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47 CHAPTER 3 Vladivostok Scenes ON 16 AUGUST 1929, ELEANOR PRAY WROTE TO HER SISTER-IN-LAW Sarah Smith in Shanghai that yet another couple of friends were about to leave Vladivostok. Both women knew well that, for many of the foreign residents , this was a place of transfer—into Siberia to explore its natural wealth, or out via China and Japan, to escape—as well as a step on the promotional ladder in international corporations seeking Russian trade. But Mrs. Pray then noted her own dissenting opinion: “Sometimes I long to get away from here and be done with all the worries and vexations of everyday life . . . but deep in my soul I know I shall never be as contented anywhere else as in this beautiful unkempt place, for the best part of my life has been spent here.” In the words of the marriage vow, Eleanor Pray loved the city and her life in it—“for better or for worse.” A spectacular embrace of hills and sea creates Vladivostok’s natural relief. Of striking shape and importance, the L-shaped central harbor, the Bay of the Golden Horn, is protected from the south by the massive Russian Island, dominating the horn’s lower prong like an old-fashioned lock. To the west, off the Egersheld Peninsula, glitters the grand Amur Bay, and to the east of the whole city, Ussuri Bay. The prerevolutionary panorama of Vladivostok’s man-made landmarks, looking north from the Golden Horn, was appealing. Old photographs show, on the west side of town, the famous railway station, the Danish Telegraph, and, later, the lovely art nouveau mansion of the Bryner family;1 in the middle the bustling marketplace on what is today the central square, near the stately trading house of Kunst and Albers (K&A); and, not far east of the city center, the Admiral’s House, the Nikolai Trium- 48 ✴ Chapter 3 phal Arch,2 and the Cathedral of the Assumption. Toward the end of her residency in Vladivostok, Eleanor Pray fondly recalled this vista: “Thirty-six years ago today I made my debut in Vladivostok and . . . I remember asking [brother-in-law] Charlie what the old Kunst & Albers building was—being quite disappointed to hear that it was only a department store, when it looked like a palace” (23 June 1930 to Sarah). If one scrutinizes the old photos carefully , Dom Smith, with its large second-floor veranda, may also be discerned somewhat to the northeast of Kunst and Albers, from 1899 on fronted by the impressive Post and Telegraph Office on Svetlanskaia Street.3 History’s preferences, often narrowly political, have wreaked havoc with the seafront, and the cathedral was brutally razed in the late 1930s.4 Still, while the architectural plans for Bolshoi Vladivostok (Greater Vladivostok) in the 1950s and 1960s called for massive, prefabricated housing developments , efforts were made to capture in iron and concrete the shape of the sopki [cone-shaped hills]—to create the effect of an amphitheater or “a kind of gigantic staircase, on which the rows of the houses will alternate with the rows of greenery.”5 Many of these terraced apartment blocks seem to cascade down, draping, as it were, over the hillsides.6 Few visitors can remain unmoved by Vladivostok’s natural beauty. When Anton Chekhov visited in the fall of 1890 on his way back to Moscow from Sakhalin, he relished a scene very similar to that which was to impress Frederick Pray a few years later. Eleanor recorded, “Fred just came tearing upstairs, for me to look out of the window—there were three whales in the harbor and it was such fun watching them blow” (27 April 1895 to Home).7 In 1913, Fridtjof Nansen, the explorer, found the combination of sea and hills picturesque, comparing it to Naples.8 Walks in central Vladivostok can be veritable feasts for the senses. One article is titled simply “Listening to the City,” and a former sea captain describes his own lyrical connection thus: “You can hear the rhythms of time through bells and fog-horns from the ships, and if you touch the old brick walls, you can feel the warmth of past years.”9 Eleanor Pray, too, was inspired by the very sensuality of Vladivostok’s sights and sounds, enjoying , for example, the bugle calls from the anchored ships at sunset (29 September 1895 to Home); pieces from Russian “grand opera” interpreted by a young man in the next building—“as...

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