About the work
The Story of a Real Man is Sergei Prokofiev's last completed opera, composed in 1947–48 after Boris Polevoy's novel of the same name about the real fighter pilot Alexei Maresyev, with a libretto the composer wrote with Mira Mendelson. A closed, concert-style run-through for officials took place on 3 December 1948 at the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad; the work was not staged publicly until 7 October 1960, posthumously, at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
Plot
The Soviet fighter pilot Alexei is shot down during the Second World War and loses both legs, but drags himself through the forest for days to reach his own troops. Despite prosthetic legs and initial doubts about his fitness to fly, he wills his way back into the air force and returns to combat missions.
Cultural significance
Prokofiev deliberately used simple, folk-song-like melodies to meet the demands of Soviet cultural policy, but officials savaged the opera at its closed 1948 run-through, and it remained unstaged during the composer's lifetime. Only the posthumous Bolshoi premiere in 1960 secured the work a modest but lasting place in the Soviet repertoire.