229 Notes NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 1 A. N. Izergina et al., The Hermitage, Leningrad: French Nineteenth-Century Masters (Prague: Artia/Leningrad: Sovetsky Khudozhnik, 1968), plate 34. The painting discussed is Boulevard Montmartre, Paris. 2 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 76, 79. 3 Michael F. Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, 1800–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), xvi. See also Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, “‘Soft’ Area Studies versus ‘Hard’ Social Science: A False Opposition,” Slavic Review 66, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 1, 17; Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 4 Examples include David Wolff, To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Roshanna P. Sylvester , Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); and Hamm, Kiev: A Portrait, note 3. 5 Today, East Siberia is a different administrative region within the Russian Federation. Mrs. Pray was referring to the area now known as the Russian Far East. 6 The term “Old Vladivostok” usually indicates the prerevolutionary period, as, for example , in Boris D’iachenko’s book Staryi Vladivostok/Old Vladivostok, trans. Alexander Mel’nikov (Vladivostok: Utro Rossii, 1992). I include most of Mrs. Pray’s Vladivostok period in the term “Old Vladivostok.” 7 The memoirs of Otto W. Lindholm, merchant of the First Guild, are another invaluable source on early Vladivostok. See his Beyond the Frontiers of Imperial Russia: From the Memoirs of Otto W. Lindholm, ed. Alexander de Haes Tyrtoff and Nicholas Tyrtoff Davis (Javea, Spain: A. de Haes OWL Publishing, 2008). Writing in Nice in 1908, Mr. Lindholm recalled events from the mid-nineteenth century in his native Finland through the early 1900s in Vladivostok. 8 This phrase, translated as “Nothing human is alien to me,” from Terentius, the Roman playwright (d. 159 BC), suggests compassion for human failings; Heauton Timorumenos I. 1, 25. 9 Dorothy Findlay, an Englishwoman, wrote on 21 November 1923 that Mrs. Pray was the 230 ✴ Notes to Introduction “only . . . American here now.” John and Dorothy Findlay, “Letters from Vladivostok, 1918– 1923,” ed. Dorothy Galton and John Keep, Slavonic Review 45 (July 1967): 530. 10 Konstantin Iasnov, “Pis’ma iz proshloi zhizni: Segodnia sostoitsia prezentatsiia unikal’nogo kul’turnogo proekta” [Letters from another life: A unique culture project will be presented today], Rossiiskaia gazeta: Primorskii krai, no. 4780, October 24, 2008. See also Liubov’ Berchanskaia, “Samyi istinnyi portret Vladivostoka” [The most truthful portrait of Vladivostok], Vladivostok, no. 2428, October 28, 2008, p. 6. 11 Now and then, Mrs. Pray considered transforming her letters into a book, but, finding her talent for pithy letters greater than for publishable stories, she did not ultimately pursue this idea. 12 Mumford likens cities to “theater, in which common life itself takes on the features of a drama, heightened by every device of costume and scenery,” City in History, 115, 200. While such spectacles, including Stalin’s “rituals of theater,” are usually created to boost the image of political leaders, Eleanor Pray wanted both to watch and to be in them, herself . The Stalin quote is from Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), xvi; see also 66. 13 The Prays graduated from Great Falls High School in New Hampshire on 17 June 1887. They visited friends in China and Japan several times and traveled around the world in 1902–3 (their only visit home to New England), but when in Russia they always remained in and around Vladivostok. 14 For information on Russia’s ethnic diversity, see Andreas Kappeler, The Russian Empire: A Multiethnic History (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2001). 15 The regular recipients of Mrs. Pray’s letters are identified at the end of this introduction. Square brackets within quotations are used for brief editorial clarifications, while parentheses within quotations contain the writer’s own remarks. 16 Birgitta Ingemanson, “Portrait of a City: Impressions of Vladivostok among EnglishSpeaking Visitors,” Rossiia i ATR 3 (1995): 107–14. 17 Lidiia Ginzburg is quoted by Julian Graffy, “Unshelving Stalin after the Period of Stagnation ,” in Stalinism and the Soviet Cinema, ed. Richard Taylor and Derek Spring (London: Routledge, 1993), 226, 266–67. 18 G. I. Ponomarchuk, “Rastitel’nost’ i zhivotnyi mir” [Flora and fauna], in Fizicheskaia geografiia Primorskogo kraia: Uchebnoe posobie...