Opera The Fiery Angel became a climax of S. Prokofiev’s creativity during the emigration period of his life 1918-1932. However unique and one-of-a-kind in opera genre of the time, Fiery Angel was not born as an occasional concept of the composer, but rather as a vertex of multidimensional philosophical and cultural flows in Russian Silver Age era (1890-1914). As a masterpiece of a specific cultural tradition, opera Fiery Angel should be analyzed through the lens of Russian Decadence and Symbolist movement. In Fiery Angel, the occult, precisely Satanism together with objectivism and Freudian philosophy find their way to speak to listeners through the prodigiously dramatic romantic story based on the Symbolist title novel of Valery Brusov.
The most conspicuous feature of both the novel and the opera is the intense demonic setting, which indicates the overt theme of Satanism penetrating the pieces. Researchers of Silver Age assume that “Christian philosophy is the basis of Russian Symbolism, whereas Satanism, demonism, and anti-Christian views form the basis of Russian Decadence”[1]. These gothic themes had been widely popular in Russia especially in literature, affected by the works of Goethe, Edgar Allan Poe, Victor Hugo and Friedrich Nietzsche. Culturally possessive, Russian intellectuals followed French occultist Symbolists who tried to prove the existence of Satan in 1890th in Paris. However, those occultists may have kept their practices away from arts to avoid public notice and trivialization of their ideas – up until the beginning of 20c[2], when Symbolist movement took the form of literary, artistic and musical avant-garde. The reason for the popularity of Satanism in Russia lays in the reactive political regime which provoked widely spread disaffection from established norms, such as sociocultural mores, religion, politics and art forms. It led people to “seek answers their culture could not provide”[3] by accepting the nihilistic program of rejection.
Fascination with the satanic in literature and fine arts as well became an ultimate cultural response to the failed revolution of 1905. For example, Symbolist poets Konstantin Balmont and Aleksandr Blok identified the Devil with the bourgeois: “Go away from me, Satan. Go away from me, bourgeois”[4]. Interesting, that precisely this phrase introduces the role of Renata in the opera The Fiery Angel, op. 37, 1919-1930, past twenty years, with her haunted arioso: “Away! Don’t touch me! Hateful intruder begone from me”, which later repeats itself with women’s chorus of the grotesque final act[5]. Just like Prokofiev’s cantata They Are Seven, op. 30, 1918-33, which was composed in parallel with the opera, and the text of which derives from ancient Scythian incantation summoning the spirit of the earth to destroy the evil forces that afflict humanity[6], Renata’s first phrase, repeated itself over and over again, may have been one of the veiled composer’s commentaries on the Red Revolution of 1917.
Prokofiev based his opera The Fiery Angel on the titled novel of Brusov, 1907-8, which was written as a classical example in the flow of Symbolist and Satanist literature. The Fiery Angel stood in line with Vladimir Gippius’s highly political novel Chertova Kukla, 1908 (The devil’s doll) where humans are depicted as Satan’s puppets, unable to influence social life; Leonid Andreev’s drama Chernye Maski, 1907 (The black masks), where title characters represent the demonic agents of the collective unconscious and the human subconscious, story Pokoi, 1911 (Rest), unfinished novel Dnevnik Satany, 1919 (Satan’s diary) which proves people to be more evil than the Satan; Fedor Sologub’s satirical novel Melkiy Bes, 1905 (The petty demon) and trilogy Tvorimaya Legenda, 1907-13 (The created legend), his poetry and the article Satana v Muzyke, 1907 (Satan in music) in journal Zolotoe Runo, which is focused on popularity of three operas: Charles Gaunod’s Faust, Anton Rubinstein’s Demon and Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele; and of course Nikolai Riabushinsky’s journal Zolotoe Runo (Golden fleece) of the special edition, which was entirely dedicated to Devil with ninety-two entries for literary and fine art works[7].
Growing disaffection from Christian Orthodox beliefs have brought all those writers and artists to turn Satan into a cultural hero, romanticizing rebellions of Mephistopheles, Faust (both present in The Fiery Angel), and idealized tragic fallen angel Lucifer (or ‘fiery angel’ Madiel, as he was described in Brusov’s title novel). Escapism and rebellious nature of these characters inspired artists not only to “upset predominant sensibilities and express unconscious desires, but they also wanted to sell their work, and, then as now, nothing sold better than sensationalism, particularly if it was coupled with Satanism”[8]. Writer Andrey Belyi, along with nonsymbolist critics such as Georgiy Novopolin[9], stated that “the “myth” of Decadent debauchery grew out of a calculated effort to shock the bourgeoisie with Satanism and pornography”[10]. Similarly, when Prokofiev first read The Fiery Angel in 1919 in New York, he got carried with its the eroticism, “endless orgies” and scenes of Catholic Inquisition, hoping to shock the public with “maximal orchestral firepower” in a manner of modernized Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable, 1831, a “grand opera”, and Charles Gaunod’s Faust, 1859, a “comedie lyrique”[11]. Prokofiev loved theatrical tricks and this theme allowed him a chance for knocks on the wall, skeletons who talk, and a convent full of hysterical nuns. Gothic setting of the novel gave the composer a chance to bring in the satiric humor he liked: narrating the bombastic character of Mephistopheles and equating magus of the past (Agrippa of Nettesheim) with psychiatrists of his own age (Freud).
Brusov, being an expert on medieval spiritualism and literary pastiche, had set his novel in a gothic setting of 16c Germany, and illustrated it with the selections from La Grande Danse Macabre des Hommes et des Femmes, 1486[12]. Originally titled Vedma (The witch), The Fiery Angel is a story of a woman, possessed by the demonic spirit of a fiery angel Madiel, who was imprisoned, tried and condemned as a witch by the Catholic Inquisition. Beside the demonic atmosphere and romanticizing of the fiery angel, clearly the fallen one, Brusov’s novel also displays the autobiographical relationship between Symbolist groupie and writer Nina Petrovskaya (by the way, whose literary work is fully dedicated to demonic) as Renata, and himself as knight Ruprecht. Andrei Belyi, who had been Petrovskaya’s lover prior to Brusov, is referred to as Count Heinrich in the novel. “The Symbolists did not want to separate the writer from the person, literary biography from personal. Symbolism did not want to be just a literary school, a literary trend… It was a series of attempts, now and then truly heroic, to find a fusion of life and art, a kind of artistic philosopher’s stone”[13]. The mysticism of the novel The Fiery Angel is similarly mixed with the rational reality of modern to author life – even the name Renata Petrovskaya took in reality during her trip to Paris in 1908 and the following conversion to Roman Catholicism. All three Symbolists Brusov, Belyi and Petrovskaya lost every sense of the difference between their occult practices, fictional activities, and diurnal activities and skepticism of their real lives. Subsequently Belyi comments on the novel: “while turning the old Cologne into the life of Moscow, sometimes Brusov himself loses the line between life and fiction; therefore, in his imagination, Moscow folks began to live as contemporaries of Nettesheim the Magus, Erasmus and Doctor Faustus; and the area between Cologne and Basel is situated between Znamenka and Arbat”[14].
As a Symbolist, Brusov practiced zhiznetvorchestvo (life creation) – a concept of portraying art in life (contradicting to the concept of mimesis – the portrayal of life in art). “This doctrine established a more real world behind the shadows of the real world, which was merely a repository of images. The effort to fuse art and life – whether through participation in games of make-believe, experimentation with narcotics, or involvement in the occult – adversely affected psychologies of Symbolists”[15]. Since his teens, Brusov mold himself into the image of the Decadent magus. “He went on to create a powerful physical image, his personal aura of mystery enhanced by the Baudelairean statement that God and Devil were the same to him”[16]. He wore black clothes, grew black beard trimmed to a point, inspired by the physical appearance of Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, 1486-1535, a wandering occultist, physician, and astrologist. In The Fiery Angel Agrippa of Nettesheim is referred to as Ruprecht’s spiritual mentor, since Brusov of the real life had passionately studied his occult work.
The reputation of a black wizard followed Brusov everywhere. Belyi, as many of their contemporaries, believed that Brusov practiced demonology and black magic and described him in the poem Mag, 1903 (The magus) as a seer. Balmont dedicated to Brusov the cycle of 15 poems Hudojnik-Diavol, 1903 (the artist-devil), and Gippius believed that Brusov best expresses “devilish eroticism”[17]. Rumors flew that Petrovskaya came to Brusov to cast a spell on Belyi to bring him back, but fell in love with Brusov instead and had spent seven years by his side developing mental illness, morphine addiction and performing suicidal pacts[18], the last of which in Paris, 1928, was successful. In her memoirs, Petrovskaya stated that her relationship with Brusov was a pact with the Devil, and they together were “children of evil”, who drowned the crisis of 1905 in wine and exotic music[19].
Brusov, as both character of the novel and its narrator, used his power to parody the real-life love triangle. Prokofiev, in his turn, being unfamiliar with the fact that The Fiery Angel was written as a roman-a-clef, started working on the opera as a parody of Symbolist poetics. “The score’s surface brilliance, in a particular the manner in which the elaborate syntax endows stage events with false mystical meaning, bears witness to the falseness of Symbolist ideas”[20]. Prokofiev sought to enunciate a modernist critique of the novel, not knowing that in the novel Symbolists made spectacles of themselves attempting to cross the borders between the imaginary world and the reality. Moreover, there is a theory that with this opera project Prokofiev meant to parody his very own rivalry with “Brusov” of his time and place – namely Igor Stravinsky in Paris[21] – by resisting modernist musical temptations and proposing that Romantic opera was viable and capable of being reborn in the middle of 20c.
By the time Prokofiev started to write The Fiery Angel, he already had a certain amount of interest in the Symbolist movement, which he knew by the time through the poetry of Konstantin Balmont, a polyglot traveler and a student of Eastern philosophy. Descriptions of Catholic Inquisition and the Satanist practice in The Fiery Angel caught composer’s attention as the matters consonant with his newly acquired interest in Christian Science. However, Prokofiev conceived The Fiery Angel not as Symbolist but Romantic opera, “with a tableau structure, aural and visual shock effects, and abrupt shifts between coloratura lyric scenes and coloratura mad scenes”[22]. The Fiery Angel reflected Prokofiev’s childhood interest in the occult, which he developed after attending the first opera in his life – Gounod’s Faust in 1900 in Moscow at the Solovodnikov Theater[23]. He as well adopted a number of features of Faust’s plot and staging, such as paper skeletons, etc. while composing music for The Fiery Angel. However, the composer had to veil the conformity of the two operas by introducing authentic devices and eliminating most conspicuous similarities. Prokofiev writes that “in the first version I ended The Fiery Angel with the death of Renata, but dramatically this seemed very boring, particularly with the presence of Faust and Mephistopheles, which recalled Marguerite’s death scene”[24]. Ruprecht’s séance with Agrippa of Nettesheim and a trio of skeletons in Act II, scene 5, is clearly inspired by Walpurginacht episode. Beside Faust, The Fiery Angel shares parallels with other Romantic operas: Elsa’s tactics of emotional blackmail in act III of Wagner’s Lohengrin became the prototype Renata’s behavior throughout The Fiery Angel; the dramatic frame of act V recalls the finale of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable; Prokofiev’s adolescent opera Maddalena, op. 13, 1911-13, had provided thematic material to all but one of The Fiery Angel’s leitmotifs.
The Symbolist concept of theatrum mundi, the montage of stage worlds, adopted from the Baroque Italian commedia dell’arte, influenced all of Prokofiev’s mature operas, as well as The Fiery Angel: “theatrum mundi implies not a one-for-one correlation between composing elements of the different worlds, but a tragic disharmony, a lack of equivalence that boded ill for the future of culture”[25]. At least one scene of The Fiery Angel informs the audience of the onset from another opera: the tavern scene featuring Mephistopheles as a buffoon and a trickster (like Gaunod’s one), who swallows whole the boy-waiter and throws him out of a trash bin alive, shocking the visitors. This gamine, dramatically unfounded shift from the highly pathetic scene of Renata’s psychosis clearly upsets both opera’s structure and its tragic content. Prokofiev uses this comic interlude to lead listeners outside of the psychological drama in order to observe the punishment of the seductress in Act V while being emotionally abstract. “We are suddenly dumped in an emotionally neutral location, with Renata dehumanized and no more sympathetic to us than the Chosen One in The Rite of Spring”[26].
Theatrum mundi as well reflects the split personality of Renata. Her earnest desire to learn the truth about her visions motivates her to demand the presence of an otherworldly fiery angel in a physical form of a man. The demonic femme fatale is a common literary theme of Symbolists, who had “alarming tendency to link pleasure and death, sex and self-destruction”[27], most likely as a reaction to emerging feminism and also syphilis, which had been incurable at the time. Groberg mentions the parallel between Brusov’s descriptions of Renata’s psychoerotic episodes of the demonic possession and French psychiatrist’s of mid 19c Jean-Martin Charcot[28] descriptions of his patients with hysterical mental illnesses (“women’s disease” of 1880th) – mostly homeless prostitutes or destitute women who suffered from syphilis, tuberculosis and various mental illnesses. Doubtlessly, Charcot’s sensational narratives were well-known to Brusov: “Charcot’s work was a great interest in Russia, where the relationship between genius and madness was explored by Nikolai Bazhenov, a psychiatrist and a friendly rival of Brusov’s and, like Brusov, a self-proclaimed expert on female sex”[29]. In The Fiery Angel the duality of other world and the material one leads Renata to the realization of the fact that her sexual love for Madiel as Count Heinrich, whether sacred of prophane, is barely a “distorted echo” of the “other, fuller harmonies”, which are promised by the fiery angel[30]. She feels revulsion for Count Heinrich after she has to admit that “he is only a human”, and seeks revenge by sending Ruprecht to kill him. Although Renata talks in theological terms, the root of her imbalance is sexual. Disenchantment in the purview of the material brings her to the convent, where she meets accusations from the Great Inquisition and willingly chooses to die as a victim of this sadistic machine of religious punishment.
The psychological picture of Renata has undergone even further changes in Prokofiev’s transcription, who examines her split personality with twentieth-century Freudian eyes. If in the draft of the opera in 1923 Renata still had features of a visionary and “Eternal Feminine” of Belyi, as she had been referred to in the novel, then in the draft of 1927 she becomes more of a “Whore of Babylon”[31]. Only by the final 1930 version of the opera composer lets the place for a suggestion that “there might be something” when he suggested to include electronic music to accompany “the mystical substratum of Renata’s visions”[32] and to distort Agrippa of Nettesheim’s voice – make it sound otherworldly. The first reason for Prokofiev’s conceptual revisions of the nature of opera’s characters, specifically Renata, – is his affiliation with Christian Science and development of personal disaffection with antichristian themes. By September of 1926 composer had decided to burn the manuscript of The Fiery Angel for the sake of his emerging religious mores, but, fortunately, had changed his mind and kept on working[33].
Regardless of Prokofiev’s personal philosophy, he kept rereading the novel with each draft of the opera, and thus developed the strong Freudian perception of the plot. “Since Freud – and the opera is post-Freud – the concept of a split personality has become more familiar. In pre-Freudian terms the illness [of Renata] was stated: there was a little girl / Who had a little curl / Right in the middle of her forehead / And she was good / She was very, very good / And when she was bad she was horrid”[34]. Entire opera’s structure follows increasingly wide swings of Renata’s mental illness and their increasingly disastrous outcome. Extrasensory perception of the reality does not lead Renata to salvation, neither it leads there her friends: Count Heinrich admits that she “had broken his best dreams”; Ruprecht receives a severe wound in a battle, which had been provoked by her; entire convent of nuns rages in demonic possession; finally herself ends up in the fire of Catholic Inquisition.
Musically Prokofiev narrates the perspective on Renata’s instability by shifting her material into an ultimate swing. The leitmotif of Renata’s hallucinations (torments in hands of invisible demons) in Act I reflects the paradox of her desires: it is shaped with ascending and falling melodic and harmonic patterns containing conflicted major and minor thirds, repeated over and over again in Stravinsky-like invariant ostinati, which remind The Rite of Spring. Renata’s following second arioso, which describes her childhood encounters with the fiery angel, is featured with stabilized harmonic texture and reduced orchestral forces, reminding in a way Elsa’s Tale in Wagner’s Lohengrin[35]. The transition between the two ariosos signifies that “the drama has traversed a metaphysical barrier of sorts, that what appeared to be a supernatural event was only a hallucination, and that Prokofiev wants us to perceive Renata as a hysteric rather than a visionary”[36].
Prokofiev achieves the effect of psychiatrist’s observation of a patient by siding with Ruprecht and articulating all the actual events through the knight’s perception. It must be mentioned that the idea of the analytic narrator of the plot belongs to Brusov[37]. In the stylized subtitle to the novel Brusov summarizes the plot as an experience of “an eye-witness”:
A True Story, in which it is related of the Devil, more than once appearing in the image of a Radiant Spirit to a Maiden, and seducing her to Various Sinful Deeds, of Unholy Practices of Magic, Astrology, Alchemy, and Necromancy, of the Trial of the Maiden under the Presidency of His Eminence the Archbishop of Trier, as well as of Encounters and Discourses with the Knight and thrice Doctor of Nettesheim, and with Doctor Faustus, composed by an Eyewitness.
The ‘eyewitness’, the rational and objective traveling knight Ruprecht perceives Renata as degenerate and hysterical, although he passionately loves her to the point of being ready to die for her: “man is possessed by the woman, and woman is possessed by the Devil”[38]. Renata does not limit herself to otherworldly hypothesis but hears and sees what for Ruprecht does not exist.
As the opera unfolds, the distinction between good and evil, natural and supernatural evaporates. Renata seems a victim of evil spirits, to whom Ruprecht sympathizes. At some point, Ruprecht starts to hesitate about his materialism and seeks answers with the most popular magus of his time, “thrice doctor” Aggrippa of Nettesheim, which, however, turns out to be a charlatan and a lier. At the end, Ruprecht observes raging nuns and Renata’s death apathetically, becoming again a wandering “eye-witness” which he was before his acquaintance with Renata. But this traveler had changed radically after having his striving resolved with nothing – he neither gained Renata nor retained the false reality of the material world. Ruprecht’s phrase from Brusov’s novel “there she is, who untuned your viola” is pronounced by Mephistopheles in the opera’s finale: thus Prokofiev makes a statement that Ruprecht had given his soul – his voice – to the Devil. Mephistopheles here refers to the musical instrument of Ruprecht’s soul, the sound of which is unperceivable by physical ear.
The final curtain of the opera descends only six measures after the Inquisitor orders Renata’s execution. “Prokofiev’s decision to end the opera at its climax – with freeze-frame fortissimo fermata – leaves his heroine stranded in the material world. By stressing external effect over internal content, his score breaks faith with its subject matter: the occult battle that takes place in outer reality and in each mind. Musically terminating the possibility of liberation from an oppressive existence constitutes the ultimate transgression of the “mystic” Symbolist preoccupation with the transcendence”[39]. The representation of the Devil in his philosophical significance is a task largely outside of the sphere of musical competence. However, Prokofiev had mastered the disparity between the orchestra and the stage action, assigning the music to speak for what cannot be transmitted dramatically throughout the opera. The stage illustration embraces only the external side of the matter – thereby Prokofiev truncated the finale of The Fiery Angel abruptly, leaving the audience with a large list of questions.
The Fiery Angel could not be staged during Prokofiev’s life. It was written too late for Symbolist fashion. In the Soviet Union the themes, touched by the opera were banned by censorship; Western fashion had been carried with modernist movement and perceived a Romantic opera as outdated. Only Myaskovsky appreciated the hidden modernism of The Fiery Angel and had foreseen its future success[40]:
It’s very hard to approach The Fiery Angel with any sort of aesthetic criteria, the more so with taste, and so on. It’s too grand for this to occur; there’s something elemental in it. It is in general not a subject for admiration, for calm appraisals, comparisons and so on. I don’t think that it can be assessed with the standard of measurement applied to a cyclone, an earthquake, and so on. Though the ‘element’ of your opera is only ‘human’, it is expressed with such power, so fully, in such ‘global’ context, that the sonic forms, becoming more visible, are overpowering in their significance. For me, The Fiery Angel is more than music, and I think that the authentic and unusually pungent ‘humanity’ of the composition will make it eternal”.
The failure to get staged the composition of an immense significance, for which Prokofiev had highest expectations, led him to a depression and a consequent return to the Soviet Union. Although The Fiery Angel did not bring Prokofiev immediate success, the very quest to develop deepest psychological portraits of its characters became a turning point in his entire career as the composer.
Stasie Fomalgaut
for Mills College, Oakland, CA
May 2016
Bibliography
- Andrei Belyi. Nachalo Veka. Moscow and Leningrad, 1933; Chicago, 1966;
- Blok, Aleksandr. “Bezvremenie” in Zolotoe Runo, 1906;
- Brown, Malcolm Hamrick. “Stravinsky and Prokofiev: Sizing up the Competition” in Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist. Ed. Jahn Pasler. University of California Press, Berkley, 1986, pp. 39-50;
- Brusov Valery. “Vladimir Soloviev: Smysl ego Poezii” in Dalekiye I Blizkiye. Scorpion, Moscow, 1912;
- Brusov, Valery. Ognennyi Angel. Moscow, 1909 and 1993;
- The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Opera. Edited by Mervyn Cooke. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2005;
- Charcot, Jean Martin, Paul Richer. Les Demoniaques dans l’Art. Paris, 1887, Amsterdam, 1972;
- Clayton, J. Douglas. Pierrot in Petrograd: Commedia dell’Arte/ Balagan in Twentieth Century Russian Theater and Drama. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993;
- Gavrilova, Vera Sergeevna. Stylistic and Dramaturgic Features of S.S. Prokofiev’s Opera “Fiery Angel”, dissertation. Moscow, 2004. Web edition;
- Groberg, Kristi A.. “Nina Ivanovna Petrovskaya” in Dictionary of Russian Women Writers. Ed. M. Ledkovsky. Westport, Conn., 1994;
- Khodasevich, Vladislav. “Konets Renaty” in Nekropol: Vospominaniya. Moscow, 1939 and 1991;
- Lascault Gilbert. “Contradictions de Felicien Rops” in Felicien Rops. Ed. R.L. Delevoy. Brussels, 1985;
- Lasowski, Patrick. Syphilis. Paris, 1982;
- Martin, George. Twentieth Century Opera: a Guide. Limelight Editions, New York, 1999;
- Mochulskiy, Konstantin V. Blok, A. Belyi, V. Brusov. Moscow, 1997;
- Morrison, Simon. The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years. Oxford University Press, New York, New York, 2009;
- Morrison, Simon. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement. University of California Press, Berkley and Los Angeles, 2002, pp. 242-308;
- Novopolin Georgy. Pornographicheskiy Element v Russkoi Literature. St. Petersburg, 1909;
- The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosental. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1997;
- Petrovskaya, Nina. “Iz Vospominaniy” in Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, 1976, no. 85, pp. 775-782;
- Prokofiev, Serge. Behind the Mask: Diaries 1915-1923. Translated by Anthony Phillips. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 2008;
- Prokofiev Serge. Diaries 1924-1933: Prodigal Son. Transl. Anthony Phillips. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2013;
- Prokofiev, Serge. Detstvo, 4th Muzyka, Moscow, 1980;
- Prokofiev, Serge. The Fiery Angel, libretto. Translated by Christopher Hassal. Boosey & Hawkes, 1957;
- Prokofiev, Serge. Fiery Angel, op. 37. Study score. Boosey & Hawkes, 2004;
- Schaffer, David R. “The Religious Component of Russian Symbolism” in Studies in Honor of Xenia Gasiorowska. Ed. L.G. Leighton. Columbus, 1982;
- Schoell, William. The Opera of the Twentieth Century: a Passionate Art in Transition. McFarland & Company, Inc., Jefferson, North Carolina, and London, 2006;
- S.Prokofiev and N.Ya.Myaskovsky: Perepiska. Ed. D.B. Kabalevsky. Sovetskiy Kompozitor, Moscow, 1977;
- Taruskin, Richard. “To Cross That Sacred Edge: Notes on a Fiery Angel” in Serge Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel. Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Jarvi, Deutsche Grammophon CD 431 669-2.
References
[1] David R. Schaffer. “The Religious Component of Russian Symbolism” in Studies in Honor of Xenia Gasiorowska. Ed. L.G. Leighton. Columbus, 1982, p. 89
[2] Kristi A. Groberg. “The Shade of Lucifer’s Dark Wing” in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ed. B.G. Rosental. Ithaca and London, 1997, p. 100
[3] Ibid, p.100
[4] Aleksandr Blok. “Bezvremenie” in Zolotoe Runo, 1906, nos. 11-12
[5] Serge Prokofiev. The Fiery Angel. Libretto. Transl. Christopher Hassal. USA ,1965, p.7
[6] Simon Morrison. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement. University of California Press, Berkley, Los Angeles and London, 2002, p. 258
[7] Groberg, pp. 106-112
[8] Ibid, p. 101
[9] Georgiy Novopolin. Pornographicheskiy Element v Russkoi Literature. St. Petersburg, 1909
[10] Andrei Belyi. Nachalo Veka. Moscow and Leningrad, 1933; Chicago, 1966, p. 280
[11] Richard Taruskin. “To Cross That Sacred Edge: Notes on a Fiery Angel” in Serge Prokofiev, The Fiery Angel. Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Jarvi, Deutsche Grammophon CD 431 669-2, p. 14-17
[12] Groberg, p. 120
[13] Vladislav Khodasevich. “Konets Renaty” in Nekropol: Vospominaniya, Moscow, 1939 and 1991, pp. 7-8
[14] Konstantin V. Mochulskiy. A. Blok, A. Belyi, V. Brusov. Moscow, 1997, p. 422. Transl. S.F.
[15] Simon Morrison. Russian Opera and the Symbolist Movement. University of California Press, Berkley, Los Angeles and London, 2002, p. 242
[16] Groberg, p. 117
[17] Ibid, p. 118
[18] Kristi A. Groberg. “Nina Ivanovna Petrovskaya” in Dictionary of Russian Women Writers. Ed. M. Ledkovsky. Westport, Conn., 1994, p. 500
[19] Nina Petrovskaya. “Iz Vospominaniy” in Literaturnoe Nasledstvo, 1976, no. 85, pp. 775, 781-82
[20] Morrison, p. 244
[21] Malcolm Hamrick Brown. “Stravinsky and Prokofiev: Sizing up the Competition” in Confronting Stravinsky: Man, Musician, and Modernist. Ed. Jahn Pasler. University of California Press, Berkley, 1986, pp. 39-50
[22] Morrison, pp. 296-297
[23] Sergei Prokofiev. Detstvo, 4th ed. Muzyka, Moscow, 1980, p. 46
[24] Letter of May 1, 1928, in S.S. Prokofiev and N.Ya. Myaskovsky: Perepiska. Ed. D.B. Kabalevsky. Sovetskiy Kompozitor, Moscow, 1977, p. 276
[25] J. Douglas Clayton. Pierrot in Petrograd: Commedia dell’Arte/ Balagan in Twentieth Century Russian Theater and Drama. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993, pp. 11-12
[26] Marina Frolova-Walker. “Russian Opera: Between Modernism and Romanticism” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Opera. Ed. Mervyn Cooke. Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 191
[27] Patrick Lasowski. Syphilis. Paris, 1982
[28] Jean Martin Charcot, Paul Richer. Les Demoniaques dans l’Art. Paris, 1887, Amsterdam, 1972
[29] Groberg, p. 121
[30] Valery Brusov. “Vladimir Soloviev: Smysl ego Poezii” in Dalekiye I Blizkiye. Scorpion, Moscow, 1912, p.37
[31] Morrison, p. 267
[32] Ibid, p. 297
[33] Diary of September 28, 1926 in Serge Prokofiev. Diaries 1924-1933: Prodigal Son. Transl. Anthony Phillips. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2013, p. 439
[34] George Martin. Twentieth Century Opera: a Guide. Limelight Editions, New York, 1999, p. 352
[35] Marina Frolova-Walker. “Russian Opera: Between Modernism and Romanticism” in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century Opera. Ed. Mervyn Cooke. Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 190
[36] Morrison, pp. 278-279
[37] Valery Brusov. Ognennyi Angel. Moscow, 1909 and 1993, p. 27
[38] Gilbert Lascault. “Contradictions de Felicien Rops” in Felicien Rops. Ed. R.L. Delevoy. Brussels, 1985, p. 22
[39] Morrison, p.282
[40] Letter of July 18, 1928, in S.S. Prokofiev I N.Ya. Myaskovsky: Perepiska, p. 283
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