Stylistic Concerns

Hello, I'm new to the forums, so be gentle if I placed this in the wrong place :(

I'm particularly obsessed with Russian music circa 1880-1960. My hard drive is filled with the works of Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Kabelevsky, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and others. I find the works produced by them to be fascinating. I own several scores of Prokofiev, my favorite composer, and have been trying to do some analysis of the works, hoping to begin composing my own russianesque pieces, but I'm having a bit of a problem.

I'll use a specific example. In trying to do a chordal analysis of Prokofiev's Overture on Hebrew Themes for Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano, I can't go more than a few bars without finding modulation, sometimes to a wild and completely different key than anything around it. I simple don't have all the theory knowledge I need to even hack my way through this piece, and the same can be said for others.

I believe the biggest thing I'm drawn to in these pieces is the rampant modulation, but I cannot find any method to the madness. In my pieces, I use a lot of pivot modulations, but I simply can't make sense of how these composers wrote.

Does anyone know of some basic, underlying patterns or chordal progressions used by russian composers, or some glaring feature I'm failing to see? How would you go about writting in this style?

Something about Prokoffiev that I've noticed is that he modulates by taking his melody, assessing where it seems to be heading in traditional harmonic terms, then finding chords that contain the same pitches as the melody, but in a different tonality. He then allows that tonality to determine where the melody heads to next. When he gets there, he repeats the process and heads off in another harmonic direction. Eventually his peregrinations lead him home, but not before he's modulated 14 times in 12 measures, with a few chords repeated (I'm thinking specifically of his famous Gavotte, for a rather simple example).

there's an additional element to Prokoviev: he uses a lot of "added notes" and chords very heavily coloured by unprepared and unresolved appogiaturas.

I think if you don't have very advanced analysis courses (ie: university) under your belt, trying to use basic harmonic analysis won't work. Lee is quite right in that Prokoviev has to be analysed linearly as well as harmonically.