When the cannons are silent, the muses are heard.” 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 Russian Embassy.

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.

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.