tell us about your father's love of literature and skill as a writer.

Prokofiev did have good literary talents and even wrote once in his youth that if he did not become a good composer, he would be a writer. Indeed, his memoirs, regrettably covering only the period until the graduation from the Conservatory, his extensive and diverse correspondence fully reflect his bright individuality. Prokofiev wrote poetry as well. Once he and his friend, poet Boris Verin, organized a contest for the best translation of Eredia's sonnets. Poets Konstantin Balmont and Igor Severyanin were the judges. By their verdict Prokofiev was declared the winner, and he was very proud of having "won over a poet."

I must say that Prokofiev almost always wrote the librettos for his operas himself. This allowed him to draw together as much as possible the literary (language) and the musical components of an opera. So the participation in the writing of librettos by Mira Mendelson, who did not have any experience in that field, was rather auxilliary, if not one of a secretary. I witnessed while visiting my father in his last years how he many times asked Mira to copy excerpts from Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," marked down by him.

As for Prokofiev's "futuristic short stories", most of them (there are eight) were written during his journey, that took three months, including a stopover in Japan, from St. Petersburg to the U.S. in 1918.

Later on Oleg collected and published them both in Russian and in English. These original, unique stories did not have a follow-up.

I also want to add that except for books by Pushkin, Chekhov and Nabokov I remember father owning books by Tolstoy, Remizov, Dos-Pasos, and even Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Prokofiev was thinking about composing an opera on the basis of the latter novel's plot!

How did you get along with your brother before you moved back to the Soviet Union in 1936?

It should not be forgotten that at that time we were still little boys (in 1936 I was twelve and Oleg seven years old.) I was studying in a private school (Ecole Tannenberg) that was situated five metro stations away from our house on rue Valentin Hauy. There I studied for five years before leaving for the Soviet Union. During the first years I was taken there by Elsa, our English-speaking Danish "nurse" (I was taught English even earlier.) I went there by myself in the last years of living in Paris. The school was a day board (with lunch, tea break, a walk in the neighboring Boulogne forest, and preparation of homework.) Therefore, I came home at 5-6 p.m., but with no homework to do. I had good grades and was among the top students in my class. Oleg attended Doctor Rubakin's countryside kindergarten (I also went there for a year.) In the morning a special bus picked up the children from all over Paris, and brought them back at the end of the day. So our parents did not have to care for us a lot. As I mentioned before, our family always spent summer holidays in the South of France, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea or Atlantic Ocean. If parents left in summer for a concert tour, we lived with our grandmother (Lina's mother), whom we called "Mémé", in Cannes.

My other grandmother (our father's mother), Maria Grigoryevna Prokofieva, died in December 1924, and I was born in February of the same year. A photo exists where she is holding me.

In Cannes, Mémé lived all year long with our very ill grandfather - Juan Codina, and when he died she moved to Paris, where she also took care of us. It was she who taught us Russian, just as she did with Lina before. Mémé (her real name was Olga) was born in Russia, her father -- Vladislav Nemysskiy, of Polish-Lithuanian descent, was a lawyer; her mother, Caroline Verlé, was French.

In October 1935, you visited the Moscow Children's Music Theatre to see Natalia Satz's productions for her children's theatre. Later she asked Prokofiev to compose a work which we all know was to become his most well-known work -- 'Peter and the Wolf'. I understand you attended the first performance at the Central Children's Theatre in 1936 with your father playing and Natalia narrating. You also attended the first official public performance in May of 1936 at the Moscow Central Pioneer Palace. Do you remember those performances? What was it like?

I remember visiting one of the first performances of "Peter and the Wolf" in 1936 in the hall of the Moscow Pioneer Palace. The hall was full, there were a lot of children in motley clothes and the abundance of red color amazed me! An exciting, festive and unusual atmosphere reigned -- everybody was speaking Russian! It was my first attendance of a concert in Moscow -- with my father and his music. The text of "Peter and Wolf" was expressively and brilliantly read by Natalia Satz -- a young attractive woman who, as the action went on, was transformed into Peter or Grandfather or the Wolf or the Duck! It was a great success, the children were joyfully shouting. Father and Natalia Satz came out many times to bow. I remember how all of our family was returning on foot along the boulevard with a pond where real ducks were swimming. It was a beautiful sunny day in May. Father was pleased and walked joyously and excited, recalling various episodes of the concert. The family had just successfully moved to Moscow and nothing foreshadowed the soon-to-come tragic events of 1937-48.

How did you feel about the move back to the Soviet Union in 1936?

Adjustment to life in the USSR was gradual and here is why: upon arrival in Moscow we lived for a few days in the "National" Hotel which was by Moscow standards of the time considered good but old-fashioned. Then for the whole summer we left for the Rest Home of the Bolshoi Theater which was housed in the former mansion of the famous Russian painter Polenov. His son (as a Director of the Rest Home) and grandson whom I befriended were still living there. In the main house there was a very interesting museum with paintings of Polenov. I was most struck by the nature of the area -- endless vistas and dense mushroom-filled forests, a wide river, the Oka, in which we enjoyed swimming. I understood what the Russian expanses were and came to love them. Those on vacation, singers and ballerinas, producers and choreographers, treated us very well, I played with their children and was particularly fond of rowing.

We also spent our vacations there the previous year in 1935 when we came for the summer to the USSR, but then the problem with the apartment had not been solved yet and we went back to Paris. Father liked it there a lot, it was conducive to his work and for warming up he even played tennis and volleyball. We were given separate rooms in the new building and for his work father was provided with a detached wooden house with a terrace on the banks of the Oka. There was a piano and it is essentially there that music for his famous ballet "Romeo and Juliet" was written.

Later on, our life in Moscow did not change much at first. We had a decent four-room apartment by Soviet standards, a maid, and a chauffeur-driven car. After an unsuccessful attempt at studying in a Soviet school I was admitted into the Anglo-American school for the children of Soviet officials working in England and the USA, with instruction in English in all subjects. In short, the former rhythm of life and work of the Prokofiev family remained, plus the Russian environment which was absent in Paris and contacts with old friends -- Miaskovsky, Asafyev, Demchinsky, Gliere as well as the Raevsky's, the Prokofievs' relations -- were added.

Unfortunately, this did not last long. In the winter of 1940-41 our parents separated and we saw father rarely. Then the war of 1941-45 followed, father was evacuated along with other composers to the Caucasus and then to the capital of Kazakhstan, Alma-Ata. Mother, Oleg and I stayed in Moscow -- it was hard.

Once you returned to the Soviet Union, was the transition difficult? I understand you and Oleg initially attended a special school for foreign children and instruction was in English. But the school closed down in 1937. What happened? Where did you go then?

At first everything went smoothly for my father and he even went twice to give concerts in Western Europe and the USA. He bought a Ford automobile (David Oistrakh bought the same at the same time). Later, when the war in Europe started, foreign trips, naturally, ceased, and for Prokofiev -- forever. For Oleg and me it was more difficult in the sense that we did not speak Russian well. Oleg spoke it pretty poorly -- he had a strong accent and used funny expressions. But we practiced a lot and there was rapid progress. Still, because of our accent and western clothes everybody took us for foreigners. Both in school and on the playground we were called "Americans", which upset us, but generally we were treated well.

In the Anglo-American school I felt fine -- everybody had similar problems there! It was just like an island of freedom. Unfortunately, this didn't last long. The frightful year of 1937 arrived. The terror affected our school too. Parents of many of my friends were arrested as "spies" and the school was closed in the middle of the academic year. Father managed to have me admitted into Radischev Russian school close to our home, which I finished in 1941 just before the war.

Valeri Gergiev recently released a complete recording of Semyon Kotko and performed it live at Covent Garden in London. This is a work which the West has known very little about. Musically, it is a vast work containing gorgeous, lush melodies. More importantly, the writing of the Opera marked a very dark period in your father's life. It is known that your father's friend Vsevolod Meyerhold was arrested during the production of the opera and later executed. Can you shed any light on what actually happened during the writing and staging of Semyon Kotko?

After the arrest of Meyerhold, another producer was appointed, Serafima Birman, who later played the part of Yefrosinya in Eisenstein and Prokofiev's film Ivan the Terrible. Work was going on but there were also difficulties of a different type. In 1939 Stalin and Hitler signed the Non-Aggression Pact between the USSR and Germany, and the theater was ordered to substitute someone else for the German invaders in the opera Semyon Kotko, who were portrayed in an excessively satirical light. The dress rehearsal was imminent. I remember father telling us at home with a smile that they wanted to substitute Austrians for Germans, and they already started doing it. "That would be good --", he said, " few changes." But it was not allowed either. And then they thought of substituting Haydamaks (nationalist Ukranian partisans) for Germans and there were more changes -- in the music, in the text, and even in the costumes! So let there be Haydamaks -- the first performance of Semyon Kotko took place in 1940 in the Stanislavsky opera theater.

Was your father ever under risk of being arrested?

It is hard to say - he and Meyerhold were friends. He probably did but he did not realize it. He was appalled at the excessive cruelty of the authorities, but continued working. What was there to do? He was trapped...

Tell us about your mother Lina. Very little is written about her. It was known she was training to be a singer when she met your father and gave a few performances once back in Europe. How far did she pursue her operatic career?

My mother was born in Madrid. Her father, Juan Codina, was a Spanish tenor and her mother, née Olga Nemysskaya, also was a singer. Olga was born in Russia and lived there until her adolescence. Later she took singing lessons in Italy and met there with her future husband. Soon after Lina's birth in 1897 the Codina family briefly visited Russia and then moved to the United States where young Lina met Sergei Prokofiev after his concert in New York in 1918. They had common friends, including Rachmaninov.

Lina started to study singing in the United States and in the beginning of the twenties left for Milan to continue her studies. She was a soprano and once sang the part of Gilda in Rigoletto. Then she studied with the famous teachers Phelia Litvin and Emma Calve. At that time she met Prokofiev's mother Maria Grigoryevna, who had escaped from Russia via the Black Sea and was interned in the Prince Islands whence Sergei Prokofiev managed to bring her to France. After all these ordeals Maria Grigoryevna got seriously ill and almost lost her sight. Lina was visiting Sergei and his mother when they settled in Ettal in the Bavarian Alps, and she took care of the ailing Maria Girgoryevna. With Maria Grigoryevna's blessing she finally married Sergei Prokofiev in 1923 in Ettal. Soon the whole family moved to Paris where their first son Sviatoslav was born in 1924.

From 1924 Lina began performing on occasion with her husband at concerts in the United States and Europe, singing Prokofiev's romances. She assumed the artistic pseudonym of Llubera -- her Spanish grandmother's last name. After the birth of her second son Oleg in December 1928, her career as a singer for all intents and purposes ended, with the exception of a few radio performances in Moscow before the war.

I want to note here that when Sergei Prokofiev decided to return to Russia he asked Lina what she thought of it and added that if she did not want to go, he would not go. Lina supported him and agreed to move. Had she refused, our family's fate would have developed very differently...

The years leading up to and during World War II must have been very difficult for your mother, your brother and you. Can you tell us a bit about those years?

Of course, the war years were doubly difficult for us: because of father's absence and the difficult wartime conditions. In this period father practically did not help us, and he was not in Moscow -- he had been evacuated along with other members of the creative intelligentsia. He left with Mira Mendelson (although officially she was not Prokofiev's wife), so leaving together was out of the question: everyone was leaving with his family.

During the war, Muscovites suffered from cold and hunger. We were saved by receiving father's food card (the so-called ration book) with which one could buy more products than with an ordinary food card. Thanks to her knowledge of several languages, Lina started working as a translator in Informbureau. I was studying at the Institute, receiving a meager scholarship, and in the evenings I worked on a private basis for the architect Oltarzhevsky who lived in our house. Moscow was bombed by German planes and the tenants of the houses including my mother and I took turns keeping duty on the roof of the house to extinguish the falling firebombs.

There were also labor services in which I took part: it's when everybody who could (or could not) work, was mobilized to either pick potatoes or other vegetables that would otherwise get frozen and wasted; or to manually saw firewood (wood stockpiling); or when the Germans advanced very close to Moscow -- to dig anti-tank trenches. All this affected my health and soon I caught TB. By this time father returned to Moscow and when he learned that I was ill he got excited and even came to see me and started to help us financially again. I was treated intensively and sent several times to sanatoriums. Finally my health improved.

But the most terrible thing for us happened in 1948 when mother was arrested. It was a replay of sorts of 1937 terror. In 1948 father also got hit because of Zhdanov's notorious decree on formalism in music. Thus the communist party was persecuting intelligentsia. With rare exceptions Prokofiev was practically never performed and he would say reproachfully: "like I never wrote anything else". He was taking this very hard. In the course of next five years his health was progressively getting worse, acute hypertensive crises were occurring more often and on March 5, 1953 there developed a stroke as a result of which he passed away.

Your father left you, Oleg and Lina to live with Mira Mendelson in March 1941. Tell us what happened.

I don't like to touch upon this but the facts are as follows: in 1939 father was vacationing alone in Kislovodsk and he had a "resort affair" which naturally resulted in disagreements between my parents. 25-year-old Mira Mendelson was provocatively threatening to commit suicide. Father was completely at a loss and finally in the beginning of 1941 left home. There was no talk of a divorce with Lina and a marriage to Mira.

How often did you see your father after he moved out?

Unfortunately we saw each other rarely and as a rule at a dacha in Nikolina Gora where in his last years father lived both in summer and winter. He would send a chauffeured car and my wife and I would spend the whole day with him. Sometimes Oleg would go too. It was almost always on Sundays. We would usually walk with father in the forest, have lunch, rest and in the evening we were brought home.

Watching us my wife used to say that we were communicating in a strange way, not as a father and son but as good acquaintances conducting a high society talk of cultural news, concerts, theatres, exhibitions etc. We never discussed the problems of everyday life. Some kind of a wall was felt though in difficult moments he helped us.

And in 1948 my brother and I were invited to live in turn for one month each during summer vacations but it happened only once.