Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist, gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia following the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd, and Prokofiev smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer-s death, to be kept in a special, closed section of the Russian State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev-s son Svyatoslav was allowed to copy the voluminous contents; when he and his son Serge Jr moved to Paris they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.
Volume I covers the bulk of Prokofiev-s years at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, ending with his triumphant graduation. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the traditions exemplified at this time by such famous men as Rim
