Passport to Paris and Los Angeles Poems - by Vernon Duke (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"Passport to Paris is one of the great neglected memoirs of the 20th-century arts. The cosmopolitan composer Vernon Duke, born Vladimir Dukelsky, succeeded not only in living a mesmerizing life but also in telling his story with incomparable novelistic flair. A sampling of Duke's California poetry augments the allure of an essential republication."
--Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise and Wagnerism

"Passport to Paris would qualify as a legendary autobiography except that its long absence rendered it largely forgotten. Its reemergence amounts to a literary and musical correction. Amid accounts of eruptions and fashions on three continents, Vernon Duke explains his irregular ears and provides casual access to the Gershwins, a tingling snapshot of Ethel Waters's opening in Cabin in the Sky, two memorably bandaged fingers--pudgy in Diaghilev's case, worshipped in Stravinsky's--and a sentence that begins: 'Following mother's death and the war, I lost much of my notorious foppishness...' A treasurable bonus is the sheaf of poems uncovered and translated by Boris Dralyuk--poems, not verse or lyrics, though 'Arizona' thirsts for music."
--Gary Giddins, author of Visions of Jazz: The First Century

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 includes rare intimate portraits of major figures in 20th-century music, from Sergei Prokofiev to the Gershwin brothers.

This edition features a new Introduction by Boris Dralyuk as well as poems 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.

Review Quotes

PRAISE FOR PASSPORT TO PARIS (1955):

"[Duke] is an autobiographer of considerable perception and honesty . . . With innumerable deft touches he illustrates the similarities and dissimilarities of the two musical worlds in which he has lived."
--The New York Times

"Being an engaging young man with that open sesame visa Dukelsky went everywhere and seems to have missed nothing. The older Duke finds it fascinating and tells it as another facet to the glittering prism of a vanished but still talked of day."
--Chicago Daily Tribune

"It is basted with the juices of serious and mature reflection . . . He writes with seeming ease of style and a definitely American wit complete with indigenous idioms."
--St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Witty and insightful."
--Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

"Glistening with famous personalities, shifting from the Continent to America, the autobiography of a composer . . . is rich with the lore of recent worlds of theatre and music."
--Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Vernon Duke (1903-1969), accomplished composer of modern
classical music and important contributor to the Great American Songbook
("April in Paris," "Autumn in New York," "I Can't Get Started," etc.), was born
in the former Russian Empire as Vladimir Dukelsky and fled war-torn Ukraine
with his family in 1919. In Passport to Paris, he chronicles, with
characteristic wit and verve, his childhood, his escape to Istanbul, and his
life in exile until 1955. The memoir is a unique document of 20th-century
musical history and of the émigré experience. The poems he wrote in California in the 1960s, here translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, offer a
glimpse of the last happy decade of his life.

Boris Dralyuk is the author of My
Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry, 2022), editor of 1917:
Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (2016), co-editor
of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), and translator
of volumes by Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Leo Tolstoy, and other authors. His
poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Hudson
Review, Raritan Quarterly, Best American Poetry 2023, and
elsewhere, and his criticism and translations have appeared in the Times
Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and The New
Yorker, among other venues. Formerly editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles
Review of Books, he is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow, editor-in-chief of Nimrod,
and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa.