¹ For a general discussion of adaptation criteria in such cases, see Burry, Alexander, Multi-Mediated Dostoevsky: Transposing Novels into Opera, Film, and Drama (Evanston, 2011), 18–19Google Scholar. Caryl Emerson summarises the War and Peace fidelity debate in ‘Leo Tolstoy and the Rights of Music under Stalin (Another Look at Prokofiev’s Party-Minded Masterpiece, War and Peace)’, Tolstoy Studies Journal 14 (2002), 1–14; here 1–4. The librettist for War and Peace, Mira Mendelson, was praised after the 1 July 1942 vetting of the opera for ‘staying close to Tolstoy’s text’: see Mendel’son-Prokof’eva, M.A., O Sergee Sergeeviche Prokof’eve: Vospominaniia dnevniki (1938–1967) (Moscow, 2012)Google Scholar, 111. It is characteristic that Georgii Polianovskii felt the need to begin his review of the original 1945 concert performance with a discussion of the impossibility of capturing Tolstoy’s masterpiece in operatic form. He then went on to praise Prokofiev and Mendelson for their selection of material: Vecherniaia Moskva (3 July 1945), 3.

² See Seinen, Nathan, ‘Kutuzov’s Victory, Prokofiev’s Defeat: The Revisions of “War and Peace”’, Music & Letters 90 (2009), 399–431CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morrison, Simon, The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; Richard Taruskin, ‘War and Peace’, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O002216 (accessed 20 November 2012); McAllister, Rita, ‘Prokofiev’s Tolstoy Epic’, The Musical Times 113 (1972), 851–855CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A notable exception is Emerson’s ‘Leo Tolstoy and the Rights of Music’, which examines the opera through the lens of Tolstoy’s aesthetic doctrine and views on music.

³ Suggesting that ‘romantic love and its loss’ is what ‘conventional opera does best’ and what opera audiences care most about, Emerson notes that some musicians in support of the project in 1942 advised Prokofiev to scale back and retitle the opera Natasha Rostova. Prokofiev, however, would not agree (‘Leo Tolstoy and the Rights of Music’, 1). Although Prokofiev’s refusal was surely true to the ideology of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, Emerson does not pursue this intriguing strand of enquiry about love. The other scholars whose work I cite in this article treat love as a musical or plot motivator without exploring its ideological ramifications.

⁴ Bullock, Philip Ross, ‘Staging Stalinism: The Search for Soviet Opera in the 1930s’, Cambridge Opera Journal 18 (2006), 83–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; here 96.

⁵ For a discussion of the work’s early reception and critics’ troubled reactions to the strange mixture of genres, see Morson, Gary Saul, Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in ‘War and Peace’ (Stanford, 1987), 37–41Google Scholar, 49–51.

⁶ At the crux of the matter stands Tolstoy’s handling of two opposing ideas: free will versus historical necessity. On the surface, it appears that individuals have agency in the novel and act by free will, yet on the macro-scale Tolstoy claims that the fates of nations are controlled by historical laws (inevitability), not the wills of individuals (he attacks the idea of ‘great men’ such as Napoleon controlling history). Isaiah Berlin described this as a conflict of ‘two systems of values, the public and the private’, and argued that the ‘terrible dilemma’ at the heart of the work is ‘never finally resolved’ (The Hedgehog and the Fox (Chicago, 1978), 30–1). Tolstoy argues that the assumption of ‘man’s free will as something capable of influencing historical events … would destroy the possibility of the existence of laws, that is, of any science whatsoever. If there is even a single body moving freely, then the laws of Kepler and Newton are negativised and no conception of the movement of the heavenly bodies any longer exists.’ Lev Tolstoi, Voina i mir, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Iubileinoe izdanie) (hereafter PSS), 90 vols. (Moscow, 1928–59), XII: 338. All translations are by Louise and Aylmer Maude: War and Peace, ed. Amy Mandelker (Oxford, 2010) (hereafter WP).

⁷ Wasiolek, Edward, ‘War and Peace: The Theoretical Chapters’, in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1988), 87–102Google Scholar; here 87.

⁸ Paul Debreczeny, ‘Freedom and Necessity’, in Bloom, ed., Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, 41–53; here 45.

⁹ References to the ‘family idea’ (mysl’ semeinaia) are ubiquitous in Tolstoy scholarship, as Tolstoy himself referred to this as the central idea in Anna Karenina (see the diaries of Tolstoy’s wife: S.A. Tolstaia, Dnevniki v 2-kh tomakh (Moscow, 1978), 1: 502). For scholarship on Tolstoy and the family, see Cruise, Edwina, ‘The Ideal Woman in Tolstoi: Resurrection’, Canadian-American Slavic Studies 11 (1977), 281–286CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cruise, , ‘Women, Sexuality and the Family in Tolstoy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy, ed. Donna Tussing Orwin (Cambridge, 2002), 191–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hruska, Anne, ‘Love and Slavery: Serfdom, Emancipation, and Family in Tolstoy’s Fiction’, Russian Review 66 (2007), 627–646Google Scholar; Karpushina, Olga, ‘The Idea of the Family in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: The Moral Hierarchy of Families’, in Anna Karenina on Page and Screen, ed. Helena Goscilo and Petre Petrov (Pittsburg, 2001), 63–92Google Scholar; M. V. Stroganov, ed., ‘Mysl’ semeinaia’ v russkoi literature: sbornik statei i materialov (Tver, 2008). For recent work on Tolstoy and brotherhood, see Donskov, Andrew and Woodsworth, John, eds., Lev Tolstoy and the Concept of Brotherhood: Proceedings of a Conference held at the University of Ottawa 22–24 February, 1996 (New York, 1996)Google Scholar. I argue for the importance of siblings to Tolstoy’s philosophy in Siblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: The Path to Universal Brotherhood (Evanston, in press).

¹⁰ I discuss this pattern in ‘The Sibling Bond: A Model for Romance and Motherhood in War and Peace’, Tolstoy Studies Journal 18 (2006), 1–15, and in Siblings in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

¹¹ PSS 10: 5; WP 318.

¹² PSS 10: 124; WP 423.

¹³ Tolstoy, , The Kingdom of God is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life, trans. Constance Garnett, rpt (New York, 2005)Google Scholar, 77, 78.

¹⁴ For a discussion of Tolstoy’s Soviet legacy and which texts were available to the public, see Bartlett, Rosamund, Tolstoy: A Russian Life (New York, 2011), 416–454Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Tolstoy, , Kingdom of God, 77Google Scholar. In the mid-twentieth century, Russian village writers often referred to their village as the ‘small homeland’ (malaia rodina). See Parthé, Kathleen, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (Princeton, 1992), 6–9Google Scholar. Tolstoy would have approved of this model for basing the idea of homeland on the close and personal.

¹⁶ Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London, 2006)Google Scholar, 6.

¹⁷ Tolstoy attacks the idea of Russians going to war to defend their ‘brother Slavs’ in Serbia, the more so because this is brotherhood that calls for bloodshed.

¹⁸ PSS 9: 302; WP 263.

¹⁹ PSS 9: 156–7; WP 136.

²⁰ PSS 12: 39; WP 1036. While there are other factors at play besides the rosy recognition of brotherhood that Tolstoy emphasises in his commentary (shared social class arguably trumping pure humanitarian feeling), here again, the sense of brotherhood is rooted in two specific individuals who, through their moment of connection, have accessed a universal truth.

²¹ In compiling the libretto, Mendelson drew heavily on Tolstoy’s own prose. See Mendel’son-Prokof’eva, O Sergee Sergeeviche Prokof’eve, 64.

²² McAllister claims that the spectator ‘is required to base his experience in the theatre directly upon Tolstoy, to think through the novel’ (‘Prokofiev’s Tolstoy Epic’, 851). For a discussion of the implications of this kind of relationship between opera and source text, see also Emerson, Caryl, Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme (Bloomington, 1986)Google Scholar, 149.

²³ As Nathan Seinen has noted, Prokofiev’s initial plan for the opera stayed true to Tolstoy by ‘concentrating on the role played by the common people’ rather than on Kutuzov (‘Kutuzov’s Victory’, 408).

²⁴ PSS 12: 13–14; WP 1014.

²⁵ We hear echoes of Boris throughout the 1942 War (some of which survive in the final version), as, for example, in the street scene in Moscow (scene 11 in the final version), where Prokofiev has peasants sound out the writing on a decree syllable by syllable, much like the comic monk, Varlaam, in Boris Godunov sounding out the warrant for Grisha Otrepev’s arrest. In noting Prokofiev’s debt to Boris, Richard Taruskin calls the scene of the burning of Moscow ‘veritably a second Kromï Forest’ (‘War and Peace’). But while Kromï closes Musorgsky’s opera, Prokofiev was forced to change his final scene and to end with a homophonic slava (‘glory’) chorus that brings his War and Peace in line with a more conservative strand of nineteenth-century Russian nationalist operas such as A Life for the Tsar (and its 1937 Soviet adaptation, Ivan Susanin), Ruslan and Liudmila or Prince Igor.

²⁶ This split is not unlike the division many early critics made between distinct halves of ‘war’ and ‘peace’ in Tolstoy’s novel, which they thought did not hold together as a unified whole (see Morson, , Hidden in Plain View, 49Google Scholar).

²⁷ Given how closely the couple worked, I will not attempt here to distinguish between their contributions. After the initial writing of the libretto, in which Mendelson took the leading role, for simplicity’s sake I will refer to the opera as Prokofiev’s.

²⁸ See, for example, Emerson, ‘Leo Tolstoy and the Rights of Music’, 5; Morrison, , People’s Artist, 177Google Scholar; Taruskin, ‘War and Peace’. A similar parallel has been noted in the novel by Debreczeny (‘Freedom and Necessity’, 45–6). Another instance that demonstrates this parallel is the way the introduction of the guests during the ball (Act I scene 2) is mirrored by the introduction of the regiments in the first scene of Act II, with each name called aloud, followed by ball guests/Kutuzov commenting on the new arrival.

²⁹ See especially Seinen, ‘Kutuzov’s Victory’; the revision process is also discussed by Morrison, People’s Artist; Taruskin, ‘War and Peace’; McAllister, ‘Prokofiev’s Tolstoy Epic’.

³⁰ The letter from Khrapchenko was dated 19 June 1942, and is reprinted in Irina Medvedeva, ‘Istoriia prokof’evskogo avtografa, ili GURK v deistvii’, in Sergei Prokof’ev: k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia: pis’ma, vospominaniia, stat’i, ed. M.P. Rakhmanova (Moscow, 2007), 216–39; here 224. These critics were right that much of Tolstoy’s sprawling work does not make for rousing, patriotic opera. The recitative style favoured by Prokofiev could not capture the grandeur of the wartime struggle in the manner that these critics desired. As Musorgsky found when revising his Boris Godunov, prose recitative could potentially be heard as unserious, and certainly as less exalted than full-fledged aria-like melodic lines. See Taruskin, Richard, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton, 1993), 256–261Google Scholar.

³¹ Letter reprinted in Medvedeva, ‘Istoriia prokof’evskogo avtografa’, 224.

³² Reprinted in Medvedeva, ‘Istoriia prokof’evskogo avtografa’, 227, 231.

³³ The scene of the war council at Fili was added due to pressure from the Bolshoi musical director, Samosud. See Seinen, ‘Kutuzov’s Victory’, 419.

³⁴ After the 1945 concert performance in Moscow, as rumours flew that War and Peace would soon receive its premiere in New York, D. Rabinovich described the music to the American public as being concentrated ‘at two opposite poles’ – the ‘lyrical and tender’ versus the ‘epic and heroic’: ‘Prokofieff’s Opera is Epic of War and Peace’, American-Soviet Music Review 1 (1946), 28–30, here 28. Simon Morrison also notes that Prokofiev ‘strove for intimate character portraits’ in the peace scenes and for ‘historical panorama’ in the war scenes (People’s Artist, 177).

³⁵ McAllister, , ‘Prokofiev’s Tolstoy Epic’, 851Google Scholar.

³⁶ Debreczeny, , ‘Freedom and Necessity’, 47Google Scholar.

³⁷ The duet was composed in April 1949, and added in what Taruskin terms the ‘fifth version’ (‘War and Peace’).

³⁸ McAllister, , ‘Prokofiev’s Tolstoy Epic’, 851Google Scholar; Taruskin, ‘War and Peace’.

³⁹ Rachmaninov had made similar allusions to Tchaikovsky’s musical depictions of love in his first opera, Aleko (1892).

⁴⁰ The first staging took place at Princeton University in February 2012. A free-verse English translation by Caryl Emerson of Krzhizhanovsky’s script is available in Sergey Prokofiev and His World, ed. Simon Morrison (Princeton, 2008), 115–90. The Russian original, alongside a new translation by James Falen, which respects the metre and rhyme scheme of the Onegin stanza and was created for the production, will be published in Pushkin Review (forthcoming).

⁴¹ PSS 10: 158; WP 452.

⁴² PSS 9: 324; WP 281–2.

⁴³ Although the audience is aware that Natasha and Andrei are falling in love, their dialogue while dancing does not actually capture this. Instead there seems to be a disconnection: Andrei reminds Natasha of the night at Otradnoe and she comments on the beauty of the ball, as if participating in a different conversation.

⁴⁴ Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s Quiet Flows the Don (1935) became the model for the ‘song opera’ (pesennaia opera), a form that ‘was principally constituted of solo numbers and choruses in a simple and accessible musical language based on popular models’ (Bullock, ‘Staging Stalinism’, 91). After the attack on Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth in 1936, composers were required to aim for this more accessible musical style.

⁴⁵ Anatole’s love letter is written for him by Dolokhov, who at this point is fashioning himself as a Byronic hero.

⁴⁶ Margo Rosen has convincingly identified the opera as Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable: ‘Natasha Rostova at Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable’, Tolstoy Studies Journal 17 (2005), 71–94.

⁴⁷ PSS 10: 340; WP 614.

⁴⁸ Mendelson wrote of the pain it caused her to leave out ‘many superb pages’ because they would not fit in the opera (O Sergee Sergeeviche Prokof’eve, 79).

⁴⁹ Letter from Khrapchenko to Prokofiev (published in Medvedeva, ‘Istoriia prokof’evskogo avtografa’, 224).

⁵⁰ Tolstoy’s belief in the corrupting power of amorous desire grew over the course of his life (culminating in his advocacy of abstinence even in marriage). As early as War and Peace, sexual desire is portrayed as suspect and polluting (see, for instance, Pierre’s guilty feelings leaning over the snuff box when he first desires Hélène, or Marya’s feeling of sinfulness at desiring ‘earthly love’ (liubov’ zemnaia) and a family). I analyse Natasha and Nikolai’s relationship and discuss Tolstoy’s use of sibling relations as an alternative to romantic love in ‘The Sibling Bond’.

⁵¹ For more on the family models for characters in the novel, see Brett Cooke, ‘Tolstoi i novyi Darvin(izm): evolutsionnye struktury v romane “Voina i mir”’, in Lev Tolstoi i mirovaia literatura: materialy III mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii v Iasnoi Poliane, 28–30 avgusta, 2003, ed. Galina Alekseevna (Tula, 2005), 195–203; here 198; Wilson, A.N., Tolstoy (New York, 1988)Google Scholar, 23; Maude, Aylmer, The Life of Tolstoy, 2 vols. (London, 1929)Google Scholar, II: 422.

⁵² PSS 12: 290; WP 1264.

⁵³ Although she regrets in another aside that she cannot reach out to Natasha with love, the impression of the episode – Marya’s only appearance in the opera – is decidedly negative. Prokofiev confines her to a recitative style that gives no room for the sort of lofty sentiments usually conveyed in aria.

⁵⁴ PSS 10: 49; WP 358.

⁵⁵ PSS 10: 205; WP 493.

⁵⁶ PSS 10: 206; WP 494.

⁵⁷ Later in the novel, during her moral regeneration, Natasha experiences this kind of universal brotherhood at a deeper level in the church when she prays for peace (PSS 11: 74).

⁵⁸ Brett Cooke links the positive portrayal of Nikolai to the fact that his character was based on Tolstoy’s own father, and traces the ‘improvement’ of Nikolai over the various drafts of War and Peace (‘Tolstoi i novyi Darvin(izm)’, 197).

⁵⁹ PSS 11: 232; WP 852.

⁶⁰ RGALI, fund 962, list 3, folder 331, p. 58. Quoted in Seinen, ‘Kutuzov’s Victory’, 410.

⁶¹ Khrapchenko, Mikhail, Lev Tolstoi kak khudozhnik (Moscow, 1963)Google Scholar, 96, 115. S.P. Bychkov cites the same diary entry: Narodno-geroicheskaia epopeia L. N. Tolstogo “Voina i mir” (Moscow, 1949), 20.

⁶² Khrapchenko, , Lev Tolstoi kak khudozhnik, 173Google Scholar.

⁶³ Anatoly Lunacharsky, ‘O tvorchestve Tolstogo’, reprinted in L. N. Tolstoi v russkoi kritike: sbornik statei, ed. I. Mikhailova (Moscow, 1960), 453–75; here 470.

⁶⁴ Bychkov, , Narodno-geroicheskaia epopeia, 23Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Bychkov, ‘Roman “Voina i mir”’, in L. N. Tolstoi: Sbornik statei, ed. I. Trofimov (Moscow, 1955)Google Scholar, 181.

⁶⁶ K.A. Fedin, ‘Iskusstvo L’va Tolstogo’, reprinted in L. N. Tolstoi v russkoi kritike: sbornik statei, 500–4; here 502 (the article was originally published in 1953).

⁶⁷ Khrapchenko, , Lev Tolstoi kak khudozhnik, 164Google Scholar. Khrapchenko is clearly echoing Lunacharsky’s discussion of War and Peace in ‘O tvorchestve Tolstogo’.

⁶⁸ Tolstoy, , Kingdom of God, 77Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Many scholars have commented on the link between nationalism and the idea of the family. Thomas Eriksen even posits that ‘nationalism promises to satisfy some of the same needs that kinship was formerly responsible for’: Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives (London, 2002), 107.

⁷⁰ This passage also dovetails with the meaning encoded in terms such as ‘motherland’, ‘fatherland’ and ‘homeland’. As Steven Grosby has noted, these terms imply ‘a form of kinship that revolves around the image of a bounded territory’: Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2005), 43.

⁷¹ Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington, 2000)Google Scholar, 116. This is similar to the village writers’ use of the ‘small homeland’ (malaia rodina) to refer to their village (Parthé, Russian Village Prose, 6–9).

⁷² Seinen, ‘Kutuzov’s Victory’, esp. 420.

⁷³ In ‘Some Words About War and Peace’, Tolstoy specifically rejects the idea of heroes in art: ‘For an historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of man’s relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men’ (PSS 16: 10; WP 1311).

⁷⁴ PSS 11: 174; WP 799. Prokofiev included this scene, but removed these lines so that in the opera Kutuzov ends with a more forceful exclamation about making the French eat horseflesh.

⁷⁵ Taruskin, , Musorgsky, 261Google Scholar. Notably, Prokofiev never allows Napoleon to move into this lyrical register.

⁷⁶ Herbert Lindenberger notes that ‘whenever a play is transformed into an opera, we note at once that the characters assume a more formal, often a more heroic stance than they did when they simply spoke their lines’: Opera: The Extravagant Art (Ithaca, 1984), 19. There is a similar shift in ‘heroic stance’ when the music moves from recitative into aria.

⁷⁷ Clark’s study of the Soviet novel helps explain part of the need for this reinterpretation of Kutuzov’s role. Clark argues that the 1930s saw a shift from lateral metaphors of brotherhood to vertical ones of father–son: ‘The father-and-son paradigm replaced the Five-Year Plan ideal within the “family” in terms of a hierarchy of maturity and care’: The Soviet Novel, 129. At the time Prokofiev was writing, his War and Peace had to be grounded in this new family metaphor that gave pride of place not to the fraternally united people, but to the benevolent father–Stalin figure.

⁷⁸ This echoes Anderson’s claim that ‘the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ or ‘fraternity’ (Imagined Communities, 7).

⁷⁹ Parakilas, James, ‘The Chorus’, in The Cambridge Companion to Grand Opera, ed. David Charlton (Cambridge, 2003), 76–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; here 82.

⁸⁰ They sing: ‘For the honour of Moscow arise, people!’

⁸¹ The Russian in the opera translates as: ‘“Go with me, my sweetheart, into the green garden. The cherries have long been ripe, it’s time to pick them. Let’s go and toil my darling, in the garden green.” “I can’t go with you. I’ve stumbled, sweetheart. I can’t find my pinafore anywhere. What shall we collect them in, sweetheart? The basket has no bottom. If you want to know the truth, sweetheart, I just don’t want to and that’s that.”’ The following is a translation of the lyrics used by Poulenc in his arrangement (included in the Chansons françaises), from 1946: ‘Sweetheart, when we used to go to the woods / We used to eat nuts to our hearts’ content. / We could eat as much as we wanted.’ Refrain: ‘Sweetheart, you’ve got me overwhelmed / Overwhelmed by your beauty. Sweetheart, when we used to go to the fishpond / We used to help little ducklings swim. / We let them swim as much as we wanted.’ (Refrain) ‘Sweetheart, when we used to sit by the oven / we used to eat hot cakes. / We could eat as much as we wanted.’ (Refrain) ‘Sweetheart, when we used to sit in the garden / We used to sing day and night. / We could sing as much as we wanted.’ (Refrain) (I am grateful to Hartley Miller for this translation).

⁸² Lindenberger writes of the chorus as ‘a magnifying force that could lend the medium [of opera] an epic quality’ (Opera, 36).

⁸³ Glinka’s choice to glorify the ‘fatherland’ instead of the ‘motherland’ was anachronistic (the shift in rhetoric took place under Peter the Great) and emphasised the opera’s imperial agenda. See Hubbs, Joanna, Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (Bloomington, 1988)Google Scholar, 203. The finale of Ruslan and Liudmila begins with everyone singing the praises of Lel’, but the people ask for something greater than just this love, and in answer, the curtains on stage open to reveal an image of ancient Kiev and the chorus beings to rejoice.

⁸⁴ As David Brown explains: ‘the peasants in Khovanshchina lament the broader tragedy of Russia itself through the universal medium of corporate song … Grief has been ritualized, elevated from the (multi-)personal to the collective, and made, if not so poignant, the more weighty.’ Musorgsky: His Life and Works (Oxford, 2002), 271.

⁸⁵ Prokofiev was forced to add the final chorus (quite reluctantly) in 1942, after an audition of the opera with Samosud, and then to replace it in 1947 with a new chorus based on the melody of Kutuzov’s aria, as a way to give proper glory to Stalin’s stand-in (Seinen, , ‘Kutuzov’s Victory’, 414Google Scholar, 422).

⁸⁶ The philosophy of history Tolstoy expounds in the Second Epilogue would seem to be at cross-purposes with this slava chorus. In the closing passage of the book, after describing the difficulty people had in accepting Copernicus’s conclusion that the earth moved round the sun, Tolstoy claims that: ‘so in history the difficulty of recognising the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause, lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one’s own personality … In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognise a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognise a dependence of which we are not conscious’ (PSS 12: 341; WP 1308). This dependence would render the individual actions of one Kutuzov meaningless on their own; they would fall subject to the same interdependence that governs all human action.

⁸⁷ Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation (New York, 2006)Google Scholar, 60. Hutcheon also makes a similar observation about film, noting the author’s greater control on the reader’s visual focus (62). Boris Gasparov analyses this potential in relation to Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, suggesting that we – the audience – hear Tomsky’s ballade about the three magical cards ‘through Hermann’s ears’. Consequently, in Gasparov’s interpretation, Hermann’s ‘hidden thoughts – the instant connection he has made between the story he is listening to and his passion – affect the music of Tomsky’s tale, resulting in an uncanny resemblance between the theme of the three cards and the love leitmotif’: Five Operas and a Symphony: Word and Music in Russian Culture (New Haven, 2005), 152. I believe the music allows for greater ambiguity; the audience does not know if it is Hermann making these connections between the cards and his passion, or if an outside narrative presence in the music is drawing the two together.

⁸⁸ Abbate, Carolyn, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 119.

⁸⁹ Abbate, , Unsung Voices, 119Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ Prokofiev, of course, was aware of this himself. His patriotic Six Songs (op. 66) was published in 1935. Anderson calls ‘unisonance’, ‘the echoed physical realization of the imagined community’. Imagined Communities, 145.

⁹¹ As Caryl Emerson stresses, War and Peace was a particularly un-operatic source text: ‘all those meandering asymmetrical sentences that stretched out for whole paragraphs’ plus ‘almost unrelieved War, unstageable and unsingable’ in Part II (‘Leo Tolstoy and the Rights of Music’, 1–2). With a more poetic, tightly structured source text focused on a dramatic love story, less radical changes would be needed.

⁹² The Opéra national de Paris staging from 2000 has Natasha appear on stage during the closing moments and embrace Pierre, but this is not justified by anything in the libretto or stage directions (cond. Gary Bertini, dir. Francesca Zambello, dir. for video François Roussillon (Arthaus-Musik, 2009)).

⁹³ Bullock, , ‘Staging Stalinism’, 103Google Scholar.

⁹⁴ Platon Kerzhentsev, chairman of the Committee of Arts Affairs (1936–8), quoted in Frolova-Walker, Marina, ‘The Soviet Opera Project: Ivan Dzerzhinsky vs. Ivan Susanin’, Cambridge Opera Journal 18 (2006), 181–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar; here 198.

⁹⁵ See Frolova-Walker, , ‘Soviet Opera Project’, 189Google Scholar.

⁹⁶ Lunacharskii, Anatolii, ‘Novye puti opery i baleta’, Proletarskii muzykant 6 (1930)Google Scholar, 8. Quoted in Frolova-Walker, , ‘Soviet Opera Project’, 188Google Scholar.

⁹⁷ Maria Iudina (9 June 1945), quoted in Medvedeva, , ‘Istoriia prokov’evskogo avtografa’, 238Google Scholar.