“ 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 Pari s 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. “Arguably the most entertaining — and stylish — of [composers'] memoirs is by Vernon Duke. . . . [He] was writing for us — those who outlived not only him, but also the entire modernist era in music. [His] poems offer nostalgic meditations on different destinies in different countries. Amusingly rhymed in singsong metres and superbly translated by Boris Dralyuk, they describe beaches and the sun and the vacuousness behind the thick black sunglasses worn by the miserable rich of Beverly Hills.” — Times Literary Supplement “A stirring account of the American dream made real . . . Immensely charming.” —American Spectator “If the Bolshevik Revolution never happened … the American songbook would be missing a few of its most elegant tunes. … The man behind [them] would have remained in Russia, composing the classical music he was trained to write. … Would that unlived life have been richer in musical achievement? The question haunts Passport to Paris , Duke’s classic 1955 memoir.” —The New Criterion “ 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 PRAISE FOR 1955 EDITION: “[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 wit