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Acknowledgments I first want to thank the Swedish historian Claes Peterson, who introduced me to the diary of Ivan Tolchënov and furnished a copy of the portion of it printed by Soviet scholars in the early 1970s. The Russian historian Boris Nikolaevich Mironov was also helpful in obtaining additional materials and giving references to sources. Leonid Romanovich Vaintraub provided a great deal of assistance and advice when I began to do archival work, and he went with me to Dmitrov and the surrounding district on several occasions to show me surviving architectural monuments from the time in which the figures in this book were alive. He and Irina Piatiletova of Vesti Press in Dmitrov helped me to gain entrance into and to photograph the interior of the Tolchënov house. Galina Nikolaevna Ul’ianova shared with me her knowledge of Russian commercial elites and their charitable practices. I also want to acknowledge the patience and assistance of the sta√s of the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, the Central Historical Archive of Moscow, and the Archive and Museum of the Dmitrov District, and the Slavic bibliographers at Indiana University’s Wells Library and those at the Helsinki University Library’s Slavonic Division. My colleagues at Indiana University, Nina Perlina, Dodona Kiziria, Michael Alexeev, Galina McClaws, Jerzy Kolodziej, Larisa Privalskaia, Henry Cooper, and Ronald Feldstein patiently responded to my questions about Russian usage and Orthodox religious practices. John T. Alexander of the University of Kansas read through much of the first draft and saved me from a number of mistakes. Daniel Kaiser of Grinnell College and Alexander M. Martin of Notre Dame University went through the entire manuscript and o√ered many helpful suggestions for improvement. Dale Peterson of Amherst College and Laura Engelstein of Yale University provided helpful interpretive suggestions at an early stage of the work. I am also indebted to Willard Sunderland of the University of Cincinnati, Gregory Freeze of Brandeis University, and the participants of the Midwest Historians of Russia Workshop for useful observations and bibliography materials. Irina Piatiletova and Leonid Vaintraub kindly allowed me to reproduce photographs taken by them, on page 87, and pages 110 and 111, respectively. Janet Rabinowitch, director of Indiana University Press, o√ered helpful suggestions for shaping the introduction, and Candace McNulty did sensitive copyediting. x acknowledgments Financial assistance for research and travel was provided by Indiana University . A fellowship from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) in spring of 1999 allowed me to launch my initial archival investigations. I am also grateful to the Bogliasco Foundation Inc. for a fellowship at its Liguria Center for the Study of Arts and Letters near Genoa in the spring of 2007 that gave me uninterrupted time to finish the manuscript. ...

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