A Review of Simon Morisson's The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Simon Morison's book, The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years, is an enthralling, three-hundred-and-sixty-three-page chronicle of the tumultuous final years of the eminent Russian composer, Sergey Prokofiev (1891-1953). Scholars with an interest in Prokofiev or the machinations of the Soviet musical society will find this book of great interest. Morrison begins his scholarly monograph by tackling one of Prokofiev's most perplexing decisions—choosing to abandon Paris, France and return to the USSR. This decision has bewildered musicologists even to this day. The focal point of the book is Prokofiev’s survival of the suffocating restrictions cast upon composers by the Soviet-Stalinist regime, both as a professional composer and as a human being. Morrison very carefully examines Prokofiev's professional struggles. He explores several of Prokofiev's works, both musically and historically, such as his operas Romeo and Juliet, Eugene Onegin, and The Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October. He then expertly dissects the political reasons behind their political, and subsequent artistic failures. Morrison also makes some effort to examine Prokofiev's personal struggles throughout the course of the book. Through various letters, diaries and reports, we glean insight into the dynamic and restless life of the man Sergey Prokofiev.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".