No one knows for sure why Sergei Prokofiev decided to go to America. Political intervention in the arts at home does not appear to have been the initial impetus. Despite the White Russian sentiments of many artists, Bolshevik cultural commissars such as the critic and Prokofiev supporter Anatoly Lunacharsky of the Department of Education did not seem any more inclined to ban theatrical works on the basis of content directly after the Revolution than before it.1 A case in point is the first Russian performance in 1926 in Petrograd2 of The Love for Three Oranges, an opera that, though it apparently draws much of its satirical humor by poking fun at the aristocracy, contradicts itself in the end by praising the very group it set out to satirize. In his autobiography, Prokofiev explained that it had not been his intention to mock anything in particular. reviewers..,. wanted to know whom I was laughing at: the audience, [Carlo] Gozzi, the operatic form, or those who had no sense of humor. They found in the Oranges mockery, defiance, the grotesque and what not; all I had been trying to do was to write an amusing opera.3 Prokofiev's remarks on the reception of this 1926 performance suggest that his idea of amusement may have been very different from that of his Bolshevik supporters. It was apparently different from that of their American counterparts as well. Some of the opera's Chicago and New York critics felt duped by an apparent black comedy appearing to masquerade as a simple children's fairy tale. Some also felt it went beyond where an operatic work should go in its exploitation of the fantastic and grotesque.4 Unlike America, Russia had a long tradition of grotesque comedy. One distinctly Slavic version was known as the kapustnik. A kapustnik (literally, cabbage patch) consisted of improvised skits that often lampooned local themes or matters. Some of Moscow's finest actors and actresses offered kapustniki during the annual Lenten season theater blackout. These included parodies of events in history or of plays produced throughout the