Dewart was an American scientist who joined the Russians in 1960 at their Mirny base.
p. 7-8: Meanwhile I was working out a cultural export program of my own that I had hoped would give my Russian hosts a sample, however biased toward my preferences, of American literature and popular music. I packed books by such classical writers as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane; the works of more modern authors, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers; science fiction by Ray Bradbury and Frederik Pohl; an anthology of current short stories; a couple of issues of the avant-garde Evergreen Review featuring the fashionable “Beat” literati; and a collection of American ballads. One English novelist was included: George Orwell.
There was also nonfiction by world traveler John Gunther, cartoonist Bill Mauldin, musicologist Barry Ulanov, frontier historian Walter Prescott Webb, and two foreign social critics, Alexis de Tocqueville and Milovan Djilas. I added a ‘reference and miscellaneous’ section that contained English and English-Russian dictionaries, English and Russian grammars, a world almanac, a photographic album of American landscape, the U.S. Navy’s cruisebook on its Antarctic operations, and a complete Sunday edition of the New York Times (the last on the advice of my predecessor Gordon Cartwright).
For consultation on music I sought out Ralph Gleason, who was then the jazz critic of the San Francisco Chronicle…Thus, I ended up with a [recordings] library that extended from Huddie Ledbetter and Josh White, through Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke, to Miles Davis and Shelley Manne.
p. 22, aboard the Kooperatsiya: There were stacks of dog-eared magazines lying around: Krokodil, the satirical and humorous journal, Sovietsky Soyuz, the illustrated monthly, and Vodnyy Transport, house organ of the maritime industry. In the passageway outside I was gratified to see, in a long row of Antarctic photographs, a shot of my friend Carl Eklund, taken during a brief visit he made to Mirnyy aboard a U.S. icebreaker at the conclusion of our year at Wilkes Station.
p. 40—gifts of meteorological publications.
p. 47: In his room he: had a bed, desk, bookcase, table, armchair, straight-backed chair, and shelves made out of packing crates. Every cranny was stuffed with clothing, books, instruments, and other paraphernalia….
p. 73-4—movies as chief entertainment
p. 91: Most of the books in my cultural-exchange collection were eventually donated to the base library, though a number of them went to friends who showed special interest in a particular volume. Fedyukhin, the photographer and war veteran, keenly appreciated Bill Mauldin’s World War II cartoons, so I gave him my personal copy of Up Front; in return I received a Soviet-made exposure meter.
p. 164, describes digging out the base Komsomolskaya which had drifted over: a compact facility, containing a sleeping room for six people, generator room, combination office and radio shack, library, and bath. The library was small but well stocked with works of Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, and Lenin, plus a number of foreign authors, including O. Henry, and there was something eerily science-fiction like about thawing these cultural treasures out of the glacial frost.