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| | Constituted in successive stages over a period of 60 years, this impressive collection was gathered by Prokofiev himself and by members of his family.
During his prolonged stay in the West from 1918 to 1936, Prokofiev accumulated a huge personal archive of music manuscripts, correspondence, business and private papers. When it was time for him to move to Moscow, decisions had to be made about it and he chose to take only those papers and manuscripts he judged indispensable for his life in Russia. Everything else was left in the care of some of his close Parisian friends and also at his publisher's, Edition Russe de Musique. Those papers remained in France until 1974 when Mme Lina Prokofiev, having returned to Paris, was able to reclaim them. In the years that followed, and up to her death in 1989, Lina devoted her amazing energy to promoting Prokofiev and to tracking down his personal effects and papers, thus increasing considerably her husband's collection. Today, while the original documents constitute the private collection of the Prokofiev family, copies of them, along with Lina's personal archive, are made accessible at the Archive.
Lina Prokofiev's collection has recently been complemented by that of her younger son, Oleg, whose own papers related to his father's work were deposited at the Archive after his death in 1998.
Overall the archival collection contains 40 folders of Prokofiev's private and business correspondence between 1920 and 1935 (mostly unpublished), and 11 archival boxes from the Lina and Oleg Prokofiev collections. These comprise papers, correspondence, photos, articles, press cuttings, concert programmes and memorabilia. Prokofiev's music manuscripts were recently digitised and are now available to visiting scholars. (Description at collection level) | | There are a number of circumstances which make the study of Prokofiev's music and life problematic. Due to the fragmented nature of the composer's nomadic life and international career, original materials are spread across the world and, so far, it has been impossible to identify and access them all. While the Archive holds the greater part of the correspondence, music manuscripts and papers pertaining to the years he spent in the West, most of the materials relating to the Russian Imperial or Soviet periods are held in Russian institutions. This dispersion of materials has been a major obstacle to a solid evaluation of Prokofiev's contribution to the history of twentieth-century music.
In order to address this problem, the Prokofiev Archive leads an active policy of acquiring, organising and disseminating a wide range of materials and bibliographical data. On-going projects include the transcription and indexing of Prokofiev's massive correspondence kept at the Archive (1920 to 1935), and the building up of a comprehensive catalogue of Prokofiev's works. The Archive also ensures the dissemination of its materials in the form of publications such as the bi-annual journal of the Serge Prokofiev Foundation, Three Oranges, which includes regularly archival materials as yet unpublished. | |
