The Black Russian (33 page)

It is a pleasure to express my heartfelt thanks to a number of people who helped me greatly while I worked on this book: Eugene A. Alexandrov for his remarkable recall of myriad details from the distant past and for deciphering pages of old German handwriting; David Bethea, Paul Bushkovitch, and Glenda Gilmore for taking time from their busy schedules to answer my questions, to read drafts, and to give me their expert advice; Judith Flowers and Flo Larson for their hospitality and their crucial help with research in Coahoma County, Mississippi; Tatjana Lorkovic for securing microfiche collections of old Russian journals for Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library that proved essential for my work; Vera Prasolova and Leonid Vaintraub for important assistance in Russian archives that yeilded remarkable documents; Bruce Thomass, Frederick Bruce Thomas’s grandson, for his hospitality, for sharing his family’s history with me, and for his generosity in allowing me to include a handsome photograph of his grandfather in this book. I owe a unique debt of gratitude to András J. Riedlmayer for suggesting sources, for helping me search collections in the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University, for fielding questions and reading a draft, for identifying several vivid Turkish recollections of Frederick Thomas, and especially for his great
kindness
in translating them for me.

I am also very grateful for advice and suggestions about a wide range of subjects that I received from Allison Blakely, Lenny Borger, James C. Cobb, Allegra di Bonaventura, Edward Kasinec, Konstantin
Kazansky, Philip Mansel, Christine Philliou, Norman Saul, Boris Savchenko, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Mary Schwartz, Vadim Staklo, and Elena Uvarova. Many people assisted me with
research
in locations both near and far, and I owe debts to them all: Aylin Besiryan, Vincent L. Clark, Andrei Dubinsky, Padre Felice, Katherine Foshko, Edip Golbasi, Camille Jove, Diana Lachatanere, Angela
Locatelli
, Soeur Maria, Shannon M. Martinez, Kevin Pacelli, Andrew Ross, Charles Nicholas Saenz, and William and Alicia Van Altena.

My search for information about Frederick Thomas took me to numerous archives, libraries, and other repositories, and the staffs of the following were especially helpful (even when what seemed like promising leads turned out to be dead ends, as happened more than once): Bakhmeteff Archive (Columbia University); Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale et Contemporaine (Nanterre, France); Coahoma County Courthouse (Clarksdale, MS); Centre des Archives Diplomatiques de Nantes (France); the Filson Historical Society (Louisville, KY); Fundación IWO (Buenos Aires, Argentina);
Gemeentearchief
Rotterdam (the Netherlands); Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Moscow); Hoover Institution Library (Stanford University); Immigration History Research Center (University of Minnesota); Imperial War Museum (London); Mandeville Special Collections Library (University of California, San Diego);
Massachusetts
Historical Society (Boston); Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (Howard University); Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library (Princeton University); National Archives (England); National
Archives
and Records Administration II (College Park, MD); Rauner Special Collections Library (Dartmouth College); Saint-Esprit
Cathedral
(Istanbul); Shelby County Archives (Memphis, TN);
Schomburg
Center for Research in Black Culture (New York); Sterling Memorial Library (Yale University).

For believing in this book, for sage advice on how to present it, and for skillfully guiding it to a hospitable port, I would like to thank my literary agent, Michael V. Carlisle of InkWell Management, and
his able assistant, Lauren Smythe. I am deeply grateful to Joan
Bingham
, my editor at Grove/Atlantic, for her enthusiastic embrace of
The Black Russian
and for her wisdom and skill in shaping its final version.

Finally, thanks to my wife, Sybil, my children, Nicholas and Sophia, my father, Eugene A. Alexandrov, and my late mother, Natalia Alexandrov, for their support and their patience during the years that I worked on “FT.”