People: Dec. 29, 1961

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Confounding enemies who gossiped that she had gone into seclusion for a nose bob, volatile Soprano Maria Callas returned to Milan's La Scala five days after undergoing punishing treatment for sinusitis and won 25 rapturous curtain calls in Cherubini's Medea. Warbled Callas. tossing off the hasty comeback as mere noblesse obbligato: "Everyone else can be ill and get sympathy, but I cannot afford to be sick because the press watches my every movement for a chance to get a smack at me."

Even with Congress in recess, the partisan snipers still plinked away. As the Republicans' leading sharpshooter, New York's Congressman William Miller, retreated to Florida to meditate the wisdom of surrendering either his chairmanship of the G.O.P. National Committee or his House seat, his fellow New Yorker, Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler, helpfully counseled him to hang onto the latter. After the recent "Rocky-mandered" reapportionment of New York's congressional districts, gibed Celler, a Republican could not be unseated in Miller's district "by St. Gabriel himself." Responded Miller: ''I hope—for once in Celler's life—that he's right."

With Moscow's cultural commissars still smarting from his poetic onslaught on Soviet anti-Semitism (TIME, Nov. 3), Russia's indomitable Evgeny Evtushenko, 28, stirred up a new hullaballoo by rebuffing the lionization of the young intelligentiki and flatly denying that his outspokenness made him "a brave man." Wrote Evtushenko in Russia's Literaturnaya Gazeta (Kiev edition only):

Sometime

Posterity will remember —and will burn with shame

When they shall have done with shame and lies

Those strange times

When

Common honesty was called courage.