Sergey Prokofiev diaries: 3 March 1925

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Borovsky's concert with the Scriabin 9th Sonata. It is a long time since I heard any Scriabin, and my last impressions had been of how alien he had become, hence my great interest in now putting these feelings to the test. In the first place, the work was marvellously played (and Borovsky was note perfect). Secondly, it portrays a fascinating image of a certain mystical striving mixed with eroticism and a kind of shadowy, dark power, a striving that at times erupts in convulsive spasms followed by the melancholy of impotence and a dreamy, exhausted resignation - the consequence alike of eroticism and a neurotically insistent mysticism. Thirdly, I came back to my paradoxical assertion that it is Scriabin, not Stravinsky, who is the national composer, because Scriabin with his passion for theosophy interwoven with eroticism, his soaring eruptions, his refinement and his enervation, reflects the Russian epoch in its entirety. But Stravinsky? His use of folk tunes hardly makes him a national composer. The fact that he is more loved abroad than at home is a great grief* to his nationalist aspirations. And leaving this question aside, the threat will always hang over him that he is not a true Russian, but the facsimile of a Russian the French have wanted to construct for themselves!

excerpt from 'Sergey Prokofiev diaries: 3 March 1925' pp. 142 (216 words)

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