The book opens with the cast, directors, support personnel and Mrs.
Ira Gershwin waiting in West
Berlin for their
visas to be returned by the Soviet Embassy. They are briefed by U.S. Embassy staff, and among other questions, ask if they will be under surveillance, presumably by the
KGB, during their visit. They also consider political issues and how to answer sensitive questions, especially those about the “
Negro situation” – also whether it is safe to drink the water: the company includes several children. Capote, who is present in the narrative, returns to his hotel room to find a brown paper parcel of
anti-Communist pamphlets. After a train ride of several days (the first two without a dining car), the cast and crew arrive in
Leningrad a few days before
Christmas and are dispatched to a hotel, the Astoria, which boasts, as Capote writes, “a trio of restaurants, each leading into the other, cavernous affairs cheerful as airplane hangars.” The guest rooms are small, over-heated, and over-furnished with “a miasma of romantic marble statuary.” Capote claims that these rooms have been assigned according to each cast member's payroll status. According to
Bolshevik logic, claims Capote, the less you make, the better the accommodations. Predictably, the production of
Porgy and Bess runs into a few snags. Programs are not printed in time for Opening Night. After the show, the directors cannot quite determine the Russian audience's response, beyond their appreciation for certain musical numbers and their disapproval of the opera's sexual themes. ==Literary significance and reception==