Stalin. He had lived near Red Square, and for three days throngs gathered to mourn Stalin, making it impossible to hold Prokofiev's funeral service at the headquarters of the Soviet Composers' Union. Because the hearse was not allowed near Prokofiev's house, his coffin had to be moved by hand through back streets in the opposite direction of the masses of people going to visit Stalin's body. About 30 people attended the funeral, Shostakovich among them. Although they had not seemed to get along when they met, in the later years their interactions had become far more amicable, with Shostakovich writing to Prokofiev, "I wish you at least another hundred years to live and create. Listening to such works as your Seventh Symphony makes it much easier and more joyful to live." Prokofiev is buried in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery. The leading Soviet musical periodical reported Prokofiev's death as a brief item on page 116. (The first 115 pages were devoted to Stalin's death.) Prokofiev's death is usually attributed to cerebral hemorrhage. He had been chronically ill for eight years. Prokofiev’s wife Mira Mendelson spent her final years living in the Moscow apartment they had shared. She occupied her time organizing her husband's papers, promoting his music, and writing her memoirs, having been strongly encouraged by Prokofiev to embark on the latter. Work on the memoirs was difficult for her; she left them incomplete at her death. Mendelson died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1968, 15 years after Prokofiev. Inside her purse a message dated February 1950 and signed by Prokofiev and Mendelson instructed: "We wish to be buried next to each other." Their remains are buried together at Novodevichy Cemetery. Lina Prokofiev outlived her ex-husband by many years, dying in London in early 1989. Royalties from his music provided her with a modest income, and she acted as storyteller for a recording of her husband's Peter and the Wolf (released on CD by Chandos Records) with Neeme Järvi conducting the Scottish National Orchestra. Their sons Sviatoslav (1924–2010), an architect, and Oleg (1928–1998), an artist, painter, sculptor and poet, dedicated much of their lives to promoting their father's work. Legacy Reputation Arthur Honegger said that Prokofiev would "remain for us the greatest figure of contemporary music", and the American scholar Richard Taruskin wrote of Prokofiev's "gift, virtually unparalleled among 20th-century composers, for writing distinctively original diatonic melodies". Yet for some