Irony can be seen as one of the central (if intrinsically slippery) turns of thought in the critical and artistic discourses of the twentieth century. We live in a generation particularly, peculiarly sensitised to those facets of the ironic that have become dominant modes within a postmodernist aesthetic; it is also a generation for which those ironies are redoubled through the disjunctions created between a critical-theoretical stance demanding radical undermining of presumed categories and identities, and an emergent global, political condition in which new nationalisms and ethnic/religious identities are attempting to recategorise the world and the individual subject within an increasing number of less negotiable boundaries. The substitution of political diffraction for postmodern pluralism – further ironised by the new global networking and transnational economic dependencies – is nowhere seen more clearly than in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, and it seems a particularly appropriate time to reinvestigate the music of Prokofiev within such a context, especially since the composer has been curiously neglected in the musicological and analytical literature, by comparison, say, with his near-contemporary Shostakovich.

In music, notions of the ironic – though still lamentably under-researched – are of long standing and diverse manifestation.