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By Root 3911 0

get her stuff out of there, Chet,’ Mrs. Negus said, ‘and I'll give you ten dollars. That's been my apartment since midnight’ “).* The translator was Tatiana Litvinov, whose father, Maxim, had been Stalin's foreign minister before the war.† In 1961, she'd written Cheever a letter explaining that a friend of hers—an éminence grise of Soviet literature, Kornei Chukovsky—had recently loaned her a copy of The Enormous Radio: “I loved the stories so much that I began translating them there and then.” The first three translations were immediately published in Novy Mir (The New World) and Znamya (The Banner)—”our two most popular literary magazines”—and now Litvinov wanted to translate the rest of the book as well. Nor was her love of such stories as “The Season of Divorce,” “The Pot of Gold,” and “Torch Song” (her favorite) based on elements of anti-capitalist satire or socialist realism: “Your stories have a special appeal for us Russians,” she wrote, “brought up as we are in the Chekhov tradition of sympathetic irony”—a point she clarified with a note in the margin: “What I like about the stories among other things is that they made you grieve for the people without feeling sentimental about them.” Litvinov's translation of The Enormous Radio, published in 1962, was a particular success among other writers, who seemed to agree with Litvinov that Cheever's work “belonged to Russia and had to be got back.” According to the New York Times, he'd also been discovered by a “lost generation” of Russian youths who were “alienated from Soviet goals and strongly oriented toward almost anything Western,” including the Twist, blue jeans, and long hair. Whatever pleasure Cheever took in this information, however, would have been dampened somewhat by the fact that Catcher in the Rye was far more popular (“almost a status symbol”) than any work of his. On the other hand, there was little question of Salinger's traveling on behalf of the government.

A week before his October 1 departure, Cheever went to Washington for his State Department briefing. “I was told that my liberty would be in danger, that my possessions would be rifled, my conversations bugged, and my walks shadowed,” Cheever would later recall (adding—inaccurately—”Nothing of the sort happened”). He was also asked whether he had any vices they should know about. “I've always been a very heavy drinker,” Cheever replied with a grin. His interlocutor then wondered if there was anything the KGB could use against him as blackmail leverage, and Cheever replied (perhaps after a tense pause) that he thought not.*

In a state of tipsy exhilaration, Cheever arrived in Moscow at midnight and heard, amid the shushing rain, what sounded like cheep cheep cheep. This was a delegation of some fifteen Soviet writers, headed by Vasily Aksyonov, all of them calling Cheever Cheever Cheever. Any lingering unease he might have felt was dispelled by his hosts’ almost overwhelming enthusiasm: they fell upon him, embracing and back-slapping and “pour[ing] vodka into [his] ears.” Indeed, this was the kind of wide-open affection for which, on some level, Cheever had hankered ever since his glacial childhood on Wollaston Hill. (“But why,” he'd written the year before, “having known so little contentment, do I think continuously of a world, a scene, in which comely men and women greet one another eagerly and with love.”) After a number of toasts, the writers dropped Cheever at his hotel—the cavernous Ukraine—where he washed his socks in the bathtub and got a few hours of sleep. At his publisher's office the next morning, Cheever was seated at a “felt-covered” table and given brandy, coffee, and cakes. “Then a man comes in with the boodle [royalties] and counts it onto the felt,” he wrote Weaver. “Then you say Bolshoi Spaseba and the publisher gives you a big smelly kiss, right on the bouche.”

In some ways, it was very near paradise. After years among the philistines of Westchester, Cheever found himself revered by a people to whom books mattered “tremendously”: to be a writer in Russia, he said, was “like