Today, as promised, we are quoting two Russian composers on our two blogs. We start Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1936), the modern composer we've quipped so far. He is perhaps best known for his symphonic children's story "Peter and the Wolf," which was written in 1936. It was ironically made into a Disney short film just ten years later.
The Soviet-era composer died on the same day when dictator Joseph Stalin's death was announced.
Prokofiev is buried at the famed Novodevichy Cemetary in Moscow where one can also find the graves of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet (1901-963) who left Turkey because of his communist views (today, he is ironically Turkey's national poet) and famed Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) who directed "Battleship Potemkin."
Here is his quote:
"I play rather well- in any case, jauntily. My success was rather great and I should say no doubt unexpected."
SIDEBAR: For those who love all things Russian, Turkish-American writer and scholar Elif Batuman has a relatively new book (released in early 2010) entitled: "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them." The book, as one would expect, discusses the likes of Anton Chekov and Leo Tolstoy. I will probably never read the rather lenghty "War and Peace" by Tolstoy myself, but Batuman's book is only (compared to Russian novels) 296 pages.
Even though I am also a Turkish-American, I have never met Batuman, though I've been told that her book, which was reviewed in "The New York Times" last year, is really good.
We learned through Wikipedia that Batuman also studied the Uzbek language as a grad student while studying in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.
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