In brief: Polanski attends jazz festival

Montreux, Switzerland – Roman Polanski has made his first public appearance since being released this week from house arrest, attending the Montreux Jazz Festival on Saturday to watch his wife perform on stage.

The 76-year-old film director arrived at the Lake Geneva festival Saturday evening in a sport utility vehicle with tinted windows. Security personnel protected him from an eager crush of photographers.

Polanski’s wife, the actress and singer Emmanuelle Seigner, performed shortly after his arrival.

The Oscar-winning director was freed Monday from seven months of house arrest at his Swiss chalet when Switzerland’s government refused to extradite him to the United States for sentencing on a rape charge.

Peredelkino, Russia – Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Russia’s most renowned living poet, has given his house along with an extensive art collection to the state as a museum.

The two-story museum in the writers colony of Peredelkino, just outside Moscow, joins nearby house-museums, including those of Boris Pasternak and Bulat Okudjava. It contains paintings by Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

Yevtushenko, who opened the museum at a ceremony on Saturday, came to prominence during the Soviet Union’s so-called cultural “thaw” under Nikita Khrushchev.

At the height of his fame, Yevtushenko read his work in packed soccer stadiums and arenas, including a 1972 recital in New York’s Madison Square Garden.