Original and rare photographic portraits of Eleonora Duse, the first woman on the cover of Time Magazine (left), Sarah Bernhardt, Théophile Gautier, Ossip Gabrilowitsch (renown conductor and son-in-law of Mark Twain), and many other renowned women and men of letters, theater, music, and politics.

Photos by the Russian physician Alexei Abrikosov (1875-1955), who toured Europe with his brother, a Russian diplomat stationed in London in 1905–1908.

This estate near Vitebsk, Belarus, was frequented by renowned men and women of the Russian Silver Age: Georgii Ivanov, Adelaida Gertsyk, Marina Tsveraeva, and others. See the daily life of the estate, its owners, and famous guests taking boat rides, making berry pies, and ice-skating on a frozen pond. The estate was burned down by the local peasants in the 1917 revolutionary events and never restored.