All his life Yuri Maximovich Isakovsky, minor Russian Jewish poet, editor of a journal of folk music, sometime English translator, has assiduously avoided power and politics--in fact, attention of nay kind. How can it be, then, that the Soviet government has chosen him to attend a conference in the fabled land of bourgeois temptation itself, New York City? And not only that, but to do a 'piece of work' for the KGB, to deliver a code message embedded in the text of a certain poem to be read in public along with his own...