Mission and Omission

When Robert Frost travelled to the Soviet Union in 1962, he was accompanied by the thirty-four-year-old interpreter F.D. Reeve, ‘a Wesleyan University professor who is an expert in Russian literature and speaks the language fluently’, in the words of the United States Secretary of the Interior Morris Udall, who made the same journey with a different purpose. They returned on 10 September, Frost died the following January, and Atlantic-Little, Brown published Reeve’s breezy account of their adventures, Robert Frost in Russia, as a reminiscent book in 1964. After about five years, it faded from general view. In retrospect, Robert Frost in Russia provides not only entertaining anecdotes about the American poet, but also a snapshot of a Russian society in the midst of cultural ferment and political tension – in literature, the rising celebrity of Yevtushenko and Voznesensky, and the publication of Solzhenitsyn – ferment and tension Frost had little notion of, but which his companion knew well.

F.D. Reeve was first a tutor of mine at Wesleyan, then a friend, and eventually a colleague. (In the week just before he died in 2013, he had asked me to stand in for him at a reading.) He was perhaps uniquely knowledgeable about the Soviet cultural scene in the 1960s, an expertise which shaped Frost’s itinerary. As a scholar, a literary translator, a novelist and a poet, he continued his whole life to engage with the Matter of Russia.

At Zephyr Press, we decided to bring the original text of Robert Frost in Russia back into print in 2001, this time fitted ...