Talk:Mira Mendelson

A fact from Mira Mendelson appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 19 January 2021 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that after meeting Mira Mendelson, Sergei Prokofiev described his future wife as "just some girl who wants me to read her bad poetry"?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2021/January. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Mira Mendelson.

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I'm messing a bit in this article if it's okay for you

Greetings @CurryTime7-24, I'm keeping this at regular talk since it doesn't really affect the DYK: Could you please check the birth year again (I can't access your source)? I've found a source stating 8 January 1915, not 1914: [1] (That source technically requires subscription - which I have through university - but in fact only the last few words are not visible in the preview, it's really short.)

I'd like to add a few more things to the article. And I'm wondering whether you'd consider renaming the "Notes" section to "References" and scrapping the current References one, since everything there seems to be duplicates only. --LordPeterII (talk) 11:45, 7 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hey there. Feel free to add anything useful and to do anything to improve the article. The birth year is a mistake on my part because I mixed up her Julian and Gregorian birth dates. Thanks for letting me know about that. I’ll fix it in a moment. CurryTime7-24 (talk) 22:39, 7 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, that makes perfect sense! I hate periods with competing calendars... And alright, I'll edit around a bit, you can always revert later ;) --LordPeterII (talk) 22:52, 7 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Removed some unsourced material

Earlier today I removed some unsourced material which appeared to run counter to WP:NOR. I'll list them out here:

Prokofiev and Shostakovich are referred to as "good friends." They were not and there exists ample evidence and anecdotes testifying to their guarded appreciation of each other's work and character. (cf. Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich: A Life Remembered and the Morrison book cited in this article). According to Prokofiev's son Svyatoslav, he and his brother went to Shostakovich about their mother's arrest in the early 1950s, but there is no mention that they did so at their father's request. At any rate, I removed all that as it was tangential to Mendelson's life. These details would be very welcome inclusions over at Lina's article.
The marriage between Prokofiev and Mendelson is implied to have been an obscurity only revealed decades later and that the latter herself never mentioned it. This is not true. Mendelson herself was very public with her presence in her husband's life and was invariably known as "Mendelson-Prokofieva" after their marriage. Furthermore, she herself made a note about it in her diaries, contradicting the assertion that she never left any evidence of it. Below is my translation of her diary entry, which appears on page 350 from the 2012 edition of her writings about her husband:

January 15[, 1948]: Divorce from L[ina]. I[vanovna]. formalized. We went to the ZAGS office on Petrovka [Street], received the marriage certificate. How many complications, how many hardships were connected with all this!

The wedding between her and Prokofiev is explained as being a humble one because of his failing health. While this may or may not have been true, this is not attested to anywhere, at least in sources that I'm familiar with. He may also have had other reasons for keeping the ceremony subdued. In the same diary entry quoted above, Mendelson makes no mention of his health being a deterrent to a more lavish ceremony, although she does note that he hit himself in the head with a curtain rod later in the day.
Removed assertion that he was unable to do anything to help his former wife because of the Zhdanov decree. The persecution had not yet shifted to music by the time of Lina's arrest in February 1948. It's also not relevant to Mendelson's article.
Removed assertion about Prokofiev only producing a "few and conformist" works during his final years. Mendelson, for one, recounts that he kept as busy as he could during this period. Works like the Symphony-Concerto, Cello Sonata, and Seventh Symphony hardly are negligible in his output, much less conformist. This hardly also does justice to the various works he revised, or new scores left incomplete during this period and, at any rate, this kind of editorializing does not hew to WP:NPOV.
Removed detail about Prokofiev's last words. To tell the truth, I had included them myself in an earlier version of this article, but removed them as I felt they had to do more with him than with Mendelson. Not sure about him "repeatedly whispering" them either. As much as I enjoy Ian MacDonald's prose and original insights, with respect to Soviet music at least he can at times be loose with the facts. He was a polemicist, rather than historian.

With respect to the sometimes highly intriguing details concerning Prokofiev and his ex-wife, I'll repeat that they will better fit in their respective articles rather than here. CurryTime7-24 (talk) 00:04, 9 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@CurryTime7-24: Fair enough. Frankly I just read through the sources I found, and added in anything remotely related. You are clearly much more familiar with the subject, so I trust your call on removing that. Frankly, that was why I put the notice here on the talk page in the first place, so you'd be aware that it might require your attention.

However, I must insist that this was not a violation of WP:NOR: Everything I added was stated in the sources (they partly are in German), it just seems that the sources themselves are badly researched. This ofc doesn't change the fact that they the poorly sourced info needed to be removed. Just emphasizing that I didn't mean to create problems and was acting in good faith :)

However, I've realized that I should better leave the editing here to you CurryTime7-24, and so just wanted to show you this last source which might or might not be of interest to you: [2]. And two minor notes:

First, the references #27, #29 & #31 "Mendelson-Prokofieva 2012" are slightly confusing atm, because they point to that Russian source #20 which apparently is her diary, but which people like me couldn't identify as such because the title is given only in Cyrillic. Maybe add a "|trans-title=" to it which has the English translation.
Second, she is listed as part of the categories of "Soviet Jews" and "Jewish Poets", yet the article says nothing about her religion. Maybe your sources have something about that? I believe it should at least be mentioned shortly in the article.

Good luck also with your future articles; I'll henceforth focus on areas that don't already have such thorough editors around ^^ --LordPeterII (talk) 15:43, 9 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]