[1] She was the co-librettist of her husband's operas Betrothal in a Monastery, The Story of a Real Man, and War and Peace, as well as the ballet The Tale of the Stone Flower.

[4] Shortly thereafter she saw the composer for the first time: At lunchtime a diminutive woman entered the dining room of the sanatorium, followed by a tall man with an extraordinary stride and a very serious expression on his face.

'[5]In a letter written to Prokofiev less than a year before their final separation, his then wife Lina decried what she perceived as Mendelson's calculated pursuit of him: Remember what you wrote after the first meeting.

At a health resort—you, not some speck of sand, but [Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev], the leading composer of the nation, a famous person with a family man aura, twice as old.

The composer maintained feeling a sense of déjà vu upon meeting her, citing her resemblance to his previous infatuations, Nina Meshcherskaya and Ida Rubinstein.

[2] Prokofiev began to appear in public with Mendelson in the fall of that same year, including at the premiere of Semyon Kotko, an event at which his wife was also in attendance, leading to an uncomfortable scene between the three.

Despite the acrimonious separation, Prokofiev continued to financially support his estranged wife and family, sometimes employing his friend and colleague Levon Atovmyan as an intermediary.

[15] After the end of World War II, the couple returned to Moscow, and spent the rest of their summers together at their dacha in Nikolina Gora [ru].

Five days later the court rejected his petition, ruling that the marriage had no legal basis since it had taken place in Germany, and had not been registered with Soviet officials, thus making it null and void.

[17][18] On February 20, 1948, Prokofiev's ex-wife was arrested in Moscow[19] and subsequently sentenced to 20 years in the Gulag for "attempting to defect" and maintaining "criminal ties" with foreign embassies.

[20] Prokofiev's final years were beset by health problems brought upon by hypertension, which necessitated Mendelson's additional assistance as secretary and sometimes caregiver.

She also supervised the rehearsals for the posthumous premiere of his final ballet, The Tale of the Stone Flower, but was dismayed by the cuts demanded by conductor Yuri Fayer, as well as by his insistence on commissioning Boris Pogrebov to reorchestrate the score.

[28] Mendelson spent her own final years living in the same Moscow apartment she had shared with her husband, although she privately commented on how her neighbors distressed her and how difficult life without Prokofiev was.