Author's Note

In transliterating from Russian I have used the Library of Congress system, modified by the omission of the soft sign (') in the body of the text. The non-Russian background of many architects in this study raised the question whether to transliterate surnames from the Russian or to revert to a Western form. Although either method, if rigorously followed, would be cumbersome and at times misleading, I have given preference to the transliterated form, which has the advantage of distinguishing Russian subjects of foreign ancestry from the numerous Austrian, German, French, and British architects mentioned in this book. In the case of certain Russified Germans, however, I have given the German form in parentheses after the first reference: Gogen (von Hohen), Kitner (Küttner), and so forth. And I have rejected transliteration where it distorts names (for example, those of such Russians of French descent as Benois and Lanceray) or ignores the subsequent biography of an architect like William Walcot, who left Russia after 1905 and resumed his career in Great Britain.

Almost all the architects whose work is the focus of this study were born in Russia, spent their entire careers there, and, as in the case of Vladimir Shervud (Sherwood), became ardent proponents of a Russian national style in architecture. It is appropriate to recognize these facts in the spelling of their names, which in no way disregards the diverse backgrounds that made Russian architecture at the turn of the century so remarkably vital.

One of the priorities in Western studies of Russian architecture must be adequate photographic documentation. For this book I have drawn such material from two sources. Some two hundred of the black-and-white photographs are reproduced from prerevolutionary Russian architectural publications. These superbly illustrated journals and albums are credited in the captions. Also included are a few prerevolutionary photographs from private archives. The remainder of the black-and-white illustrations and all of the color photographs in this book are my own. Where appropriate, the captions contain accession numbers for my black-and-white photographs now held in the Photographic Archives of the National Gallery of Art. This collection represents a substantial archival resource outside the Soviet Union; it can be used at the National Gallery for purposes of research in the history of Russian architecture.