Capote in the USSR
39.99 €
In stock
Capote in the USSR
39.99 €
In the winter of 1955, the American opera Porgy and Bess, directed by Robert Breen, toured behind the Iron Curtain. Truman Capote was among the company. His report, "The Muses Are Heard," which he wrote following the trip, was published in The New Yorker in 1956 and became a classic of American nonfiction. Seventy years later, Russian historian and literary scholar Denis Zakharov conducted his own investigation of these events.
Relying on American and Russian archives, family papers of the tour participants, personal correspondence with their descendants, and witnesses of the era, the author traces the entire story: from the diplomatic intrigue that opened Soviet borders to Porgy and Bess to the literary fate of the report, which some of its subjects called "terrible" but readers hailed as a true masterpiece.
The book establishes the true identities of the characters Capote hid behind pseudonyms, reconstructs the backstage of the tour, and for the first time introduces documents that allow us to rethink the events described in the report "The Muses Are Heared."
"Capote in the USSR" is simultaneously a detective story, a biography of literary method, a history of Cold War-era cultural diplomacy, and a collective portrait of people whose destinies intersected in the Soviet Union.
Relying on American and Russian archives, family papers of the tour participants, personal correspondence with their descendants, and witnesses of the era, the author traces the entire story: from the diplomatic intrigue that opened Soviet borders to Porgy and Bess to the literary fate of the report, which some of its subjects called "terrible" but readers hailed as a true masterpiece.
The book establishes the true identities of the characters Capote hid behind pseudonyms, reconstructs the backstage of the tour, and for the first time introduces documents that allow us to rethink the events described in the report "The Muses Are Heared."
"Capote in the USSR" is simultaneously a detective story, a biography of literary method, a history of Cold War-era cultural diplomacy, and a collective portrait of people whose destinies intersected in the Soviet Union.
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