Robert Frost in Russia

ROBERT FROST IN RUSSIA
By F.D. Reeve
May 2001
ISBN 0-939010-63-1 (trade paper), $13.95
5.5 x 7.5         192 pages


At the height of the Cold War in 1962, the most American of poets traveled
to the Soviet Union to confront Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Robert Frost in
Russia endures as a portrait of the American poet and the Soviet culture he
witnessed. Out of print for the last 30 years-this updated edition is
augmented by a new, retrospective introduction by the noted poet, scholar
and translator, F.D. Reeve. This revised edition also includes an exhaustive
set of endnotes to the events and individuals who appear throughout the
text, and never before published photographs of the trip.
Besides Frost's lucid--and sometimes curmudgeonly--critiques of American and
Russian society in the midst of the Cold War, Reeve's memoir contains
intimate portrayals of Russian poets such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei
Voznesensky, and Anna Akhmatova, as well as Frost's infamous conversation
with Premier Khrushchev. Robert Frost in Russia is both a fascinating
document of the Cold War era, and an essential fragment of Frost's personal
and poetic biography.

"Poet and translator Reeve provides a new introduction, new photos, and very
useful endnotes to his account of Robert Frost's 1962 goodwill trip to the
Soviet Union.... [Originally] published in 1964, a year after the poet's
death, Reeve's day-by-day account nevertheless captures the essence of the
good, grumbly man-of-letters: cantankerous, insightful, highly
self-conscious of public scrutiny. Reeve, at the time a young college
professor brought along to translate, remains unobtrusive throughout as
Frost encounters writers as voluble as the showy Yevtushenko and as a
reticent as the tragic Akhmatova. 'Kirkus' admired Reeve's understated tone
and wondered at the dissonance between public perception of the Soviet
terror and this bubbly chronicle, 'upbeat in spirit and notational in
approach.' A must, in any case, for Frost fans."

--Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2001