Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems

Passport to Paris is a witty, pleasantly chatty, richly detailed memoir of a life in emigration and of a dual career in the "serious" and "popular" music worlds. It provides one of the most vivid and refreshingly buoyant accounts of the perilous exodus from the collapsed Russian Empire undertaken by some two million people during the late 1910s and early 1920s, and also offers rare intimate portraits of major figures in 20th-century music, from Sergei Prokofiev to the Gershwin brothers. This edition includes a new Introduction by Boris Dralyuk as well as poems that Duke wrote in California in the 1960s, here translated from the Russian by Dralyuk, that offer a glimpse of the last happy decade of Duke's life.