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own country until 1984. “How many letters do you get?” Yevtushenko asked Cheever, who said he got maybe ten or twelve a week. Yevtushenko beamed: “I get two thousand a day.“ That was the sort of thing that excited Cheever's love. “Everybody says that [Voznesensky is] a better poet than Zhenya and he definitely thinks this himself,” said Cheever; “but my affection for that incontinent and self-destructive ego-centric makes Andrei's gleaming face seem a little complacent.” Cheever's crush on Yevtushenko (platonic) was confirmed when he saw the man perform at a public reading, which was more like a rock concert than a literary event: for two hours, the flamboyant poet dashed around the stage reciting from memory, while the ecstatic crowd threw flowers. “I seem to love him as I love most natural phenomena,” Cheever wrote, though he was more restrained about the poetry itself: “[Zhenya] writes always of a new world, its failures and promise. I know that the paradise he speaks of is populated by stupid and drunken peasants. The cows are scrawny, the children are hungry, the wheat crop is blighted and the trains are late but I would much sooner hear him speak than listen to the mumbling of my colleagues.”

Cheever admired and perhaps even preferred Voznesensky's work, but quietly deplored the way the serious young man sipped water when others were toasting with vodka. No such qualms applied to Yevtushenko, who fully reciprocated Cheever's admiration in this respect. “You drink like Siberian worker!” he declared, adding that Cheever's face was perfectly “working class.” Then he gave the puzzled American a big kiss. (“Was best compliment,” Yevtushenko explained forty years later. “Because he didn't look like an intellectual. What was great in John Cheever, when he came to Russia, he was very childishly curious about things. He created atmosphere of sincerity around him. The real artists, they are never peacocking. That is the great quality of the John Cheever character.”) When the two wanted to speak freely, they'd take a bottle to Pasternak's grave and sit there on the bench; it was a common spot for such chats, as it seemed impervious to eavesdropping, and Yevtushenko's home, of course, had long been bugged. Years later, however, when Pasternak's daughter-in-law wanted the bench repainted, a bugging device was found in one of the hollowed-out concrete legs.

Whatever his awe of Yevtushenko, Cheever's most abiding attachment was with Tanya Litvinov, whom he'd first met at a reception given by the editorial board of Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature). While publisher Boris Ryurikov “was booming along” about “common aims” and so forth, Cheever and Litvinov ducked behind a bowl of fruit and whispered about one thing and another. (“You could talk about anything with him,” she remembered. “As if you were going on with some conversation that had begun long, long ago. It was absolutely wonderful.”) Litvinov had begun translating “The Swimmer” and wanted to know why, exactly, Neddy was obliged to swim from one pool to the next, but Cheever mostly wanted to talk about her. (“Tanya,” he noted afterward. “A very quick woman. A suit, a man's haircut, bad teeth, quick laughter, quick smile … She speaks of her mother; never her father. An intractible woman, I think. A light, feminine fierceness, having lived a life that would best be understood by a lunatic”) At one point Cheever produced a few well-thumbed family photographs from his wallet, and Litvinov remarked that Susan looked like a Russian girl (“he took it—as I intended it to be—as a compliment”), and when he gave her a somber publicity photo of himself, she said, “Mr. Cheever on his guard.” “Always am,” he replied.

With Breitburd in tow, as ever, Cheever and Litvinov were driven to Kornei Chukovsky's dacha in Peredelkino, a writers’ settlement a few miles outside Moscow. The eighty-two-year-old Chukovsky had not only discovered Cheever for the Russians, but also written an admiring preface to Litvinov's translation of The Enormous Radio. The two men loved each other at once.