Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America

Acknowledgments

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s As I grew more involved with Helena Mo­dje­ska’s life and work, I regretted the fact that I could not interview her or spend an hour or two in her presence. But researching and writing this book introduced me to so many other Mo­ dje­ ska enthusiasts and experts that I feel I have been reveling in Mo­ dje­ ska’s circle for years. Mo­ dje­ ska has made my life rich in friendships as well as the knowledge of her fascinating life in context. I am grateful to Anna Frajlich-­ Zając and the Kościuszko Foundation for sponsoring my first forays into this book’s topic. I thank Bożena Shallcross and David Ransel for recommending me to Indiana University’s Institute for Advanced Studies; that fellowship equipped me with the time, resources, and impetus to begin serious research. I thank the UNC-­Duke Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies for a travel grant to Poland in summer 2004, where I took up the Modrzejewska trail. The very generous leave time I received from Duke University’s Dean of Arts and Sciences literally enabled me to review years of research work and draft the manuscript; the research funds that the university awarded me paid for further work in Poland and subsidized purchase of book illustrations. Other colleagues and the venues they offered have helped me to test out my main hypotheses along the way: Bill Johnston and Indiana University’s Polish Studies Center; Halina Stephan, Irene Masing-­ Delić, Yana Hasha­ mova and the Midwest Slavic Conference sponsored by The Ohio State University Center for Slavic and East European Studies; Donna Buchanan and the University of Illinois’s Russian and East European Studies Center; Margarita Naf­pak­titis and the University of Virginia’s Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; Carey Baughman and Marshall Duell and the Old Courthouse Museum in Orange County, California; Linda Plochocki, Krystyna Stamper, and Yvonne Boehm of the Mo­dje­ska Foundation; and Agata Grenda and the Polish Cultural Institute in New York. I thank them and the audiences at these talks for their generosity and constructive feedback. I am indebted x Acknowledgments to George Gutsche, who graciously furnished me with hard-­to-­get materials. I also thank Basia and Leonard Myszyński of OC Influential Productions, who invited me to participate in their documentary on the great actress and whose award-­ winning film Mo­dje­ska—Woman Triumphant is a beautifully made, eye-­ opening testament to Mo­ dje­ ska’s person and achievements. I had the good fortune to work with expert curators, librarians, and scholars on both sides of the ocean. I thank the librarians at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts for their help; Georgianna Ziegler and ­Nadia Sophie Seiler at the Folger Shakespeare Library for their bibliographic advice; Raymond Wemmlinger for his special assistance at the Hampden Booth Library housed in New York’s Players Club; Anna Chen for her enthusiastic retrieval of materials from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-­Austin; and Kristin Kulash for her expertise and advance collection of materials at the Harvard University Libraries. I owe an ongoing debt of gratitude to Erik Zitser, Duke University’s fantastic Slavic bibliographer, and to the hardworking Interlibrary Loan staffs at both University of North Carolina–­ Chapel Hill and Duke University. In Southern California, Bill Landis and other staff members in the University of California-­ Irvine’s Special Collections and Archives helped me enormously in sorting through their rich cache of Mo­dje­ska materials; my thanks to Steve MacLeod and Andrew Jones at UCI for further help in sorting out illustrations and permissions. Sue Hodson was a generous, gracious Curator of Literary Manuscripts at the Huntington Library. Jennifer Ring, the Bowers Museum registrar, has been a wonderful resource and colleague from the moment I inquired about visiting the museum’s substantive Mo­dje­ska collection. Her expertise and efficiency and the commitment of Peter C. Keller, the museum ’s director, helped to realize the first Polish-­ Ameri­ can Modrzejewska/­ Mo­dje­skaexhibitin2009.EllenK.Lee,thegreatestMo­dje­skaadvocateinCalifornia , was kind enough to give me a privately guided tour of Arden in 2001; her death in 2005 impoverished Mo­dje­ska enthusiasts everywhere. I was lucky to keep learning about Arden and its visitors from Diane Wollenberg, the Orange County Parks ranger who knows and...