Poetry Evening: Oleg Prokofiev

Prokofiev Studio
13 Ramsgate Street, London E8 2FD, United Kingdom

An evening of poetry by Oleg Prokofiev. Read by Gabriel Prokofiev & Maria Bregman.

Join us for an evening dedicated to the poetry of Oleg Prokofiev, offering a rare opportunity to experience his literary voice alongside his artistic legacy. The readings will be presented by Gabriel Prokofiev, composer and son of Oleg Prokofiev, and Maria Bregman, poet, literary critic and writer, bringing together personal insight and performative interpretation.

The event creates a dialogue between Prokofiev’s poetic works, inviting audiences to reflect on memory, materiality, and the passage of time.

Oleg Prokofiev was a significant yet largely undiscovered poet whose work is only now beginning to receive the attention it deserves. At the time of his death in 1998, he left behind several hundred poems, all written in Russian and preserved within his family archive.

Prokofiev’s poetic language is imagistic and fragmentary, often resisting translation. Dispensing with punctuation, he relies on line breaks to shape meaning, creating a syntax that is at once fluid and ambiguous. His work frequently gestures toward pre-verbal and supra-verbal states of perception, with imagery that is both open-ended and hermetic.