12 Facts About Lina Prokofiev

Lina Prokofiev's mother was a Russian of Polish, Lithuanian, and Alsatian ancestry; her father was a Spaniard born to a Catalan family in Barcelona.

Lina Prokofiev graduated from Brooklyn's Public School No 3; the graduation was held at the nearby Commercial High School on 24 June 1913.

Lina Prokofiev worked for a month as an assistant to Russian socialist Catherine Breshkovsky in 1919.

Lina Prokofiev attempted to dissuade her husband from relocating with his family to his homeland after being urged to do so by Pierre Souvtchinsky, who drew her attention to the persecution of Dmitri Shostakovich in the wake of the official denunciation against his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Lina Prokofiev replied that she did not object to it as long as he did not go to live with her, she recalled in interviews decades later.

Lina Prokofiev's apartment was searched by the police, who confiscated various family heirlooms and artifacts.

Frederick Reinhardt, an employee of the American Embassy in Moscow who was acquainted with Lina Prokofiev, suggested that her persistent efforts to obtain an exit visa had caused her to be noticed unfavorably by Soviet authorities.

Lina Prokofiev was sentenced to incarceration in the gulag for 20 years, serving part of her sentence at the Intalag camp in the Komi ASSR, before being moved to the Mordovian ASSR to serve the remainder, in Abezlag.

Subsequent petitions to Dmitri Shostakovich and Tikhon Khrennikov, the latter a personal friend of Lina Prokofiev, resulted in her successful rehabilitation during the Khrushchev Thaw.

Soon thereafter Lina petitioned the courts to have them reassert her rights as Prokofiev's sole and legitimate spouse.

Lina Prokofiev outlived her ex-husband by many years, dying in London on 3 January 1989, and being buried in the French town of Meudon.

Lina Prokofiev was the subject of Simon Morrison's 2013 biography Lina and Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev.