The Philosophy of Sergei Prokofiev

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to present the philosophy of Sergei Prokofiev not only as a concentration of his creative experience, but also as a result of studying works by the great philosophers, I. Kant and A. Schopenhauer. Prokofiev distinguishes between a priori philosophy of music and a posteriori philosophy of music in his creative work. The first one is represented by thoughts about music (creative will); the second one is represented by musical works themselves (creative ideas). The scientific novelty of the research lies in considering Kant’s antinomies of pure reason as Prokofiev’s frame of reference in his life and creative work. Thus, the composer’s symphonic oeuvre develops as a chain of binary structures representing semantic antinomies, opposite judgments about reality correlated with each other as a “thesis” and an “antithesis”. As a result of the research, the author comes to the conclusion that Prokofiev’s symphonies, connected in pairs, capture the history of the first half of the XX century as a tragic rift of the world between the forces of good and evil, creation and destruction, freedom and cruel necessity.