The Sun-Sounding Scythian

The chapter examines the relationships between Prokofiev’s early music and the poets that inspired him. Guided by Konstantin Balmont’s poetic characterization of him in the early 1920s as a “sun-sounding Scythian,” it looks at two specific facets of Russian Symbolism and post-Symbolism that informed Prokofiev’s works: the sun cult and Scythianism. Prokofiev’s luminous Scythianism encompasses the paradox of the lyricism of his early songs and the perceived barbarism of his rejected ballet Ala and Lolli, from which the composer derived his Scythian Suite. By analyzing Prokofiev’s collaboration with Gorodetskii on Ala and Lolli and the composer’s settings of Balmont’s and Akhmatova’s poems, we can understand how the incarnations of the sun god in the Russian Silver Age informed both the sunrise music and the aesthetics of horror in the ballet and the suite. The chapter also reflects on Ala and Lolli as an unrealized ballet in the shadow of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.