Acknowledgements

The author and publisher are grateful to a number of professional and non- professional photographers who generously offered their work for the improvement of Modern Russian Culture. These include Mr. N. N. Rakhmanov of Moscow, whose forty-year visual record of the splendors of Moscow constitutes an immeasurable contribution to the preservation of his city's culture; and our colleagues James Bailey, Lydia Kalaida, Christine Rydel, Edward Cole, and David Huisman who generously offered the best of their private slide collections.

We are additionally grateful and indebted to the staff of the Northern Illinois University Art-Photo Lab who produced many of the slides and provided remarkable graphics for the collection on which the present photoimages are based; to the staff of the Northern Illinois University Production Imaging service, successor of the Art-Photo Lab, for superior new images; to the Recording Company "Russkii Sezon" (www.russianseason.com) for permission to use excerpts from their CD productions of Russian classical music; to Paradyme Productions in Madison, Wisconsin, for their superior recordings of the narrated lectures; and to Boston Photo Imaging for the superb quality of their digital reproductions of the color slides on which the images of this course are based.

We are further indebted to Ms. Antonina Konstantinovna Slavinskaya of Zvezda magazine in St. Petersburg, Russia, for her careful work on verifying the factual information in this course. In many cases this proved to be a difficult task as publications vary--sometimes greatly--as to the dates and titles of many Russian paintings from the nineteenth century.

The conceptual design and programming for Modern Russian Culture were done by Slava Paperno of Cornell University and Lexicon Bridge Publishers.

Funding for this project was generously provided by The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning.

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