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xvii Introduction Between the Two Bays: Eleanor Pray’s Vladivostok, 1894–1930 BIRGITTA INGEMANSON CITIES, LIKE PEOPLE, ARE MUCH MORE COMPLEX THAN THE BOOKS and pictures that describe them. Certainly, a good guidebook will outline the history, architectural landmarks, and special events of any metropolis, and pictures such as Camille Pissarro’s Parisian boulevard scenes and Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of New York offer vivid flashes of urban life. But take another look at those images. Although we are pushed straight into the noise and movement of Pissarro’s street, just as the artist has intended—into “its jingling carriages and its throngs of people”1—there is a catch. We can go to the view, but we cannot be in it: the human mysteries of those captured moments cannot be revealed by a painting alone. Who are the passersby with their hats and umbrellas, and where are they going? How has the city shaped their lives? To answer such questions, we would have to follow these people to their homes, in the mad hope that they might open their doors and reveal their secrets. For to explore the character of a city, it is not enough to remain on the outside looking in; we must immerse ourselves in both its domestic and its public realms. This task requires more than the facts, more than the visual imagery and the fleeting testimony of tourists. In historian Lewis Mumford’s words, we need not only “buildings, trees, gardens, but also men in action.” As “a touch of actual life” he offers a scene glimpsed by Herodotus on a street in ancient Babylon: a father and his rebellious son in the midst of an argument.2 There they are, universally human, adding vividness to an otherwise plain scene. Such personal vignettes are necessarily anecdotal and may be dismissed as insignificant, but they can both supplement and enliven the objective narratives of social historians, many of whom do recognize xviii ✴ Birgitta Ingemanson their value and “richness of detail.”3 If we are very lucky, private observations about a place—flashes of ordinary moments—may be found in individual residents’ letters and diaries, allowing us to explore the human depths beyond the scholarly façades. Several writers portraying Russian imperial cities have achieved exactly this.4 And to explore the historical Pacific port of Vladivostok, there is no one better than Eleanor Lord Pray. Originally from Berwick, Maine, Eleanor Pray (1868–1954) arrived in East Siberia in June 1894 a starry-eyed, newly married member of the merchant family of Charles (1834–98) and Sarah (1858–1942) Smith, owners of the city’s American Store.5 She was destined to live in Vladivostok far longer than the five years to which she and her husband Frederick (1867–1923), Sarah’s brother, had agreed, and, with great narrative acumen, transformed the good times and the bad of those years, 1894–1930, into an exuberant epistolary testimonial of interest, appreciation, and survival . Several days a week, and often several times a day, Mrs. Pray wrote diary-like letters on all kinds of stationery to numerous correspondents in New England, Europe, and China; some are two to three pages long, others average forty to fifty pages, altogether, she wrote more than two thousand letters numbering a total of approximately sixteen thousand pages. In addition , the Eleanor L. Pray Collection contains diaries from 1914–15, a calendar noting the birthdays of family members and friends, several scrapbooks, and a number of short stories, poems, and articles that reflect Eleanor Pray’s life in Vladivostok. Furthermore, some twenty photo albums offer hundreds of striking scenes from “Old Vladivostok,” often enhanced by precise annotations in the letters.6 While this collection also includes letters written to Eleanor Pray (especially from Sarah), Mrs. Pray’s own writings constitute its mainstay. Thanks to the immediacy and reliability of her observations—and to the loyal safeguarding of these written and visual memories by her correspondents and their heirs—the Eleanor L. Pray Collection is a significant source of primary information about bourgeois life in Old Vladivostok. No other collection of letters pertaining to Vladivostok, with such a wide scope of chronology and contents as that of Eleanor Pray, is presently known. The city’s repositories of history—including the State Archive of the Maritime Territory, the Vladimir K. Arseniev State Museum of Primorie (informally , the Arseniev Museum), and the Institute of History, Archeology, and the Ethnography of the Peoples of the Far East...

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