Robert Frost in Russia

the long version

"At the height of the Cold War, the most American of poets traveled to the Soviet Union to meet leading literary lights of Russia and to have it out with Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The distinguished translator, scholar and poet F. D. Reeve accompanied Robert Frost as interpreter in August and September 1962, the last year of Frost's life. In addition to presenting an intimate portrait of the poet, Robert Frost in Russia records a snapshot of Soviet Russian culture at the very end of the post-Stalinist Thaw. Frost met with Khrushchev himself, with elder literary figures like Anna Akhmatova and Kornei Chukovsky, as well as the then-rising generation of Yevtushenko and Voznesensky.". "Subsequent events such as the Cuban Missle crisis, the sharp change in Russian culture leading to the fall of Khrushchev and the intensification of Cold War politics, blunted the topicality of the book and it was not reprinted after it first sold out in the early 1960s. But the very sharpness of focus on its particular moment and on the figure of Robert Frost in his last months of life that made the book ephemeral in its own time now gives it historical significance."--BOOK JACKET.