Porgy and Bess in Russia

On Thursday, the twenty-second of last December, after a train ride of three nights and two days from East Berlin, ninety-three Americans arrived in Russia’s second-largest and northernmost metropolis, the port city that was once St. Petersburg and is now Leningrad. They were members—or, in a few instances, guests—of Everyman Opera, Inc., the first American theatrical company ever to invade the Soviet Union, and their production of the George Gershwin-Ira Gershwin-DuBose Heyward opera “Porgy and Bess” was to be given fourteen performances in Leningrad, followed by twelve in Moscow, under the sponsorship of the Russian Ministry of Culture.

The Astoria Hotel, to which the company was driven in chartered buses from the Leningrad terminal Thursday morning, is situated on the impressive expanse of St. Isaac’s Square. It is an Intourist hotel, which means that it is run by the Soviet government agency that is in charge of all hotels where foreigners are permitted to stay. The Astoria claims—justifiably, it would seem—to be the best hotel in Leningrad. Some think it the Ritz of all Russia. But it makes only a few concessions to Western ideas of a de-luxe establishment. Of these few, one is a room off the lobby that advertises itself as an Institut de Beauté, where guests may obtain Pédicure, Manicure, and Coiffure pour Madame. The Institut, with its mottled whiteness, its painful appurtenances, resembles a charity clinic supervised by not too sanitary nurses. There is also on the main floor a trio of restaurants, one leading into another—cavernous affairs, cheerful as airplane hangars. The principal one is Leningrad’s smartest gathering place, and in the evening, from eight till midnight, an orchestra plays Russian jazz for a local haut monde that seldom dances but sits morosely counting the bubbles in glasses of syrupy Georgian champagne. The hotel’s Intourist office is behind a low counter in the main lobby; its dozen desks are so placed that the employees have a broad view of the comings and goings of the guests, which simplifies their task of keeping tabs on them. It is a job they have made still simpler—in fact, foolproof—by stationing a dormitory matron on each of the upstairs floors. These vigilantes are on duty from dawn to dawn, never allowing anyone to leave his room without turning in his key, and constantly, like human time clocks, recording ins and outs in bulky ledgers. Perhaps Houdini could have eluded the matrons, but it is hard to see how, since they sit at desks that face both the staircase and the elevator, an ancient bird cage that creaks on its cables. There is also a rear, unguarded staircase connecting the upper floors with a remote side lobby, and for the clandestine visitor, or the resident wishing to depart unnoticed, this would make the ideal route. Would, except that it is barricaded at every floor with a fence formed by old settees and armoires. It may be that the management can find nowhere else to stash these pieces of furniture. Certainly there is no more room in the rooms. The average Astoria accommodation is like the annex to a Victorian attic where some poor relation lives buried beneath the family discards: a miasma of romantic marble statuary, weak-bulbed lamps with tulle shades like ballerina skirts, tables (several of them, covered with OrIental carpeting), chairs galore, plush settees, armoires that could hold wardrobe trunks, flower-papered walls kaleidoscopic with gilt-framed paintings of fruit and country idylls, beds concealed in cavelike alcoves behind dank velvet curtains—all this crammed into a tomb-dark, unventilated area (you can’t open the windows in winter, and wouldn’t want to if you could) quadruple the size of a train compartment. The hotel has grander quarters, of course—suites of five and six rooms—but their décor is the same, merely more abundantly so.

Nevertheless, the majority of the “Porgy and Bess” party were most approving of the Astoria, many because they had anticipated “something so much worse” and, instead, found their rooms “cozy,” “kind of atmospheric,” or—as one of the production’s publicity men, Gerard Willem van Loon, the son of the historian, put it—“full of art-nouveau charm.” But when the troupe entered the lobby of the hotel, already swarming with Chinese dignitaries and high-booted Army officers, actual occupancy of these rooms was, in some instances, distant and debatable. The Astoria’s method of assigning the rooms and, particularly, the suites was governed by a protocol, or lack of one, that embittered quite a few. Nancy Ryan, the young secretary to Robert Breen, co-producer and director of the opera, volunteered the theory that the Russians had arrived at their system of room distribution by consulting Everyman Opera’s payroll: “The less you get, the more they give you.” Whatever the reason, several of the leading players and the prominent people who were travelling as guests of the company thought it odd that stagehands and carpenters and electricians were being led straightway to the V.I.P. apartments, while they themselves were supposed to be content with the hotel’s backwater leftovers. One guest, the newspaper columnist Leonard Lyons, who was billed as Company Historian, had been assigned one of the lesser rooms. Another guest, a New York financier, Herman Sartorius, had been assigned no room at all. Nor had Mrs. Ira Gershwin, wife of the lyricist and sister-in-law of the composer of “Porgy and Bess,” who was travelling without her husband.

At twelve o’clock noon that Thursday, Mrs. Gershwin, attractive, delicately blond, draped in mink, and wearing a smile as bright as the diamonds that sparkled at her throat, her wrists, and her fingers, was still sitting on her luggage in the lobby. She was being soothed by Wilva Breen, the energetic partner-wife of the co-producer and director, and Warner Watson, Breen’s mild, though high-strung, production assistant, whose chief task, as he sees it, is “to get things fenced in.”

“Don’t you worry, baby,” said Mrs. Breen, who had arrived the night before by plane and was ensconced with her husband in five rooms of Astorian splendor. “The Russians may be slow, they may get things a little mixed up, but everything comes out straight in the end.”

“Sure, Lee,” said Warner Watson. (Mrs. Gershwin’s name is Leonore.) “Sure, don’t worry. We’ll get this room business fenced in.” He brushed down his graying crew cut with a nervous hand.

“Darling, I’m perfectly happy,” Mrs. Gershwin, who makes a practice of using terms of endearment with everyone, assured him. “I just think it’s so wonderful being here.”

“To think we really made it!” said Mrs. Breen, beaming around her. “And what sweet, kind, adorable people! Wasn’t that adorable when the train arrived?”

“Adorable,” said Mrs. Gershwin, and gazed at a mass of wilting bouquets that had been given her and others in the company at the station by a Soviet reception committee.

“You’ll have a beautiful room, Lee,” said Mrs. Breen, and Warner Watson added, “If you don’t like it, you can change it. Anything you want, Lee. We’ll get it fenced in.”

The Leningrad première of “Porgy and Bess,” an event that was expected to reap international publicity, was planned for the evening of Monday, December 26th, which gave the company four days to prepare and rehearse—a sufficient time, it would seem, since the show had been touring the world for nearly four years. But Robert Breen, who had encountered political opposition and overcome financial obstacles in carrying out what he often termed “this unprecedented project” of taking “Porgy and Bess” to Russia, was determined that the audience at the Leningrad première should see the finest possible rendering of the opera. Breen and his wife and Warner Watson were confident that the Russians would be “stunned” by the musical folk tale, and were positive that they would “never have seen anything like it.” Several observers, though sympathetic, were not quite so sure about the first prediction. Aside from the fact that the quality of the company’s performance was understandably frayed after so many years of continuous playing, the opera itself contained elements antipathetic to both the puritanism of Russian mores and the deepest principles of Soviet ideology. Then, too, it was feared that its story, which emphasizes the exploitation of Southern Negroes and their poverty, was apt to turn the venture into a Soviet propaganda triumph. All things considered, the opening night promised to be one of the most suspenseful in theatrical annals.

The Ministry of Culture had sent five representatives to welcome the Everyman company at the Soviet border city of Brest Litovsk and travel with it to Leningrad. This delegation, headed by Nikolai Savchenko, a formidable six-footer, was now, at the Astoria, in a whirl of pacifying, rectifying, promising everyone he would get the room he deserved. “Patience,” pleaded one of them, a middle-aged interpreter called Miss Lydia. “Do not contribute to the misery. We have plenty rooms. No one will stride the streets.” Nancy Ryan said she wouldn’t mind striding the streets, and suggested to me that since we had each been assigned a perfectly acceptable room, we escape the confusion in the lobby by taking a walk.

St. Isaac’s Square is bordered on one side by a canal stemming from the Neva, a river that threads through the city—in winter like a frozen Seine—and on another by St. Isaac’s Cathedral, which is now one of Leningrad’s anti-religious museums. We walked toward the canal. The sky was a sunless gray, and there was snow in the air-buoyant motes that seethed and floated like the toy flakes inside a crystal. It was noon, but the only vehicles on the square were a car or two and a bus with its headlights burning. Now and then, horse-drawn sleds slithered across the snowy pavement. Along the embankments of the canal, men on skis silently passed and mothers aired their babies, pulling them on small sleds. Everywhere, like darting blackbirds, dark-furred school children skated on the ice-coated sidewalks. Two of these children stopped to inspect us. They were twins, girls of nine or ten, and they wore gray rabbit-fur coats and blue velvet bonnets. They were sharing a single pair of skates, and by holding hands and pushing together they managed very well on one skate apiece. They looked at us with pretty, puzzled brown eyes, as though wondering what made us different. Our clothes? Miss Ryan’s lipstick? Most foreigners in Russia become accustomed to this: the slight frown of the passerby who seems disturbed by something about you that he can’t at once put his finger on, and who stops, stares, keeps glancing back, and quite often even feels impelled to follow you. The twins followed us onto a footbridge that crossed the canal, and watched while we paused to look at the view.

The canal, no more than a snowy ditch, was a sporting ground for children, whose laughing shrillness combined with a ringing of some unidentifiable bells, both sounds carrying on the strong, shivery wind that blew from the Gulf of Finland. Skeleton trees, sheathed in ice, glittered against the austere fronts of the palaces that line the embankments all the way to the distant Nevsky Prospekt. Leningrad, which is at present a city of three million, was built to the taste of the Czars, and Czarist taste ran to French and Italian architecture, which accounts for not only the style but the colors of the palaces along the canal and in other old quarters. Parisian blacks and grays predominate, but suddenly, here and there, the hot Italian palette intervenes, with a palace of bitter green, of brilliant ochre, pale blue, orange. A few of the palaces have been converted into apartments; most are used for offices. Peter the Great, who is given high marks by the current regime because he introduced the sciences to Russia, would probably have approved of the myriad television aerials that have settled like a swarm of metal insects on the roofs of his once imperial city.

We crossed the bridge and wandered through open iron gates into the deserted courtyard of a blue palace. It was the entrance to a labyrinth—an arctic casbah, where one courtyard led into another via arcades and tunnels and across narrow streets, snow-hushed and silent except for sleigh horses stamping their hoofs, a drifting sound of bells, and an occasional giggle from the twins, still trailing behind us. The cold was like an anesthetic; presently, I felt numb enough to undergo major surgery. But Miss Ryan refused to turn back She said, “This is St. Petersburg, for God’s sake. We’re not just walking anywhere. I want to see as much as I can. And I’d better. From now on, you know where I’ll be? Locked in a room typing a lot of nonsense.” But I saw that she couldn’t last much longer; her face was drunkard-red, a frostbite spot whitened the tip of her nose. Minutes later, feeling its first sting, she was ready to seek the Astoria.

The trouble was we were lost. It amused the twins greatly to see us circling through the same streets and courtyards. They screeched and hugged each other with laughter when we came to an old man chopping wood and begged him for directions by swinging our arms like compass needles and shouting “Astoria! Astoria!” The wood chopper didn’t understand; he put down his axe and accompanied us to a street corner, where we were required to repeat our pantomime for three swarthy friends of his. None of them appeared to get the point, but they nevertheless beckoned us up another street. On the way, we were joined by a gangly boy carrying a violin case, and a woman who must have been a butcher, for over her coat she was wearing an apron splattered with blood. The Russians babbled and argued; we decided they were taking us to a police station, and neither of us cared, as long as it was heated. By now, the moisture in my nose had frozen; my eyes were unfocussed by the cold. Still, I could see well enough to know when, abruptly, we were back at the Neva canal footbridge. I wanted to grab Miss Ryan’s hand and run. But she felt that our entourage had been so faithful they deserved to see the mystery solved. From wood chopper to violinist, the procession—led by the twins, who skated ahead like pied pipers—convoyed us across the square and up to the Astoria’s entrance. While they surrounded one of several Intourist limousines that stay parked in front of the hotel, and began to question its chauffeur about us, we rushed inside, collapsed on a bench, and sucked in the warm air like divers who have been too long underwater.

Leonard Lyons walked by. “Looks like you’ve been out,” he said.

A company bulletin board had by now been installed in the lobby. Posted on it were announcements concerning the rehearsal schedule, and a list of entertainments our Soviet hosts had planned for us, which included—in the days before the première—ballet and opera performances, a ride on the new Leningrad subway, a visit to the Hermitage art museum, and a Christmas party. Under the heading “PROMPTLY,” the hours for meals had been posted, and these, influenced by the fact that in the Russian theatre matinées start at noon and evening performances at eight, were listed as: “Breakfast 9:30 A.M., Lunch 11:00 A.M., Dinner 5 P.M., Evening Snack 11:30 P.M.”

But at five that first evening I was too much enjoying a hot tub to bother about dinner. The bathroom adjoining the third-floor room assigned to me had peeling sulphur-colored walls, a cold radiator, and a broken toilet that rumbled like a mountain brook. The tub itself, circa 1900, was splotched with rust stains, and the water that poured from the taps was brown as iodine, but it was hot, it made a wonderful steam, and I basked in it, idly wondering if downstairs in the bleak dining room the others were at last being treated to caviar and vodka, shashlik, bliny, and sour cream. (Ironically, as I learned later, they were being offered the same menu that had been regularly served on the train to Leningrad: yoghurt and raspberry soda, broth, breaded veal cutlets, and peas.) My waterlogged drowsing was interrupted when my telephone rang. I let it ring awhile, the way you might if you were sitting in a bath at home. Then I realized that I wasn’t home, remembered that, looking at the telephone earlier, I’d thought what a dead object it was to me in Russia, as useless as if the wires were cut. Naked and dripping, I picked up the receiver. It was Miss Ryan, reminding me that dinner was already being served, promptly, and that I was not present.

The company was expected to attend the ballet that evening, and I started to get dressed for it. There was a problem here. The Breens had decreed that the men should wear black tie and the ladies short evening dresses “It’s more respectful,” said Mrs. Breen, “and besides Robert and I like everything to be gala.” A certain clique, however, held the opinion that the Breens’ pronouncement would, if obeyed, make us all look “ridiculous” in a country where practically no one dressed formally for any occasion whatever. I compromised by putting on a black tie with a gray flannel suit. As I moved around the room dressing, I straightened some of the fruit and flower paintings that clotted the walls. They were rather atilt, owing to a visit from Leonard Lyons, who was trying to document his conviction that the Astoria’s rooms were wired for sound. Lyons’ theories were shared by most of the company, and this was not remarkable, inasmuch as two diplomats from the American Embassy in Moscow had told them at a briefing in Berlin that during their Russian visit they should “assume” their rooms would be wired and their letters opened. On my way out, I stopped at the floor desk and handed my key to the keeper, a plump, pale woman with a kewpie-doll smile, who wrote in her ledger “224-1900”—the number of my room and the hour of my departure.

Downstairs, a row was in progress. Nearly the whole company, dressed and ready to leave for the ballet, stood around the lobby like figures in a tableau while John McCurry, a husky, bull-like man who plays the role of Crown, stomped about yelling, “God damn if I will! I’m not gonna pay any goddam crooked somebody seven-fifty to baby-sit nobody!” McCurry would have to leave his two-year-old daughter while he and his wife went to the ballet. Intourist had supplied a batch of babysitters, at the rate of thirty rubles a night, to the parents of the troupe’s six children, and had even arranged one for Twerp, a boxer puppy belonging to Marilyn Putnam, the production’s wardrobe mistress. At the official exchange rate of four to one, thirty rubles amounts to seven dollars and fifty cents, a fairly stiff price for a night’s baby-sitting, but for the Russians, thirty rubles has a buying power equivalent to a dollar and seventy cents, and the Ministry of Culture people, who had only this modest fee in mind, couldn’t fathom why McCurry was causing such a scene. Savchenko was rosy with indignation, Miss Lydia white. Breen spoke sharply to McCurry, and McCurry’s wife, a shy woman whose eyes are usually downcast, told him that if he would please be quiet she would stay home with the child. Warner Watson and Miss Ryan hustled everyone else out of the lobby and into two buses that had been provided for the Leningrad stay.

The ballet was at the Maryinsky Theatre, renamed the Kirov (no one calls it that, though), after the old revolutionary and friend of Stalin who was assassinated in 1934. Except for the Fenice, in Venice, which it somewhat resembles in its eighteenth-century size and style (as well as its heating system), I think it the most beautiful theatre I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, the original seats have been replaced by wooden ones, rather like those in a school auditorium, and their harsh natural color makes a raw contrast with the subtle grays and silvers of the Maryinsky’s simplified rococo interior. Galina Ulanova, the Bolshoi Theatre’s prima ballerina, made her début in this theatre, and the Leningrad Opera and Ballet Company, which is now installed there as a repertory group, is considered first-class by Soviet critics.

Despite the chilliness of the theatre, everyone, whether man or woman, was required to leave his coat in the cloakroom; in Russia it is thought uncultured—nyekulturny—to enter a theatre, restaurant, museum, or any such place wearing a coat or wrap. At the moment, the principal sufferer from the ruling was Miss Ryan. A tall, striking blonde, she was wearing a low-cut strapless dress, and as she walked down the aisle masculine eyes swerved in her direction like flowers turning toward the sun For that matter the entrance of the entire company was creating a stir in the crowded auditorium. People were standing up to get a better view of the Americans and their black ties, silks, and sparkles.

“I’d be freezing if I weren’t so embarrassed,” said Miss Ryan as an usher seated her. “Just look. They think I’m indecent.” One couldn’t deny that there was a touch of criticism in the stares Miss Ryan’s bare shoulders were receiving from surrounding Russian women.

Mrs. Gershwin, who was wearing a becoming green cocktail dress, said, “I told Wilva Breen we shouldn’t get all dressed up. I knew we’d look ridiculous. Well, darling, never again. But, really, what should we wear?” She looked about as if hunting fashion hints among the audience’s melancholy, shapeless garments. “I didn’t bring anything that wasn’t pretty.”

The chandeliers dimmed and the orchestra conductor raised his baton. The ballet—in three acts—was called “Corsair.” The average Soviet ballet is far less concerned with dancing than with stupendous production effects, and “Corsair,” though a minor work in the Leningrad company’s repertoire, involves as many changes of scene as the extravaganzas at the Radio City Music Hall or the Folies-Bergère—two theatres where “Corsair” would be quite at home, except that the choreography and its execution were not up to the standards of the former, and the latter would never tolerate dancing slave girls swathed to the neck. The theme of “Corsair” is very similar to that of “The Fountain of Bakhchisarai,” a ballet, based on a poem by Pushkin, that the Bolshoi has inflated into one of its prize pieces. In “The Fountain,” a beautiful, virtuous girl is kidnapped by a barbaric Tartar chieftain and hauled off to his harem, where, for three hours of playing time, many vile adventures befall her. In “Corsair,” this girl’s twin sister undergoes somewhat the same ordeal; she is a victim of a shipwreck (brilliantly simulated onstage with thunder, lightning, and torrents of water crashing against the stricken vessel) and is captured by pirates, after which, for three hours, ditto.

During the first intermission, most of the “Porgy and Bess” company went to the Maryinsky’s café-salon, where refreshments were on sale—beer, liqueurs, raspberry soda, sandwiches, candy, and ice cream. Earl Bruce Jackson and his fiancée, Helen Thigpen, two long-engaged members of the cast who planned to be married in Moscow, were at the center of one group. Jackson announced that he was starving. “But, man, that ice cream costs a dollar a lick,” he said. “And guess what they want for a little bitty piece of chocolate not as big as your toe? Five-fifty.” Ice cream, advertised by the Soviets as a delicacy of their own contriving, started to become a national passion in the U.S.S.R. in 1939, when American machinery was imported for making it. Most of the Russian customers jammed into the salon were spooning it out of paper cups as they watched the Americans pose for informal news photographs—balancing beer bottles on their foreheads, demonstrating the shimmy, doing imitations of Louis Armstrong.

During the second intermission, I looked for Miss Ryan and found her backed into a corner, haughtily smoking a cigarette in a long Russian holder and trying to pretend she was not the cynosure of a circle of puffy girls and leaden-faced women, gathered to giggle and comment on her clinging gown and bare shoulders. Leonard Lyons, standing with her, said, “See, now you know how Marilyn Monroe feels. Would she ever be a wow here! She ought to get a visa. I’m going to tell her.”

“Ohhh,” moaned Miss Ryan, “if only I could get my coat.”

A man in his late thirties, clean-shaven, dignified, with an athletic figure and a scholar’s face, stepped up to Miss Ryan. “I should like to shake your hand,” he said respectfully. “I want you to know how much my friends and I are looking forward to ‘Porgy and Bess.’ It will be a powerful event for us, I can assure you. Some of us have obtained tickets for the first night. I am among the fortunate.” Miss Ryan said she was pleased to hear that, and remarked on the excellence of his English, which he explained by saying that he’d spent a number of the war years in Washington as an employee of the Soviet Purchasing Commission. “But can you really understand me?” he said. “It’s been so long since I’ve had the opportunity of speaking, it makes my heart pound.” His smile slackened as a flicker of lights signalled the end of the intermission, and urgently he said, “Please let me see you again. I’d like to show you Leningrad.” The invitation was directed to Miss Ryan, but by polite necessity included Lyons and me. Miss Ryan told him to call us at the Astoria, and he jotted our names on a program, then wrote out his own—I’ll can him Stefan Orlov—on a slip of paper and handed it to Miss Ryan.

Arrangements had been made for the company to go backstage at the end of the performance and meet the ballet artists. The final scene of “Corsair” is played partly on a ship’s deck hung with rigging, and when the Americans went behind the curtain, there was such congestion onstage that half the dancers had to stand on the deck or climb the rigging to get a good look at their Western colleagues. They cheered and applauded the Americans’ entrance for a full four minutes before enough quiet could be summoned for Breen to make a speech, which began, “It is we who should applaud you. Your thrilling artistry has produced an evening none of us will ever forget, and we only hope on Monday evening we can a little repay you for the pleasure you have given us.”

While Breen made his speech, and the director of the Maryinsky made one, the little ballerinas, sweat seeping through their makeup, crept close to the American performers and, in awe, gazed at the visitors’ shoes; shyly, then boldly, touched their dresses; rubbed bits of silk and taffeta between their fingers. One of them reached out and put her arm around a member of the cast named Georgia Burke. “Why, precious child,” said Miss Burke, a warm, happy-natured woman, “hug me all you like. It’s good to know somebody loves you.”

It was nearly one o’clock when the company started the bus ride back to the Astoria. The buses, rolling refrigerators, had the same seat plan as those that operate on Madison Avenue. I sat on the long back seat between Miss Ryan and Miss Lydia. Street lamps, yellowing the snow of empty streets, flashed at the windows like wintry fireflies, and Miss Ryan, looking out, said, “The palaces are so beautiful in the lamplight.”

“Yes,” said Miss Lydia, stifling a sleepy yawn, “the private homes are beautiful.” Then, as though suddenly awake, she added, “The former private homes.”

The next morning, I went shopping on the Nevsky Prospekt with Lyons and Mrs. Gershwin. The Nevsky, Leningrad’s principal street, is not a third the length of Fifth Avenue, but it is twice as wide; to get across its lanes of skidding traffic is a perilous chore—and a rather pointless one, for all the stores on both sides of the street are government-owned emporiums selling the same stock at the same prices. Bargain hunters and buyers on the lookout for “something a little different” find shopping on the Nevsky a discouraging experience.

Lyons had set out with starry hopes of picking up “a nice piece of Fabergé” to take home to his wife. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks sold to French and English collectors almost all the jewelled eggs and boxes that Fabergé had created for the royal amusement; the few examples of his work known to have remained in Russia are on display in the Hermitage and in the Armory at the Kremlin. Today, on the international market, the price of a small Fabergé box is likely to be over two thousand dollars. None of this daunted Lyons, who felt certain he was going to locate his Fabergé at a Commission Shop. This was sound thinking as far as it went, for if such an item existed, then a Commission Shop, a state-controlled brokerage where a Comrade can turn the last of his hidden heirlooms into spot cash, is probably the only place you would discover it. We visited several of these shops—drafty establishments with the going-gone sadness of auction rooms. In the largest, a glass cabinet ran the length of the shop, and the spectacle its contents presented, the conglomeration of spookily diverse objects, was like a Dadaist experiment. Rows of second-hand shoes, so worn that the spectral shape of the previous owners’ feet could be pathetically discerned, were neatly set forth under glass like treasures, which indeed they were at fifty to a hundred and seventy-five dollars a pair; a selection of headgear—flapper cloches and velvet cartwheels—flanked the shoes. After the hats, the Surrealistic variety and value of the cabinet’s contents swirled: a moth-nibbled fan ($30), a soiled powder puff ($7), an amber comb with broken teeth ($45), tarnished mesh handbags ($100 and up), a silver umbrella handle ($340), an unexceptional ivory chess set with five pawns missing ($1,450), a celluloid elephant ($25), a pink plaster doll cracked and flaked as though it had been left out in the rain ($25). All these articles, and yards more, were placed and numbered with a care that suggested an exhibition of mementos, the possessions of some beloved person now dead, and it was this—the reverence with which the things were displayed—that made them poignant. Lyons said, “Who do you s’pose buys this stuff?” But he had only to look around him to see that there were those who found the moth-nibbled fan and the silver umbrella handle still fetching, still desirable, quite worth their quoted cost. The Russians’ Christmas was two weeks off, but they give gifts at New Year’s, now only a week away, and the Commission Shops, like all the stores along the Nevsky, were packed with spenders. Lyons failed to flush any Fabergé, but a broker in another shop came up with a unique nineteenth-century snuffbox—an immense topaz, split in half and hollowed out. But the price, eighty thousand dollars, was more than the customer had in mind.

Mrs. Gershwin, who intended giving a Christmas present to every member of the “Porgy and Bess” cast, still had a few odds and ends of shopping to finish up, though she had carted a trunkload of gifts from Berlin. And so, struggling through the Nevsky crowds, we visited a furrier, where the cheapest sable was a short jacket selling—or, rather, not selling—for eleven thousand dollars. Then we stopped at an antique shop declared by Intourist to be Leningrad’s most “elegant.” The antiques turned out to be used television sets, an icebox, an old American electric fan, some battered pieces of Biedermeier, and a colossal number of oil paintings depicting historical events. “What did you expect, darling?” said Mrs. Gershwin. “There’s no such thing as a Russian antique. If there is, it’s French.” Inquiring for caviar, of which there had been a great dearth at every meal served us so far, we went to two fancy-food stores, the local Vendômes; there were pineapples from Africa, oranges from Israel, fresh litchi nuts from China, but no caviar. “Where, where did I get the idea it was the butter on the workingman’s bread?” lamented Mrs. Gershwin, and concluded that she’d settle for a cup, or a glass, of tea—a desire that shortly drove us into a Soviet version of Schrafft’s. This was in a dungeon cellar, where waitresses, wearing knee boots and tiaras made of doily paper, waded across slush-flooded floors carrying trays of ice cream and improbable pastry to gloomy groups of middle-aged women. But Mrs. Gershwin had to do without her tea, for there were no tables available, nor was there even space to stand and wait for one.

So far, none of us had made a single purchase. Mrs. Gershwin decided to try a department store. On the way, Lyons, who had brought a camera, often paused to take photographs—of match women and cherry-cheeked girls dragging Christmas trees, of street-corner flower stalls selling artificial roses and paper tulips stuck in flowerpots as though they were real. Each of his photographic forays created a pedestrian traffic jam, a gallery of silent spectators, who smiled, or sometimes scowled, when he took their pictures too. Presently, I noticed that there was one man who showed up every time among the onlookers, yet did not seem one of them. He always stood at the rear—a chunky man with a crooked nose, bundled in a black coat and astrakhan cap, with half his face hidden behind the kind of windshield dark glasses that skiers wear. I lost track of him before we reached the department store.

The store was reminiscent of a carnival alley, consisting of counters with alcoves behind them whose shelves seemed stocked mostly with shooting-gallery prizes—the familiar cheap dolls, ugly urns, plaster animals, toilet sets bedded in a crumpling of white casket silk. Mrs. Gershwin, overcome by an odor of rancid glue, felt a swift necessity to leave the leather-goods department, and a moment later she felt a swifter one to flee the perfume counter. A crowd began trailing us through the store, and when, at a counter before an alcove devoted to hats, I started trying on caps of ersatz Persian lamb, a good thirty grinning, jostling Russians ganged around demanding that I buy this one, that one, themselves whisking models on and off my head and ordering the clerk to bring more, more, until hats were toppling off the counter. Someone bent to retrieve one from the floor; it was the man wearing ski glasses. The hat I bought, chosen at desperate random, proved later not to fit. A fake astrakhan, it cost forty-five dollars, and because of the complicated system of payment that operates in all Soviet stores, forty minutes more was required to complete the transaction. First, the clerk gives you a sales slip, which you take over to a cashier’s booth, where you cool your heels while the cashier makes her computations on an abacus (an accurate method, no doubt; still, some clever Russian should invent the cash register). When you have paid your money, the cashier stamps the sales slip, and this you take back to the clerk, who by now is attending five other people; eventually, though, the clerk will accept the slip, usually go to check it with the cashier, come back, hand over your purchase, and direct you to a wrapping department, where you join another queue. At the end of such a process, I was given my hat in a green box.

Ski Glasses was nowhere in sight when we left the store. He turned up soon enough, however, at the edge of a group watching Lyons photograph peddlers selling Christmas trees in a snowy courtyard. It was there in the courtyard that I must have left the hatbox; I must have put it down to slap my numbed hands together, but I didn’t realize that it was missing until many blocks later. Lyons and Mrs. Gershwin were game to go back and look for it, but that wasn’t necessary, for as we turned around we saw Ski Glasses coming toward us, and dangling from his hand was the green hatbox. He gave it to me with a smile that twitched his crooked nose. Before I could think to say thank you, he’d tipped his cap and walked away.

“Well, ho ho. Call that a coincidence?” said Lyons. “Oh, I’ve had him spotted!”

“So have I,” Mrs. Gershwin said. “But, really, darling—isn’t it a comfort to know you can’t lose anything in Russia?”

At the Astoria, after lunch, I rode up in the elevator with Ira Wolfert. A former war correspondent, Wolfert is currently a stocky, silver-haired, pipe-puffing staff writer for the Reader’s Digest. He and his poet wife, Helen, had come along on Everyman Opera’s Soviet tour at the invitation of Breen, who hoped Wolfert would write something about the venture for the Reader’s Digest. “You can’t talk to anybody around here,” Wolfert told me. “Russians, I mean. It’s giving me claustrophobia. Every time I get into a political conversation, I keep getting the same old line. I was talking to Savchenko—he’s supposed to be an intelligent guy—and I said to him, ‘Since this is a private talk, do you honestly believe all these things you’re saying about America?’ You know, he was saying how Wall Street runs the country. But he acted as if he didn’t hear me. You can’t talk to them. There’s no realism in this social realism. Yesterday I was talking to a Russian, and he slips me a note. This note asks me to call his sister in New York. He has a sister living there. Later on, I see this guy on the street. I pull him down a side street and say, ‘What the hell goes on here?’ And he says, ‘Everything’s fine. Only, it’s better to be careful.’ Everything’s fine, but the guy’s slipping me notes!” Wolfert hit hard on his pipe and shook his head. “There’s no realism. I’m getting claustrophobia.”

Upstairs, I could hear the telephone ringing inside my room as I unlocked the door. It was the man I’d met during intermission at the ballet—Miss Ryan’s admirer, Stefan Orlov. He said he’d been calling Miss Ryan but there was no answer. I suggested he try the Breens’ suite, one room of which Miss Ryan was using as an office. “No,” he said, sounding nervously apologetic. “I must not ask for her again. So soon. But when may I see Nancy? And you?” I asked him if he would like to come by the hotel for a drink. There was a pause that lasted until I thought we’d been disconnected; finally, he said, “That would not be convenient. But could you both meet me—say, in an hour?” I said yes, I could, and would see about Nancy. But where? He told me, “Walk around the cathedral. St. Isaac’s. Keep walking. I will see you.” He rang off without saying goodbye.

I went down to the Breens’ suite to tell Miss Ryan of the invitation. She was first delighted and then crestfallen, because she had to work on a rush item for Breen. The rush item was a two-page letter he had just dictated, addressed to Charles E. Bohlen, the American Ambassador to Russia. Breen began by expressing gratification over the fact that Ambassador and Mrs. Bohlen were coming to Leningrad for the “Porgy and Bess” première, but the bulk of his letter was in a tone of aggrieved complaint. Although the production’s Soviet tour had received the blessings of the State Department, it was not, contrary to the popular impression, under its official sponsorship. Indeed, the trip had been made financially possible by Russia’s own Ministry of Culture. Nevertheless, Breen said he felt it was “a crying shame” that no member of Ambassador Bohlen’s staff had been permanently assigned to the company to make a record of “the day-to-day and minute-to-minute happenings, the individual contacts, and the spontaneous, warm incidents” that Breen considered necessary if the Embassy intended to “prepare properly the sort of full and valid report which rightfully should be expected on this unprecedented project.” Breen wrote, “The need for such documentation concerns not only this goodwill tour, important as it is, but also possible future cultural exchanges. No one can imagine the extreme lengths to which we have gone to provide smooth running—or the infinite amount of details which have to be foreseen and arranged if this type of exchange is to bear the fruit of its promise.”

“Give my love to Stefan,” Miss Ryan instructed me as I left to keep the appointment. “And if it turns out to be a spontaneous, warm incident, be sure and tell me.”

It’s a stone’s throw from the Astoria to the Russian Empire mass of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. I left the hotel at exactly three-thirty—the time Orlov had said he would meet me. On stepping out the door, I found myself confronting a pair of ski glasses. There was an Intourist Zis limousine parked at the curb, and the man was sitting in the front seat talking to the chauffeur. For a moment, I thought of going back inside the hotel; it seemed the sensible course if Orlov was anxious that our rendezvous be off the record. But I decided to stroll past the car and see what happened; as I went by, nerves and an unreliable sense of etiquette prompted me to nod at the man. He yawned and averted his face. I didn’t look back until I had crossed the square and was in the shadows of St. Isaac’s. By then, the car was gone. I walked slowly around the cathedral, pretending to admire the architecture, though there was no reason to pretend anything, for the sidewalks were deserted. Still, I felt conspicuous and not quite lawful. Night was sweeping across the sky as swiftly as the crows that wheeled and cawed overhead. The third time around, I began to suspect that Orlov had changed his mind. I tried to forget the cold by counting my steps, and had ticked off two hundred and sixteen when, turning a corner, I came on a scene that made the flow of numbers stop like the hands of a dropped watch.

Four men in black had a fifth man backed against the cathedral wall. They were pounding him with their fists, hitting him with the full weight of their bodies, like football players practicing on a dummy. A woman, respectably dressed and carrying a pocketbook tucked under one arm, stood on the sidelines as though she were casually waiting while some men friends finished a business conversation. Except for the cawing of the crows, it was like an episode from a silent film; no one made a sound, and as the four attackers relinquished their hold on the man, who fell and lay spread-eagled on the snow, they glanced at me indifferently, then joined the woman and walked off, still without a word. I went over to the man. He was fat, too heavy for me to lift, and the drink on his breath would have killed scorpions. He was not bleeding and he was not unconscious, but he wanted to speak and couldn’t; he gazed up at me like a deaf-mute attempting to communicate with his eyes.

A car with its headlights on pulled alongside the curb. The strip of black-and-white checks bordering its frame identified it as a taxi. The door opened, and Stefan Orlov called my name. Leaning in, I tried to explain what had happened and ask him to help the man, but he was impatient, he didn’t want to listen; he kept saying “Get in” and “Will you please get in,” and at last, with a fury that shocked me, he said “You’re an idiot!” and yanked me onto the seat. As the taxi swung in a U turn, its headlights fell on the man sprawled on the sidewalk, his lifted hands plowing the air, like the claws of an insect cruelly tumbled on its back.

“I’m sorry,” said Orlov, regaining a civil voice that also managed to sound sincerely remorseful. “But other people’s quarrels, they are not so much interesting. You understand. Now enjoy yourself. We are going to the Eastern.” He commented on Miss Ryan’s absence and regretted “deeply” that she had been unable to accept his invitation. “The Eastern is the place to take a girl like Nancy. Very good food. Music. A bit of Oriental atmosphere.” After the clandestine arrangements for our meeting, it struck me as curious that we were now proceeding to a place as gay and public as he described, and I said so. He was hurt. “I have no fears, but I’m not an idiot, either,” he said. “The Astoria is a sensitive place. You understand? It’s a nuisance to go there. Why shouldn’t I see you if I like?” He was asking himself the question. “You are a singer, I’m interested in music.” It turned out he was under the impression that both Miss Ryan and I were singers in “Porgy and Bess.” When I told him I was a writer, he seemed upset. Now that he knew who I was, I thought, perhaps he would see the situation in a different, not quite so harmless perspective, so I suggested that if the taxi would take me within walking distance of the Astoria, we could amicably part company then and there. “Please, no. I admire so much the American people,” he said. He told me that the years he’d spent in Washington “were of a happiness I never forget,” and went on, “The Russians who lived in New York were always very snobbish about the Russians who had to live in Washington; they said, ‘Oh, my dear, Washington is so boring and provincial.’ ” He laughed at his grande-dame imitation. “But for me, I liked it there. The hot streets in the summer. Bourbon whiskey. I liked so much my flat. I open my windows and pour myself a bourbon. I sit in my underwear and drink the bourbon and play the vic as loudly as I like. There is a girl I know. Two girls. One of them always comes by.”

The Eastern is a restaurant attached to the Hotel Europa, just off the Nevsky Prospekt. Unless a few desiccated potted palms connote the Orient, I am at a loss to explain Orlov’s contention that the place had a slant-eyed atmosphere. The atmosphere, if any, was a discouraging one of yellow-walled drabness and sparsely occupied tables. Orlov was self-conscious; he picked at his tie and smoothed his dark hair as we crossed an empty dance floor. An ensemble, four musicians as spidery as the palms they stood among, was scratching out a waltz. We climbed a flight of stairs to a balcony where there were discreet dining booths. “I’m sure you think the Astoria is more elegant,” he said as we sat down. “But that is for foreigners and large snobs. Here is for smaller snobs. I am very small snob.”

It occurred to me that he probably couldn’t afford the Eastern at all. His overcoat had a luxurious sable collar and he wore a hat of gleaming sealskin; still, his suit was a poor, thin plaid wool, and the laundered freshness of his white shirt somehow made more apparent its frayed cuffs and collar. But he gave sumptuous instructions to the waiter, who brought us a four-hundred-gram carafe of vodka and huge helpings of fresh caviar heaped in silver ice-cream dishes, with toast and slices of lemon on the side. With a passing thought of Mrs. Gershwin, I dispatched every soft, unsalted pearly-gray bead of it, and Orlov, marvelling at the speed of my accomplishment, asked if I would like another serving. I said no, I couldn’t possibly, but he saw that I could and sent the waiter for more. Meanwhile, he proposed toasts in honor of Miss Ryan. “To Nancy,” he said, draining his glass. “She is a beautiful girl. Beautiful.”

The succession of rapidly gulped vodkas flushed his pale, almost handsome face. He told me he could drink “a fool’s fill” and not get drunk, but a gradual dimming of intelligence in his fine blue eyes belied the boast. He wanted to know if I thought Miss Ryan liked him. “Because,” he said, leaning forward in an excessively confidential attitude, “she is a beautiful girl, and I like her. But you think I’m an idiot? Because I’m nearly forty and I’m married five years?” He spread his right hand on the table to show me a plain gold wedding ring. “I would never do harm to my marriage,” he said piously. “We have two babies, little girls.” He described his wife as “not beautiful but my principal friend,” and told me that, even aside from the children, the interests they shared made the marriage “a serious composition.” Among the professional classes in Russia, it can be observed that people seldom make alliances with anyone outside their own field of work. Doctors marry doctors, lawyers lawyers. Orlov and his wife, it seemed, taught chemistry at the same Leningrad school. Music and the theatre were their chief pleasures; they had taken turns, he said, waiting in line to buy tickets for the “Porgy and Bess” first night, but in the end tickets had been rationed, and they had been allowed just one. “Now my wife pretends she doesn’t want to go. That is so I can go.” The previous year, they had bought a television set as a New Year’s present for each other, but now they regretted having spent the money on something “so boring and childish.” He expressed himself with equal harshness on the subject of Soviet films. His wife was fond of going to the kino, but he himself would be enthusiastic only if ever again they showed American pictures. (“I should like to know. What has happened to that beautiful girl Joan Bennett? And the other one, Myrna Loy? And George Raft? What a wonderful actor! Is he still alive?”) Apart from this disagreement on the merits of moviegoing, his wife’s tastes coincided with his at every point; they even, he said, enjoyed the same sport, boating, and for several years had been saving to buy a small sailboat, intending to dock it at a fishing village on the Gulf of Finland, near Leningrad, where each summer they spent two months’ vacation. “That is what I live for—steering a boat through the poetry of our white nights. You must come back when the white nights are here. They are a true reward for nine months’ dark.”

The vodka was exhausted, and Orlov, after calling for a replenishment, complained that I wasn’t keeping pace with him. He said it “disgusted” him to watch me “just tasting” and demanded that I “drink like a decent fellow or leave the table.” I was surprised how easy it was to empty a glass in one swallow, how pleasant, and it appeared to have no effect but a tickling warmth and a feeling that my critical faculties were receding. I began to think that, after all, Orlov was right, the restaurant did have an Oriental atmosphere, and the music of the quartet, scraping away like cicadas among the palms, seemed to have acquired a beguiling, nostalgic lilt.

Orlov, at the stage of repeating himself, said “I’m a good man and I have a good wife” three times before he could reach the next sentence, which was “But I have strong muscles.” He flexed one arm. “I’m passionate. A lusty dancer. On hot nights, with the window open, and the vic playing loud as we like. And the vic playing loud as we like. One of the girls always comes by. And we dance like that. With the window open on hot nights. That’s all I want. To dance with Nancy. Beautiful. A beautiful girl. You understand? Just to dance. Where is she?” His hand swept the table. Silverware clattered to the floor. “Why isn’t Nancy here? Why won’t she sing for us?” With his head tilted back, he sang, “Missouri woman on the Mississippi, with her apron strings . . .” His voice grew louder and he lapsed into Russian—a hollering still obscurely associated with the tune of “St. Louis Blues.” I looked at my watch. To my astonishment, it was nine o’clock. We had been sitting in the Eastern almost five hours, which meant I couldn’t be as sober as I reckoned. The realization and the proof of it struck simultaneously, like a pair of assassins who had been lying in wait. The tables seemed to slide, the lights to swing, as though the restaurant were a ship riding a rough sea. At my insistence, Orlov asked for the check, but he went on singing as he counted out his rubles and we made our way down the stairs.

In front of the Eastern, there was a man selling rubber animals. Orlov bought a rabbit and handed It to me. “Tell Nancy from Stefan,” he said. Then he pulled me along a street that led away from the Nevsky Prospekt. As frozen-mud lanes replaced pavement, it became clear that our destination was not the Astoria. This was no neighborhood of palaces; instead, it was rather like the slums of New Orleans, a district of broken fences and sagging wooden houses. We passed an abandoned church with wind wailing around the domes like a widow at a grave. But not far from the church, sidewalks resumed and, with them, the city’s imperial façade. Orlov headed toward a café with lighted windows. The cold walk had quieted, somewhat sobered, him. At the door, he said, “Here it is better. A workingman’s place.”

It was like falling into a bear pit. The body heat and beery breath and damp-fur smell of a hundred growling, quarrelling, jostling customers filled the brightly lit café. Eight or ten men huddled around each of the dozen tables. The only women present were three waitresses—all of them brawny girls, wide as they were tall, and with faces round and flat as plates. In addition to waiting on table, they did duty as bouncers. Calmly, expertly, with an odd absence of rancor and less effort than it takes to yawn, they would throw a punch that knocked the stuffing out of a man double their size. Lord help the man who fought back. If he did, all three girls would converge on him, beat him to his knees, and then literally wipe the floor with him as they dragged his carcass to the door and pitched it into the night. Some men, would-be customers but apparently personae non gratae, never got in the café, for as soon as one of these undesirables appeared in the doorway, the ladies of the establishment formed a flying, flailing wedge and drove him out again. Yet they could be courteous. At least, they smiled at Orlov—impressed, I thought, by his sable collar and expensive hat. One of them showed us to a table, where she told two men, young, jut-jawed bruisers wearing leather coats, to get up and give us their chairs. One was willing, the other argued. She settled his objections by snatching him up by the hair and twisting his ear.

For the most part, only upper-stratum restaurants are licensed to sell vodka, and since the café was clearly not in that category, Orlov ordered Russian cognac, a brackish liquid that came in large tea glasses overflowing their brims. With the blitheness of a man blowing the foam off his beer, he emptied a third of his glass, and then asked if the café “pleased” me or did I think it “rough”? I answered yes, and yes. “Rough but not hooligan,” he said. “On the waterfront, yes, that is hooligan. But here is just ordinary. A workingman’s place. No snobs.” We had eight companions at the table, and they were soon picking at me like magpies, plucking the cigarette lighter out of my hand, the scarf from around my neck, and passing these objects back and forth among themselves, glaring at them, grinning over them, and showing—even the youngest—rows of rotted teeth, and wrinkles for which age could not account.

A favorite of the café was a boy who roamed around with a guitar. If you bought him a drink, he’d sing you a song. He sang one for Orlov, who translated it for me, saying it was the kind of song “we” like. It was the lament of a sailor longing for the village of his youth and a lost love called Nina. (“The green of the sea is the green of her eyes.”) The boy sang well, with plaintive flamenco waverings in his voice. But his eyes bothered me, and after a while I knew why. It was because they reminded me of the expression, the deaf-mute pleading, in the eyes of the man lying on the cathedral sidewalk. When the boy stopped singing, Orlov told him to sing another song. Instead, he tried to speak to me: “I . . . you . . . mother . . . man.” He knew about ten words of English, and he struggled to pronounce them. I asked Orlov to interpret, and he and the boy talked together in Russian.

“It’s not so much interesting,” Orlov said. “I’m not interested in politics.” When I persisted, Orlov was annoyed. “It’s nothing,” he said. “A nuisance. He wants you to help him.”

“Help” was a word the boy understood. “Help,” he said, nodding vigorously. “Help.”

“Isn’t he a nuisance?” said Orlov. “He says his father was English and his mother Polish, and because of this he says he’s very badly treated in our country. He wants you to write the British Ambassador. Something like that. He wants to go to England.”

“English man,” said the boy, pointing at himself proudly. “Help.” I didn’t see how I could, and when Orlov told him what I had said, he repeated reproachfully, “Help. Help.”

Orlov gave him a coin and told him the name of a song he wanted to hear. It was a comedy song with unending choruses, and though the boy drudged through it listlessly, even the waitresses laughed and roared out the key lines, which everybody seemed to know. At five minutes to midnight, closing time, the waitresses began to switch the lights off and on, warningly. But the customers kept the song going, clung to these last minutes, as though they loathed to trade the café’s camaraderie for cold streets, the fierce, lonely journeys homeward. Orlov said he’d walk me to St. Isaac’s Square. But, first, a final toast. He proposed, “To a long life and a merry one. Is that what they say?” Yes, I told him, that’s what they say.

The boy with the guitar blocked our path to the door. Exiting customers were still warbling his song; you could hear their voices echoing down the street. And in the café the waitresses were shooing out the last diehards, turning off the lights in earnest. “Help,” said the boy, still trying to speak to me, as a waitress, at Orlov’s request, pushed him aside so we could get by.

“Help, help,” he called after me, as the door closed between us.

“I think he must be a crazy person,” said Orlov.

“New York could’ve been bombed, for all we know,” said Leonard Lyons to Herman Sartorius, who was sitting next to him in one of the buses taking the company on a morning visit to the Hermitage. “I’ve never been to a place where I couldn’t get a newspaper in a language I could read and find out what’s going on in the world. A prisoner—that’s how I feel.” Sartorius, a tall, graying, solemnly courteous man, confessed that he, too, missed Western newspapers and wondered aloud if it would seem “not quite correct” for him to inquire at a Leningrad bank for the current New York Stock Exchange quotations.

As it happened, the passenger seated behind them could have supplied them with any information they wanted. It was his business to know what went on beyond the Iron Curtain—especially in America. He was a Russian, Josef (“Call me Joe”) Adamov, and he was in Leningrad to tape-record interviews with the “Porgy and Bess” cast for Radio Moscow, the station that beams broadcasts to countries outside the Soviet orbit. Adamov’s talents—writing, interviewing, acting—are devoted to programs intended for American, or at least English-speaking, consumption. The programs consist of news reports, interviews with visiting celebrities, music, and soap operas sudsy with propaganda. Listening to one of these plays (as I have done) is a startling experience, not for the content, which is crude, but for the acting, which isn’t. The voices pretending to be “average” Americans seem precisely that; one believes absolutely in the man who says he’s a Midwestern farmer, a Texas cowhand, a Detroit factory worker. Even the voices of children sound as American as the crunch of Wheaties, the crack of a baseball bat. Adamov bragged that none of the actors had ever left Russia; their accents were manufactured right in Moscow. Himself a frequent actor in the plays, Adamov has so perfected a certain American accent that he fooled a native of the region it belongs to, Lyons, who said, “Gee, I’m dumfounded, I keep wondering what’s he doing so far from Lindy’s.” Adamov, indeed, seems to belong on the corner of Broadway and Fifty-first, a copy of Variety jammed under his arm. Although his slang needs dusting off, it is delivered with a bizarrely fluent, side-of-the-mouth technique. “Me, I’m no museum type,” he said as we neared the Hermitage. “But if you go in for all that creepy stuff, they tell me this joint’s O.K., really loaded.” A swarthy, moonfaced man in his middle thirties, with a jumpy, laughing, coffee-nerves animation, Adamov has shifty eyes, and they grow shiftier when, under duress, he admits that his English was learned in New York, where he lived between the ages of eight and twelve, with an émigré grandfather. He prefers to skate over this American episode. “I was just a kid,” he remarks, as much as to say, “I didn’t know any better.” Adamov is a successful man, which means, as it does elsewhere—though far more so in Russia—that he enjoys privileges unknown to the ordinary citizen. The one he values most is that of occupying a two-room bachelor apartment in Moscow’s Gorky Street, where, to hear him tell it, he lives the life of a Turk in a seraglio. “Gimme a buzz you come to Moscow, you wanta meet some cute kids,” he was heard telling some members of the company. Meanwhile, he thought some of the girls in the “Porgy and Bess” company were “pretty cute kids” themselves—particularly a saucer-eyed singer in the chorus named Dolores Swan. At the museum, where the sightseers were separated into battalions of twelve, Adamov made a point of joining Miss Swan in a group that included Lyons, the Wolferts, Mrs. Gershwin, Nancy Ryan, Warner Watson, and me.

The Hermitage is part of the Winter Palace, which in recent years has been repainted its imperial color—a frosty chartreuse-vert. Its miles of silvery windows overlook a park and, beyond it, a wide expanse of the Neva. “The Winter Palace was started in 1764 and took seventy-eight years to finish,” said the English-speaking guide, a girl with a brisk, whip-’em-along attitude. “It consists of four buildings and contains, as you see, the world’s greatest museum. This where we are standing is the Ambassadorial Staircase, used by the ambassadors mounting to see the Czar.” In the wake of those ectoplasmic ambassadors, our party followed her up marble stairs that curved under a filigree ceiling of white and gold. We passed through a splendid hall panelled in green malachite, looking like a corridor under the sea, and here there were French windows where a few of us paused to look across the Neva at a misty-hazy view of that celebrated torture chamber, the Peter Paul fortress. “Come, come,” the guide urged. “There is much to see and we will not accomplish our mission if we linger at useless spectacles.”

The Treasure Vault was the mission’s immediate objective. “That’s where they keep the ice, the real stuff—crown jools, all that junk,” Adamov informed Miss Swan. A group of stunted amazons, several of them in uniform and wearing pistols strapped around their waists, guarded the vault’s bolted doors. Adamov, jerking a thumb toward the guards, said to Warner Watson, “I’ll bet you don’t have any female cops like these in America, huh?”

“Sure,” said Watson timidly. “We have policewomen, sure.”

“But,” said Adamov, his moist moonface going scarlet with laughter, “not as fat as these, huh?”

While the vault’s complicated steel doors were being unlocked, the guide announced, “Ladies will please leave their pocketbooks with the custodians.” Then, as though to circumvent the obvious implication: “It is a matter of ladies causing damage dropping their pocketbooks. We have had that experience.” The vault is divided into three small, chandelier-lighted rooms, the first two entirely occupied by a unique display—a sophisticated splash of Scythian gold, fashioned into buttons and bracelets, cruel weapons, papery leaves, and garlands. “First-century stuff,” said Adamov. “B.C., A.D., all that junk.” The third room is intellectually duller but aesthetically much more dazzling. In it are a dozen glass-enclosed cabinets (bearing the metal mark of their maker, Holland & Sons, 23 Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, London) afire with souvenirs of the Czarist era: onyx and ivory walking sticks, birds that sing with emerald tongues, a lily bouquet made of pearls, a rose one of rubies, rings and boxes so heavily jewelled they give off a trembling glare like heat waves.

Lyons planted himself in front of a cabinet containing one of the collection’s few examples of Fabergé: a miniature version of the symbols of royal power—crown, sceptre, and orb. “It’s gorgeous,” said Miss Swan. “Don’t you think it’s gorgeous, Mr. Adamov?”

Adamov smiled indulgently. “If you say so, kid,” he said. “Personally, I think it’s junk. What good does it do anybody?”

Wolfert, chewing on an unlit pipe, was rather of Adamov’s opinion. “I hate jewelry,” he said, glowering at a tray of blazing froufrou. “I don’t know the difference between a zircon and a diamond. Except I like zircons better. They’re shinier.” He put an arm around his wife. “I’m glad I married a woman who doesn’t like jewelry.”

“Oh, I like jewelry, Ira,” said Mrs. Wolfert, a comfortable-looking, dreamy-eyed woman. “I like creations. But this, this is all trickery and showoff. It makes me ill.”

“It makes me ill, too,” said Miss Ryan. “But in quite a different way. I’d give anything for that ring—the tiger’s-eye.”

“It makes me ill,” Mrs. Wolfert repeated.

Mrs. Gershwin was also making comparisons “I wish I’d never come here,” she said, forlornly fingering her diamonds. “I feel so dissatisfied I’d like to go home and crack my husband on the head.”

Miss Ryan asked her, “If you could have any of this you wanted, what would you take?”

“All of it, darling,” replied Mrs. Gershwin.

Miss Ryan agreed, and added, “And when I got it home, I’d spread it on the floor and rip off my clothes and just roll.”

The guide herded everyone to the door, counting us as we left. Some six kilometres later, the group, its ranks thinned by fatigue cases, stumbled into the last exhibit hall, weak-legged after two hours of inspecting Egyptian mummies and Italian madonnas, craning necks at excellent Old Masters excruciatingly hung, poking about the sarcophagus of Alexander Nevsky, and marvelling at a pair of Peter the Great’s goliath-size boots. “And over here,” the guide said, directing attention to the final item on the agenda, “is our famous The Peacock.”

The Peacock, a mechanical folly constructed by the eighteenth-century English clockmaker James Cox, was brought to Russia as a gift from Potëmkin to Catherine II. It is kept in a glass cage the size of a summerhouse. The chief attraction of the piece is a bronze peacock perched among the gilded leaves of a bronze tree. Balanced on other branches are an owl, a rooster, a squirrel nibbling a nut. At the base of the tree there is a scattering of mushrooms, one of which bears the face of a clock. “When the hour strikes, we have here a forceful happening,” said the guide. “The peacock spreads his tail and the rooster crows. The owl blinks her eyes and the squirrel has a good munch.”

Adamov grunted. “Who the hell cares what it does? It’s dopey.”

Miss Ryan took him to task. She wanted to know why he should feel that way about an object of such “imaginative craftsmanship.”

He shrugged. “What’s imaginative about it? A lot of jerks going blind so milady can watch a peacock fan his tail. Look at those leaves! Think of the work went into that! All for nothing. A non-utilitarian nothing. I’ll tell you a good reason I don’t like it. Because that peacock’s gonna go on fanning his tail when I’m dust. A man works all his life, he ends up dust. That’s what museums are—reminders of death. Death.”

A gang of soldiers, part of another tour, approached The Peacock just as the hour chimed inside the cage, and the soldiers, country boys with their heads shaved bald, their drab uniforms sagging in the seat, had the double enchantment of gaping at foreigners and watching the golden-eyed owl wink and the peacock flash his bronze feathers in the wan light of the Winter Palace. The Americans and the soldiers crowded close to hear the rooster crow, man and art for a moment alive together.

It was Christmas Eve. The interpreters from the Ministry of Culture, under the supervision of Savchenko, had set up a skinny fir tree in the center of one of the two lesser Astoria restaurants and decorated it with hand-colored paper cards and wisps of tinsel. The members of the company, sentimental about their fourth Christmas together, had gone on spending sprees before leaving Berlin: a razzle-dazzle of cellophane and ribbon spread in a knee-deep, twenty-foot circle around the tree. The presents were to be opened at midnight. Long past that hour, Miss Ryan was still in her room wrapping packages; I helped her carry her presents down to the restaurant, where she was just in time for the end of the gift distributing. The children had been allowed to stay up for the party, and now, hugging new dolls and squirting raspberry soda from water pistols, they cycloned through the gaudy wrapping-paper debris. The grownups danced to the music of a Russian jazz band, which could be heard playing in the connecting main restaurant. Mrs. Breen whirled by, a bit of holiday ribbon floating around her neck. “Isn’t it bliss?” she said. “Aren’t you happy? After all, we don’t spend every Christmas in Leningrad!”

The waitresses, young English-language students who had volunteered to tend table for the American troupe, demurely refused invitations to dance. “Oh, come on, honey,” one waitress was urged, “let’s you and me melt that Curtain together.”

Vodka, abetting the spirit of the occasion, had already melted the reserve of the Ministry of Culture representatives. They each had received presents from the company, and Miss Lydia, who had been given a compact, wanted to kiss everyone in sight. “It is too kind, so kind,” she said, tirelessly examining her face in the compact mirror.

Even the aloof Savchenko, a dour, glacial Santa Claus, seemed after a while willing to forget his dignity. At any rate, he did not protest when a girl in the cast plumped herself on his lap, threw her arms around him, and between kisses told him, “How come you want to look like a grumpy old bear when you’re just a doll? A living doll, that’s what you are, Mr. Savchenko.” Breen, too, had affectionate words for the Ministry of Culture executive. “Let’s all drink to the man we can thank for this wonderful party,” he said, hoisting a tumbler of vodka. “One of the best friends we have in the world—Nikolai Savchenko.”

Savchenko responded by proposing another toast. “To the free exchange of culture between the artists of our countries. When the cannons are heard, the muses are silent,” he continued, quoting his favorite maxim. “When the cannons are silent, the muses are heard.”

Adamov was busily tape-recording the party on a portable machine. Five-year-old Davy Hawthorne, solicited for a comment, said into Adamov’s microphone, “Hello, everybody, Happy Christmas. Daddy wants me to go to bed, but we’re all having a grand time, so I’m not going.” Adamov also recorded “Silent Night,” which the cast, gathering around the tree, sang with a volume that drowned the next-room thumping of the dance band.

After two, the party infiltrated the next room, the Astoria’s “night club,” which is permitted to operate later than twelve on Saturdays—the only night of the week when the patrons outnumber the personnel. The Soviet habit of seating strangers together does not encourage uninhibited conversation, and the cavernous restaurant, occupied to near capacity by Leningrad’s élite, was unreasonably subdued, the merest few—mostly young Army and Navy officers with their sweethearts—taking advantage of the orchestra’s respectable rhythms. The rest—artists and theatrical people, groups of military Chinese, jowly commissars accompanied by their uncorseted, gold-toothed wives—sat around as bored and uncaring as castaways on a Pacific atoll.

Earl Bruce Jackson took one look and said, “Whatcha say, cats, let’s get the snakes crawlin’, skin the beast and sprinkle pepper in his eyes!” Whereupon five members of the company commandeered the bandstand. The hotel musicians had not the least objection to being ousted. They were all fans of American jazz, and one of them, a devotee of Dizzy Gillespie, had accumulated a large record collection, he told me, by listening to foreign broadcasts and recording the music on discs made from old X-ray plates.

Junior Mignott spat into a trumpet, and banana-fingered Lorenzo Fuller struck piano chords. Moses LaMarr, a powerhouse with sandpaper lungs, stomped his foot and opened his mouth wide as an alligator. “Grab yo’ coat ’n’ get yo’ hat, leave yo’ worry on de do’step . . .” It was as though the castaways had sighted rescue on the horizon. Smiles broke out like an unfurling of flags; tables emptied onto the dance floor. “. . . just direct yo’ feet . . .” A Chinese cadet tapped his foot; Russians packed close to the bandstand, riveted by LaMarr’s scratchy voice, the drumbeat riding behind it. “. . . to de sunny, sunny, sunny . . .” Couples rocked, swayed in each other’s arms. “. . . side ah de streeeet!”

“Look at them zombies go!” said Jackson, and then shouted to LaMarr, “They’re skinned, man, skinned! Throw on the gasoline and burn ’em alive. Ooble-ee-do!”

Mrs. Breen, a smiling shepherdess gazing at her flock, turned to Leonard Lyons. “You see,” she said. “We’ve broken through. Robert’s done what the diplomats couldn’t.”

At one of the tables, a female member of the cast was sitting with three Russians, one of whom, a gnarled, unshaven gnome with frothing black hair, splashed champagne into a glass and thrust it at me. “He wants you to sit down, and, gosh, you’d better,” the actress advised me. “He’s a wild man.” He was, I later learned, a Georgian sculptor, responsible for the heroic statuary in the new Leningrad subway. The others at the table, a man and wife, were silent until, a moment or two after I sat down, the actress and the sculptor got up to dance. Then the woman, a death-pale brunette with Mongolian cheekbones and green almond eyes, whom I shall call Mme. Zukovsky, said to me, “What an appalling little man. A Georgian, of course. These people from the South!” She spoke English with the spurious elegance, the strained exactness, of Eliza Doolittle. “I am Mme. Zukovsky, and this is my husband, the crooner,” she said, introducing me to the gentleman, who was twice her age—somewhere in his sixties—a vain, once-handsome man with an inflated stomach and a collapsing chin line. He spoke no English. His wife was startled that I’d never heard of him. “No? Zukovsky? The famous crooner?” During the twenties and thirties, it seemed, Zukovsky lived in Paris, enjoying a minor vogue as a cabaret artist. When that faltered, he went on a honky-tonk tour of the Far East. Though of Russian parentage, his wife was born in Shanghai, and it was there that she met and married Zukovsky. In 1943, they moved to Moscow, where she launched a not too prosperous career as a film actress. “I am a painter, really,” she said. “But I can’t be bothered ingratiating myself with all the right people. That is necessary if you want your pictures shown. And painting is so difficult when one travels.” Zukovsky was currently engaged in a series of concerts in Leningrad. “Zukovsky is more sold out than the Negroes,” his wife informed me. “We are going to the Negro première. It should be a delightful evening, because the Negroes are so amusing and there is so little amusing here. Nothing but work, work. We’re all too tired to be amusing. Don’t you find Leningrad absolutely dead? A beautiful corpse? And Moscow. Moscow is not quite as dead, but so ugly.” She wrinkled her nose and shuddered. “I suppose, coming from New York, you find us very shabby? Speak the truth. You think me shabby?” I didn’t think so, no. She wore a simple black dress and some good jewelry, and had a mink stole slung over her shoulders. In fact, she was the best-dressed, best-looking woman I’d seen in Russia. “Ah, you’re embarrassed to say,” she went on. “But I know. When I look at your friends, these American girls, I feel shabby. There are no nice things next to my skin. It isn’t that I’m poor. I have money. . . .” She hesitated. The actress and the sculptor were returning to the table. “Please,” she said, “I would like to say something to you privately. Do you dance?”

The improvised band was smooching its way through “Somebody Loves Me,” and the crowd on the floor listened to LaMarr rasp out the lyrics with transfixed expressions. “. . . I wonder who, oh MAY-be, BA-by, MAY-be it’s you!” Mme. Zukovsky danced well, but her body was tense, her hands icy. “J’adore la musique des nègres,” she said. “It’s so wicked. So vile.” And then, in the same breath, she began to whisper rapidly in my ear. “You and your friends must find Russia very expensive. Take my advice—don’t change your dollars. Sell your clothes. That is the way to get rubles. Sell. Anyone will buy. If it can be done discreetly. I am here in the hotel. Room 520. Tell your friends to bring me shoes, stockings, things for close to the skin. Anything.” She dug her nails into my sleeve. “Tell them I will buy anything.”

Set somewhat back from the Nevsky Prospekt, there is an arcaded building bearing a marked resemblance to St. Peter’s, in Rome. This is the Kazan Cathedral, one of Leningrad’s largest anti-religious museums. Inside, in an atmosphere of stained-glass gloom, the management has produced a Grand Guignol indictment of the teachings of the church. Statues and sinister portraits of the Popes follow one another down the galleries like a procession of witches. Everywhere ecclesiastics leer and grimace, make, in captioned cartoons, satyr suggestions to nunlike women, revel in orgies, snub the poor to cavort with the decadent rich. Ad infinitum, the museum demonstrates its thesis—that the church, Roman Catholic in particular, exists solely as a protection for capitalism. One caricature, an enormous oil, depicts Rockefeller, Krupp, Hetty Green, Morgan, and Ford plunging avaricious hands into a mountainous welter of coins and blood-soaked war helmets.

The Kazan Cathedral is popular with children—understandably so, since the exhibition is liberally sprinkled with horror-comic scenes of brutality and torture. The schoolteachers who daily herd swarms of pupils through the place have difficulty dragging them away from attractions like the Chamber of the Inquisitors. The Chamber is a real room peopled with the life-size wax figures of four Inquisitors relishing the agonies of a heretic. The naked victim, chained to a table, is being branded with hot coals by a pair of masked torturers. The coals are electrically lighted. Children, after being pulled away, keep sneaking back for another look.

Anti-religious museums were not among the sightseeing projects its hosts had lined up for the “Porgy and Bess” cast. Quite the contrary. On Sunday, Christmas Day, the Russians offered it the chance to attend either a Catholic Mass or a Baptist service. Eleven members of the company, including Rhoda Boggs, a mezzo-soprano who plays the part of the Strawberry Woman, went to the Evangelical Baptist Church, whose Leningrad parishioners number two thousand and, incidentally, sing the standard, familiar Baptist hymns in Russian. Afterward, I saw Miss Boggs sitting alone in one of the Astoria restaurants. She is a round, honey-colored, jolly-faced woman, always carefully groomed, but now her little Sunday-best hat was slightly askew and the handkerchief she kept dabbing at her eyes was wet as a washcloth.

“I’m tore to pieces,” she told me, her breast heaving. “I’ve been going to church since I can walk, but I never felt Jesus like I felt Jesus today. Oh, child, he was there. He was out in the open. He was plainly written on every face. He was singing with us, and you never heard such beautiful singing. It was old people mostly, and old people can’t sing like that without Jesus helping them along. The pastor, a sweet old man, he asked the interpreter to ask us colored people would we render a spiritual, and they listened so quiet, all those rows and rows and rows of old faces just looking at us, like we was telling them nobody’s alone when Jesus is everywhere on this earth, which is a fact they know already, but it seemed to me like they were glad to hear it. Anybody doubts the presence of Our Saviour, he should’ve been there. Well, it came time to go. To say goodbye. And you know what happened? They stood up, the whole congregation. They took out white handkerchiefs and waved them in the air. And they sang ‘God Be with You Till We Meet Again.’ With their own words. The tears were just pouring down our faces, them and ours. Oh, child, it churned me up. I’m all tore to pieces.”

That evening, with the première less than twenty-four hours away, the windows of the Astoria stayed lighted late. All night, footsteps hurried along the corridors, doors slammed, and telephones rang, as though a calamity were occurring.

In Suite 415, Ambassador Bohlen and his wife entertained a small group of aides and friends who had just arrived with them by train from Moscow. The gathering, which included Roye L. Lowry, Second Secretary of the Embassy and one of the two diplomats who had briefed the company in Berlin, and Mrs. Lowry, was exceptionally quiet, since the Bohlens didn’t want their presence in the hotel generally known until the last possible moment. Directly below the ambassadorial apartment, in Suite 315, Mrs. Breen was having a massage while her husband polished the pre-curtain speech he planned to deliver. It had been suggested to him that he might circumvent the Communist propaganda potential in “Porgy and Bess” by pointing out that its picture of American Negroes concerned the long ago, not today, so he added the line “Therefore, let our work tell you how we feel through the drama and music of ‘Porgy and Bess,’ a folk-story which took place in the past—years ago—in Charleston, South Carolina, in the U.S.A.” In Room 223, Leonard Lyons was at his typewriter roughing out the opening-night column he intended cabling his newspaper, the New York Post. “Onstage were the flags of both nations, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.,” he wrote, previewing the event. “The last time an American flag was displayed here was when there were only forty-five states in the Union. A representative of the Ministry of Culture phoned to inquire how many states are united now. Yesterday, a wardrobe mistress sewed three more white stars on the old flag.”

The hotel was seething with journalists. The Saturday Evening Post was represented in the person of Charles W. Thayer, Ambassador Bohlen’s brother-in-law, who had arrived, along with C. L. Sulzberger, of the New York Times, with the Bohlen party. The Saturday Review was sending Horace Sutton; Time and Life already had a photographer-reporter team on hand; Mrs. Richard K. O’Malley, representing A.P.’s Moscow bureau, was speeding toward Leningrad aboard the crack Red Arrow Express; and the night before the same train had brought C.B.S. correspondent Daniel Schorr. Now, in Room 111, Schorr, a heavy-set man in his late thirties, was trying simultaneously to correct a typescript, keep a pipe lighted, and dictate over the telephone to a stenographer in Moscow. “O.K. Here’s the story. You put in the slugs. Let’s go,” he said, and began to read from the typed pages: “ ‘The Porgy and Bess Company comma believed to be the first American theatrical troupe ever to appear in Russia comma will open its Soviet engagement tomorrow night before a selected audience of two thousand two hundred’—I repeat, ‘two two oh oh’—‘at Leningrad’s Palace of Culture comma but offstage the Negro actors and singers have already scored a smash hit period The sixty members of the cast comma just by being themselves comma have had a tremendous impact on this comma the second-largest city in the Soviet Union.’ . . . That’s right, isn’t it? It is the second-largest?” For twenty minutes more, Schorr droned out anecdotes and facts. The opening night had been sold out weeks in advance; long lines of Leningraders had waited many hours in the snow to buy tickets; the top price was sixty rubles ($15), a figure doubled and tripled on the black market. “Hey, what’s a synonym for ‘black market’ that we can get past the censors? O.K., make it ‘curb price.’ ” Toward the end, he was saying, “ ‘They have given Leningrad a Christmas probably unlike any in history period. Until four o’clock this morning they gathered around a Christmas tree dash provided by a solicitous Soviet government dash and sang carols and spirituals period.’ Yeah, I know I’m overfiling this story. But I got excited. Real excited. You can see it. The impact of one culture on another culture. And by the way, listen, I’m having a hell of a time. They’re a great bunch, these ‘Porgy and Bess’ people. Like living with a circus.”

On Monday morning, the day of the première, the cast met in Leningrad’s Palace of Culture for a final dress rehearsal, with full orchestra. Originally, the Russians had intended housing the production in the attractive Maryinsky theatre, but the demand for tickets convinced them they could increase their take by transferring the opera to the huge Palace of Culture. The Palace, a pile of muddy-orange concrete, was slapped together in the thirties. From the outside, it is not unlike one of those decaying supermarkets along Ventura Boulevard. Several things about the interior suggest a skating rink—its temperature, for one. But Davy Hawthorne and the other children in the company thought it “a grand place”—especially the vast backstage, with its black recesses for hiding and its fly ropes to swing on, where the tough backstage crew, strong men and stronger women, caressed them, gave them sticks of candy, and called them “Alluchka”—a term of endearment.

I rode over to the rehearsal in a car I shared with two of the Ministry’s interpreters—Miss Lydia and a tall, personable youth named Sascha. Miss Lydia, a woman who enjoys her food, was in a fine state of excitement, as though she were about to sit down to a delicious meal. “We will see it, no? Now we will see this ‘Porgy-Bess,’ ” she said, wriggling on the seat. And then it occurred to me that yes, of course, at last Miss Lydia and her colleagues would be able to judge for themselves “this ‘Porgy-Bess,’ ” the myth that had consumed their hours and energy ever since September 1st, when the negotiations between Everyman Opera and the Ministry of Culture had resulted in its extending its invitation to the troupe. Savchenko, too, would be having his first glimpse. Here and there along the route, Miss Lydia happily pointed at street placards advertising the show.

“How do you sit that still?” Miss Lydia inquired of Sascha. “Now we see it. Before the ordinary people.”

Sascha was still. He had a stricken, seasick look, and not without reason. That morning, Savchenko had thrown Breen into a tailspin by telling him that the production’s theatre programs were still at the printer and would not be obtainable for another few days. It was an authentic crisis, because the programs contained a synopsis of the opera’s plot, and Breen was afraid that without this guide the audience would be hopelessly at a loss. Savchenko offered a solution. Why not have one of the Ministry’s interpreters come out in front of the curtain before each act and outline the plot? Sascha had been chosen for the task. “How will I keep my knees from shaking?” he said, his eyes glazed with premature stage fright. “How will I speak when there is no water in my mouth?”

Miss Lydia tried to soothe him. “Think only what an honor!” she said. “Many important people will be present You will be noticed. If you were my son, Sascha, I would be very proud.”

Inside the darkened auditorium of the Palace of Culture, Sascha and Miss Lydia found seats in the fourth row. I sat down behind them, between Savchenko and Adamov. Some thirty other Russians, who had finagled invitations to watch the run-through, were scattered around in the first several rows. Among them were Moscow journalists and photographers who had come to cover the première. The orchestra in the pit, an importation from Moscow’s Stanislavsky Theatre, was winging through the overture with confident ease. The conductor, Alexander Smallens, a Russian-born American who has made almost a life work of “Porgy and Bess,” having maestroed its every incarnation, including the original 1935 production, told me after the rehearsal that the Stanislavsky orchestra was the sixty-first to do this production of the opera under his direction, and the best of the lot. “Superb musicians, and a joy to work with,” he said. “They love the score, and they have the tempo, the rhythm. All they need now is a little more of the mood.” Onstage, Breen, wearing a beret, a windbreaker, and a pair of frontier pants, motioned members of the cast into place for the first scene. Overhead rehearsal lights shadowed the actors’ faces, drained the color from the scenery, and accentuated its wrinkled wornness. The set, a simple, functional job, depicted a corner of Catfish Row, with its balconied houses and shuttered windows. Presently, responding to a signal from Breen, a soprano leaned over a balcony and began to sing the opening song, “Summertime.” Miss Lydia recognized the melody. She swayed her head and hummed with the music until Savchenko tapped her on the shoulder and growled an admonition that made her shrink in her seat. Midway through the performance, Adamov dug me with his elbow and said, “I speak pretty good English, right? Well, I can’t figure what the hell they’re yelling about All this dialect stuff! I think—” But I never heard what he thought, for Savchenko turned with a look that strangled him. Most of the Russians were as silent as Savchenko could have wished. The rows of profiles, silhouetted in the glow from the stage, remained as severely unmarred by expression as coin engravings. At the end, there was a quiet drifting off to the cloakrooms. Savchenko and Miss Lydia, Sascha and two other young men from the Ministry—Igor and Henry—walked together to where an attendant was holding their coats. I went over and asked Miss Lydia her opinion of what she’d seen. She bit her lower lip, and her eyes darted toward Savchenko, who said firmly, “Interesting. Most interesting.”

Miss Lydia nodded, but neither she nor Sascha, and neither Igor nor Henry, would venture a different adjective. “Yes,” they all said. “Interesting. Most interesting.”

The average playing time of “Porgy and Bess” is approximately two and a half hours, but this final run-through, involving many pauses for the redoing of business and lines, as well as whole songs, had lasted from ten o’clock until two. The cast, edgy with hunger and anxious to return to the hotel, was annoyed when, after the theatre had emptied, Breen informed it that the rehearsal was not yet over. He wanted to restage the curtain calls. Though only the two players in the title roles took individual bows, the pattern of calls already established required six minutes to complete. Not many productions can expect an audience to provide six minutes of sustained applause, but Breen now proposed extending these six minutes indefinitely by contriving what amounted to “a separate little show,” he said. “Just an impromptu thing,” he added. “Sort of like an encore.” It consisted of having a drummer beat a bongo while, one at a time, all the members of the company sashayed across the stage winking and waving, inviting individual applause. The director, and even the stage manager, the wardrobe mistress, and the electricians were to receive homage from the audience. One could draw one of two conclusions: either Breen was counting on an ovation of volcanic vigor or he feared the reverse, and so was insuring prolonged applause by staging these “impromptu” extra curtain calls. Obviously, under the delicate diplomatic circumstances, no audience would walk out while the performers were still, in a sense, performing.

Limousines had been put at the disposal of the leading players. Martha Flowers, who alternates with Ethel Ayler in the role of Bess, and who was to sing the part that evening, offered me a ride back to the Astoria. I asked if she was nervous about the première. “Me? Uh-uh. I’ve been doing this show two years. The only thing makes me nervous is maybe I’m ruining my voice for serious work.” Miss Flowers, a young Juilliard graduate, is ambitious to make a reputation as a concert recitalist. She is small and perky. Her lips, even when smiling, are turned downward, as though she’d just tasted a green persimmon. “I’m tired, though. I sure am that. This kind of climate’s no good for a singer. You’ve really got to watch your throat. The other Bess—you know, Ethel—she’s in bed with a bad cold. Got a temperature and everything. So I’ll have to sing the matinée tomorrow, and maybe the evening, too. Well, a person could ruin their voice forever, carrying on like that.” She talked of her schedule between the rehearsal and curtain time. “I ought to eat something. But first I’ll take a bath. I’ll take a nap, too. We start for the theatre at six. Maybe six-thirty. I’ll be slipping into my costume and pinning that old red flower in my hair. Then I guess I’ll have a long sit.”

At six-thirty, the hour when Miss Flowers was presumably in her dressing room pinning a cloth rose in her hair, Mrs. Breen and Mrs. Gershwin were in the Bohlens’ suite, where they had been asked to have drinks before leaving for the Palace of Culture. Breen himself, too busy to accept the Ambassador’s hospitality, had already gone to the theatre. The drinks, Scotch-and-tap-water, were being served by Lowry and Mrs. Lowry, a couple well matched in their decorous, rather schoolteacherish demeanor. Mrs. Bohlen’s close friend Mrs. Sulzberger, the quick-witted wife of the Times man, was also present, as a sort of auxiliary hostess. Mrs. Bohlen, a serene woman with a dairymaid complexion and blue, sensible eyes, gave the impression of being able to keep any conversation afloat, however awkward, and there was, if one remembered the exceedingly reproachful letter Breen had dispatched to Bohlen a few days earlier, a certain awkwardness inherent in this meeting between representatives of Everyman Opera and the State Department. As for the Ambassador, one would not suppose, from his amiable manner, that he had ever received such a letter. Bohlen, a career diplomat for more than twenty-five years, a large number of them spent at the American Embassy in Moscow, where he once held Lowry’s post of Second Secretary (he became Ambassador in 1953), still resembles a photograph that was taken of him in 1927, the year he graduated from Harvard. Experience has made his sportsman’s handsomeness harsher and salted his hair, but the direct look of youth, of rugged stamina, has stayed with him. He lounged in his chair, sipping Scotch and talking to Mrs. Breen as though they were in a country room before a warm hearth and with lazing dogs on the floor.

But Mrs. Breen couldn’t relax. She sat on the edge of her chair. “It’s so sweet of you to have come. Just dear of you,” she told Bohlen. “It means so much to the cast.”

“You don’t think we would’ve missed it?” said Bohlen, and his wife added, “Not for anything in the world! It’s the high point of the winter. We’ve thought of nothing else, have we, Chip?”

“It means so much to the cast,” Mrs. Breen said again.

“It means so much to us,” said Mrs. Bohlen. “Our life isn’t so amusing we could afford to miss something like this. Why, we’d have got here if we’d had to walk the whole way, or crawl on our hands and knees.”

“It’s just dear of you,” Mrs. Breen said. “And, of course, we’re all thrilled about the party in Moscow.”

“Oh, yes—the party,” said Mrs. Bohlen. In honor of the company’s Moscow première, two weeks later, the Bohlens had arranged to give an official reception at their residence, Spasso House.

“Robert and I do hope Mr. Bulganin will be there,” Mrs. Breen said. “We want to thank him personally for all the courtesies we’ve received. The Ministry of Culture paid Robert a lovely tribute. Seven ivory elephants.” (Mrs. Breen was referring to a mantelpiece parade of ivory-colored elephants that Savchenko had given Breen for Christmas.)

“How very nice,” said Mrs. Bohlen. “Well, of course, we can’t be quite sure who’s coming to the party. We’re sending out two hundred invitations, more or less, but since Russians never answer an R.S.V.P., we never know whom to expect or how many.”

“That’s right,” said the Ambassador. “You don’t count on these fellows until they walk in the door. Any of them. And when they give a party themselves they almost never invite you until the last minute. All of us in the diplomatic corps keep the evening free when we know there’s going to be a big affair at the Kremlin. We just sit around, hoping the phone will ring. Sometimes we’re in the middle of dinner before they invite us. Then it’s a rush. Fortunately, you never have to dress for these things.” He was reverting to a previous topic, and a painful one for Mrs. Breen, who, earlier in the day, had been chagrined to learn that Bohlen had not come equipped to attend the opening in black tie. Indeed, driven by her determination to make everything “gala,” she had gone a step further and envisioned the Ambassador arriving in white tie and tails, which was what her husband planned to wear.

“It never occurred to me to bring a dinner jacket,” said Bohlen, fingering a button of the dark-gray suit he considered appropriate to the occasion. “No one wears them here. Not even for a première.”

Over in a corner, Mrs. Gershwin and Mrs. Sulzberger were discussing the same subject. “Of course we shouldn’t dress up,” Mrs. Gershwin said. “That’s what I’ve told Wilva all along. We dressed for the ballet the other night and looked perfectly ridiculous. Oh, there’s too much fuss around here. I don’t know what the fuss is all about. After all, it’s only little old ‘Porgy.’ ”

“Actually,” said Mrs. Sulzberger, a Greek-born woman whose clever eyes sparkle with Mediterranean mischief, “it might not be a bad thing for the Russians to see people dressed. There’s no excuse for going about looking the way they do. When we first came here I felt sorry for them.” She and her husband had been in the Soviet Union for two weeks, as house guests of the Bohlens, she explained, and added, “I imagined the way they dressed—the dreariness of it all—was because they were terribly poor. But really, you know, that’s not true. They look this way because they want to. They do it on purpose.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Gershwin, “that’s what I think.”

Lowry caught the Ambassador’s eye and glanced significantly at his watch. Outside the hotel, a Zis limousine sat with its engine purring, ready to carry the Bohlens to the theatre. Other Zises, a street-long gleam of them, waited for Mrs. Breen and Mrs. Gershwin, for Savchenko and Adamov and the correspondents of the A.P., Time and Life, C.B.S., and the rest. Soon the cars would start slithering across the square like a funeral cortege.

Bohlen swallowed his Scotch and accompanied his guests to the door of the suite. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” he told Mrs. Breen. “The Russians are very musical people.”

“Adorable man. And she’s charming, too,” Mrs. Gershwin remarked to Mrs. Breen as the two ladies descended the stairs.

“Adorable,” said Mrs. Breen. “But Robert and I did want it to be gala.”

Across town, at the Palace of Culture, snow-sprinkled crowds were massing on the sidewalk to watch the ticket-holders arrive, and inside the theatre a sizable audience, baking in a blaze of newsreel and television lights, was already seated. Baskets of flowers, yellow and white, flanked the stage, and crossed flags, a mingling of Stars and Stripes and Hammer and Sickle, floated above the proscenium. Backstage, where the tuning orchestra’s chirping flutes and moaning oboes echoed like forest sounds, Martha Flowers, costumed and completely calm, despite the distant, rising hubbub, was having, as she had predicted, a long sit.

And it was very long. The curtain had been announced for eight o’clock, but at eight o’clock only the preliminaries began. First, the audience stood at solemn attention while the orchestra played the national anthems of the two countries; Savchenko had courteously insisted that “The Star-Spangled Banner” should be heard first. Ambassador and Mrs. Bohlen, the Sulzbergers, the Lowrys, Miss Ryan, and Leonard Lyons were all together in the front row. Near them, on a platform extending forward from one side of the stage, a squadron of photographers waited impatiently until the anthems ended; then the platform resembled a besieged fortress, photographers firing away while assistants reloaded their cameras. Some of the people on the platform, like C.B.S.’s Daniel Schorr, alternated between cameras and tape recorders as they went to work documenting the pre-curtain ceremonies There was no need for the photographers’ haste. The speeches, and their translations, lasted an hour.

The Russians were brief enough. Konstantin Sergeev, the dapper young ballet master of the Maryinsky, shook hands with Breen and, speaking in English into a microphone, said, “Dear brothers in art, welcome. We in the Soviet Union have always paid attention and tribute to the art of the United States. We know and cherish the works of such fine artists as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jack London, and Paul Robeson. We appreciate the talents of George Gershwin, and that is why this meeting is so joyous.” (Afterward, apropos of this speech, Mrs. Gershwin said, “I thought I’d faint when I heard the name Gershwin being lumped in with all those Communists.”)

Breen bowed to Sergeev and stepped up to the microphone, an impeccable figure in trim dinner jacket and starched shirt. “He just lost his nerve,” said Miss Ryan, explaining why at the last minute her employer had abandoned the idea of wearing white tie and tails. But now, watching Breen acknowledge the applause that greeted him, one wouldn’t have guessed he had ever lost his nerve in his life. His smooth blond face, under the strong lights and exploding flash bulbs, possessed an inward-gazing remoteness, as though he had for so long dreamed the scene before him that it was still a dream, and when he spoke, his measured, resonant actor’s voice contained not the slightest tremor. With graceful sweepings of the hands, he introduced Ambassador and Mrs. Bohlen, who rose to acknowledge the applause. The Ambassador had been expected to deliver a speech, but, much to his relief and Breen’s regret, the Russians, extremely sensitive to protocol, had asked that this part of the program be deleted, because they had no one “of comparable eminence” to make a rejoinder. Mrs. Gershwin was also introduced, and the conductor, Alexander Smallens, who received a generous hand when Breen announced that Smallens had been “born right here in Leningrad.” Breen then presented members of the cast who were not performing that evening—Ethel Ayler, the alternate Bess, sufficiently recovered from her cold to climb out of bed and into a skimpy, strapless blue gown, and Lorenzo Fuller, an alternate Sportin’ Life. Fuller had a “few” words to say, among them a Russian phrase he had memorized—“Dobro pozhalovat druzya,” which means “Welcome, friends.” The audience roared approval. But as Breen rambled on, with more acknowledgments and protestations of cultural solidarity, and with the Russian interpreter trailing along behind him, the clock hands crept toward nine, and even the frenzied photographers paused to consult watches. “Jesus, they ought to have a gong around here,” said one correspondent. “Like Major Bowes.” It was as though Breen had overheard him, for abruptly the ceremonial group vacated the stage.

The theatre grew quieter than a hens’ roost at sunset as the audience settled back, confident that now the curtain would rise and reveal what it had paid its rubles to see—“Porgy and Bess.” Instead, Sascha appeared. He crossed the stage stiff-legged and wobbly, as though he were walking the plank. A sheaf of typewritten pages quivered in his hands, and his bloodless face was drenched with sweat. The instant the audience caught on to why he was there—to read them the opera’s plot—the hens’ roost turned into a hornets’ nest. They apparently couldn’t tolerate another syllable about the show; they simply wanted to see it. And mutiny broke out in the balcony, where rude voices started shouting, and it spread to the orchestra; the patrons clapped, whistled, stamped their feet. “Poor Sascha, oh, poor boy,” said Miss Ryan, covering her face with her hands. “It’s too terrible. I can’t bear to watch.” Several rows back of Miss Ryan, Sascha’s two friends, Igor and Henry, slumped on their spines, but Miss Lydia, less squeamish, glared at her neighbors. Onstage, Sascha went on reading, in a mumble, as if he were whispering a prayer against the deafening tumult; like Breen before him, he seemed locked in a dream, a numbing, naked-in-the-street nightmare. Smallens flicked his baton, and as Sascha, unapplauded, retreated into the wings, the overture sounded.

It was soon evident that the audience regretted not having paid more attention to Sascha’s résumé of the tale the opera tells. In skeleton, the story is this: A crippled beggar, Porgy, falls in love with a Charleston tart, Bess. Alas, this easily swayed young woman is under the wicked influence of two other men. One, a devilish dope peddler, Sportin’ Life, has enticed her into drug addiction, while the second, a muscular criminal named Crown, monopolizes her libidinous impulses. Porgy disposes of the latter rival by killing him in self-defense, and when he is sent to jail for the deed, Bess alleviates her woes by going on a dope binge, during which Sportin’ Life persuades her to forget Porgy and traipse off with him to New York. “Dat’s where we belong, sister,” he sings as they head for the sugary lights of Harlem. In the last scene, Porgy, acquitted of Crown’s murder, sets out for the North in a goat-drawn cart, believing, and leaving the spectator to believe, that he will find Bess and bring her home. Although this narrative line seems straight as a ruler, the intricate vocal and choreographic terms in which it is developed would confuse any audience unfamiliar with English, particularly if the music, the style of dancing, and the dramatic approach were all virgin territory, as they were to the overwhelming majority of those assembled in the Palace of Culture.

The opening aria, “Summertime,” ended, and there was no applause. The entrance of Porgy went unheralded. When, soon afterward, Leslie Scott, playing the part, finished “They Pass by Singing” and a reprise of “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing,” he paused for applause. The fact that none came caused a temporary lapse in the stage action. Recovering, the cast launched into the jazzy crap-game sequence. Whispering ran through the audience, as though people were asking each other what it meant, these excited men tossing dice. The whispering gathered momentum and turned into gasps, a tremor of shock, when Bess, in her initial appearance, hiked up her skirt to adjust her garter. Miss Ryan observed to Mrs. Lowry, “If they think that’s so daring, just wait.” The words weren’t out of her mouth before Sportin’ Life’s witty, lascivious gyrations ignited fresh firecrackers of audible astonishment. The crap game concludes with Crown killing one of Porgy’s neighbors. A funeral scene follows; while the murdered man’s widow sings a lament, “My Man’s Gone Now,” the mourning inhabitants of Catfish Row sway in a tribal circle around the corpse. At this point, an important Soviet dignitary turned to a correspondent and said in Russian (later translated for my benefit), “Ah, now I see! They are going to eat him.” The deceased, undevoured, was trundled off to his grave, and the opera progressed to Porgy’s optimistic “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’.” Scott, a big, solidly constructed baritone, belted the song across the footlights with a fervor that should have stopped the show. It didn’t.

The audience’s persistent silence seemed not altogether attributable to apathy. For the most part, it appeared to be the result of troubled concentration, an anxious desire to understand; fearful of missing the essential phrase, the significant clue that would dissolve the mysteries confronting them, people listened and watched with the brooding intentness of students in a lecture hall. But the first act was almost over before the warmth that comes with comprehension was wafted through the theatre. It was created by “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” a duet sung by the principals. Suddenly it was clear that Porgy and Bess were in love, that their song was a tender rejoicing, and the audience, rejoicing, too, deluged the performers with applause that was brief but heavy, like tropical rain. However, the drought set in again as the music moved into the jamboree fanfare of “Oh, I Can’t Sit Down!,” the first-act finale. The scene is peppered with folklorish humor, and, occasionally, isolated chuckles, lonely patches of laughter, indicated that there were persons who appreciated it. After Porgy sang a reprise of “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” the curtain descended. Silence. The house lights began to come up; the audience blinked, as though until this instant it hadn’t known the act was over. It caught its breath, like passengers at the end of a roller-coaster ride, and began to applaud. The applause lasted thirty-two seconds.

“They’re stunned,” said Lowry, parroting the words, though somehow transforming the spirit, of Breen’s prophecy. “They’ve never seen anything like it.”

If the Russians were stunned, they were not alone. Several of the American journalists huddled together, comparing notes. “It’s not going over,” a baffled Daniel Schorr complained to a bewildered Time and Life photographer. And Mrs. Bohlen, following her husband up the aisle, looked poignantly pensive. Later, she told me the thought behind the expression: “I was thinking, Well, we’ve laid an egg. Now what are we going to do about it?”

Out in the crowded lobby, Mrs. Breen smilingly expressed sentiments of a sunnier nature; according to her, the performance was going beautifully. A correspondent interposed to ask why, in that case, the Russians were “sitting on their hands.” Mrs. Breen stared at the questioner as though she thought him certifiable. “But they aren’t supposed to applaud,” she said. “Robert planned it that way. So that there wouldn’t be any applause. It interrupts the mood.”

The Wolferts agreed with Mrs. Breen; they felt that the première was turning out a triumph. “First time we’ve seen the show,” said Wolfert. “I don’t like musicals. Got no use for them. But this one’s pretty good.”

Savchenko and Adamov circulated, sampling opinions. “It’s a very big success,” Savchenko said.

Adamov, whose slang was growing richer under the company’s tutelage, said, “So a lot of squares don’t dig it. They don’t flip. So is that big news? You got squares in New York, ain’tcha, man?”

Mme. Zukovsky and her husband passed by. “Oh, we’re amazed!” she told me, flourishing a sword-length cigarette holder. “Zukovsky thinks it très dépravé. Not I. I adore the vileness of it all. The rhythm, the sweat. Really, the Negroes are too amusing. And how wonderful their teeth!” Moving closer, she said, “You did tell your friends? Room 520. Don’t telephone. Come quietly, bring anything. I will pay very well.”

Stefan Orlov was standing at a refreshment counter, a glass of mineral water in his hand. “My friend,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “What a night we had, yes? The next morning, my wife, she had to beat me out of bed. Tie my shoes and knot my tie. Not angry, you understand—laughing at me.” He produced a pair of opera glasses and peered through them at me. “I saw Nancy. I wondered should I try to speak to her. But I said to myself, ‘No, Nancy is sitting with fashionable people.’ Will you tell her that I saw her?” I said I would, and asked if he was enjoying “Porgy and Bess.” “I wish I had a ticket for every night,” he said. “It’s an experience. Powerful! Like Jack London. Like Gogol. I will never forget it.” He pocketed the opera glasses. A frown creased his forehead, he opened his mouth to speak, changed his mind, took a swallow of mineral water instead, then changed his mind again, and decided to tell me: “The question isn’t whether I forget. Or what we old ones think. It’s the young people who matter. It matters that they have new seeds planted in their hearts. Tonight”—he looked around the lobby—“all these young people will stay awake. Tomorrow, they will be whistling the music. And in the summer that’s what you’ll hear—young people whistling along the river. They won’t forget.”

Backstage, tranquillity prevailed as the performers prepared themselves for the second act. Leslie Scott, not in the least unnerved by the reception of the first act, grinned and said, “Sure, they’re kinda slow. But most audiences don’t warm up until the duet, and that went over O.K. From here on out, we’ll sail.”

Martha Flowers, freshening her makeup in front of a mirror, said, “This audience, that audience—I don’t know the difference. You wouldn’t, either, you been doing this show two years.”

But Sascha, lacking Miss Flowers’ professional savoir-faire, was an alarming sight as he waited in the wings to resume his role of plot-narrator; with head bowed, and holding on to a dancer’s practice bar like a fighter on the ropes, he listened dazedly while his seconds, Igor and Henry, whispered encouragement. To Sascha’s surprise, his second round was victorious. The audience was eager to hear what would happen in the next act, and Sascha (who two weeks later applied to the Moscow Art Theatre for a drama-student’s fellowship) recounted Crown’s murder, Porgy’s imprisonment, and what follows to rapt listeners. He walked off to one of the largest hands of the evening; Miss Lydia was still clapping after the house lights had dimmed.

The element of the opera that seemed to disturb the Soviet audience most, its sensuality, reaches a peak of Himalayan proportions in the opening twenty minutes of Act II. The song “I Ain’t Got No Shame (Doin’ What I Like to Do)” and the shake-that-thing brand of choreography accompanying it proved too aptly titled, too graphically illustrated, for Russian comfort. They were met by a stony lack of response. But it was the ensuing scene that contained, from a prudish viewpoint, the real affront. The scene begins with Crown attempting to rape Bess and ends with Bess raping him. This, too, was not appreciated. But Leslie Scott’s prediction that the second act would “sail” was almost fulfilled during the opera’s remaining hour. The street-cry song of the Strawberry Woman started favorable winds blowing. Again, as in the love duet, the situation—simply a peddler selling strawberries—was one that the Russians could grasp, be charmed by. After that, every scene seemed to be accepted, and though the performance did not sail, perhaps because too much water had already been shipped, at least it floated.

As the curtain fell and the calls commenced, cameramen, scooting up and down the aisles, divided their shots between applauding Russians and salaaming actors. “They’re stunned,” Lowry once more pronounced, and his wife tacked on the inevitable “They’ve never seen anything like it.” The applause, which one experienced witness described as “nothing compared to an opening night at the Bolshoi,” sustained the customary six minutes of curtain calls, then swiftly declined. It was now, when people were leaving their seats, that Breen made his bid for a more impressive demonstration by unleashing the extra, “impromptu” curtain calls he had rehearsed that afternoon. On came the cast, one by one, cavorting to the beat of a bongo drum. In the endurance test that followed, the audience compromised by substituting a chantlike pattern of clapping for authentic applause. Three minutes passed—four, five, six, seven. Finally, when Miss Flowers had blown a last kiss across the footlights and the last electrician had been acknowledged, Breen, taking the ultimate bow, permitted the curtain to be lowered.

Ambassador and Mrs. Bohlen and various Soviet officials were ushered backstage to shake hands with the cast. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about,” Mrs. Gershwin gaily cried as she squeezed through the backstage pandemonium. “It’s only little old ‘Porgy.’ ”

Savchenko pushed toward Mrs. Breen; stiffly offering his hand, he said, “I want to congratulate you on a very big success.”

Mrs. Breen dabbed at her eyes. “That ovation. Wasn’t it glorious?” she said, turning to gaze at her husband, who was posing for a photograph with Bohlen. “Such a tribute to Robert!”

Outside, since the limousines were not yet taking people back to the hotel, I looked for a taxi, and had to walk some distance before finding one. A threesome—two young men and a girl—were walking ahead of me. I soon gathered that they had been part of the “Porgy and Bess” audience. Their voices reverberated down the shadowed, snow-silent streets. They were all talking at once, an exhilarated babble now and again mixed with humming—the strawberry street cry, a phrase of “Summertime.” Then, as though she had no real understanding of the words but had memorized them phonetically, the girl sang, “There’s a boat that’s leavin’ soon for New York, come with me, that’s where we belong, sister . . .” Her friends joined in, whistling.

Reviews of the production were published by two of the city’s leading papers, Smena and Evening Leningrad. In Ambassador Bohlen’s opinion, the articles were, “by and large, really excellent. Very thoughtful. It shows they took it seriously.”

The Evening Leningrad critic, V. Bogdanoff-Berezovski, wrote, “ ‘Porgy and Bess’ is a work stamped with brilliant talent and unusual mastery . . . and was warmly received by the audience.” Fifteen hundred words elaborated on that statement. He praised the score (“Gershwin’s music is melodic, sincere, intentionally suffused with Negro musical folklore. There are plenty of really expressive and contrasting melodies”), Breen’s direction (“The show is directed with great mastery and rivets one’s attention with its dynamic sweep”), the conductor (“The musical part of the performance is on a very high level”), and the cast (“The actors play together with harmony rarely to be seen”). The libretto, however, provoked a gentle reprimand, for the writer noticed in it “some elements of expressionism and melodrama, an abundance of the customary details regarding criminal investigation.” Nor did Evening Leningrad forget to press the political pedal: “We, the Soviet spectators, realize the corrosive effect of the capitalistic system on the consciousness, the mentality, and the moral outlook of a people oppressed by poverty. This lifts Heyward’s play, as set to music by Gershwin, into the realm of a social drama.” But these comments seemed a mere obbligato compared to the loud chords of propaganda that opponents of the “Porgy and Bess” tour had anticipated.

The second critic, U. Kovalyev, writing in Smena, mentioned an aspect of the opera that had been ignored by Evening Leningrad. “The astoundingly erotic coloring of some of the dancing scenes is unpleasant,” he wrote. But “on the whole ‘Porgy and Bess’ constitutes one of the most interesting events of this theatrical season. It is an excellently performed production, colorful, full of movement and music. It testifies to the high talent of the Negro people. Very possibly not all of the music and the staging will be approved by the Soviet audiences and everything will not necessarily be understandable to them. We are not used to the naturalistic details in the dances, to the excessive jazz sound of the symphony orchestra, etc. Nevertheless, the performance broadens our concept of the art of contemporary America, and familiarizes us with thus far unknown facets of the musical and theatrical life of the United States.”

These reviews did not appear until Thursday, three days after the opening. By then, their publication was rather an anticlimax, and the company was inclined to regard them with a yawn. “Sure it’s nice they write O.K. things, but who cares?” said one member of the cast, expressing the prevalent attitude. “It’s not what the Russians think. It’s the stuff they’re hearing about us back home. That’s what counts.”

Later that day, Breen received a cable on the subject from Everyman Opera’s New York office. Miss Ryan typed copies of it, and she was about to put one of them up on the company’s bulletin board when I came into the lobby. “Hi,” she said. “Guess what? Stefan called. He wants to take me dancing. Anything to get away from ‘Porgy and Bess.’ ” And she thumbtacked her typewritten copy of the cable to the bulletin board:

ROBERT BREEN HOTEL ASTORIA LENINGRAD USSR

WONDERFUL ARTICLES HERE ALL DECEMBER 27TH PAPERS STOP ALL MENTION TEN MINUTES STANDING OVATION STOP

JOURNALS HEADLINE—“LENINGRAD GOES WILD OVER PORGY AND BESS” STOP

AP FACTUAL RELEASE INCLUDES GREAT TICKET DEMAND AND SIZE AUDIENCE STOP

TRIBUNE STRESSES WARM AUDIENCE RECEPTION STOP

TELEGRAM HEADLINE—“PORGY AND BESS WINS PRAISE FROM RUSSIANS” OVER AP RELEASE STOP

MIRROR EDITORIAL “HEART TO HEART DIPLOMACY—CAST TAKING LENINGRAD BY SONG. WE ARE PROUD OF THEM” STOP

AP RELEASE IN SOME PAPERS SAYS MOSCOW RADIO TERMED PREMIERE GREAT SUCCESS STOP

TIMES COLUMN TODAY BY SULZBERGER PORGY BESS “OPENING ANOTHER WINDOW TO THE WEST”

JOURNAL EDITORIAL TODAY—“MADE TREMENDOUS HIT”

NBC CBS NEWSCASTS FABULOUS

CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERY SINGLE SOUL WITH YOU

All afternoon, members of the company passing through the lobby stopped to read the message from New York. It made them grin; they walked away with lightened steps.

“Whatcha say, man?” said Earl Bruce Jackson to Warner Watson as they stood reading the cable. “We’re making history!”

Watson, rubbing his hands together, replied, “Yep. I guess we’ve got history fenced in.” ♦

(This is the second part of a two-part article.)