Description
Massachusetts is a heaven for history lovers. Not every European province can boast such a lineage: Pilgrims and Puritans, preachers and merchants, pirates and witches, rebels, philosophers, and authors. As Oscar Wilde quipped back in the 19th century, Americans have been joking about their youth for two hundred years.
Boston is a city of subtle details, free from pretension of being a dominant capital. This is why wandering the narrow streets of neighborhoods like the North End, Beacon Hill, and Back Bay feels so inviting. Boston is a graphic city. Black-and-white photography captures so well the mood and texture of its old red brick and gray granite from local quarries, its authentic cast-iron lanterns and wrought-iron balcony railings. Boston is often described by visitors as the most European city in the United States.
I have lived in Boston for over thirty years. This small photo album is my tribute to my new home.
Массачусетс — место для любителей истории. Пилигримы и пуритане, проповедники и негоцианты, пираты и ведьмы, бунтари и сочинители – не каждая из европейских провинций может похвастать такой родословной. Как острил в позапрошлом веке Оскар Уайльд, американцы уже двести лет шутят о своей молодости.
Бостон — город частностей. У него нет претензий быть столицей. Поэтому так уютно бродить по улочкам районов Норт-Энд, Бикон-Хилл или Бэк-Бей. Бостон — город графический. Поэтому черно-белые фотографии хорошо передают оттенки настроения старого красного кирпича и серого гранита из местных каменоломен, аутентичных чугунных фонарей и кованых балконных решеток. Большинство приезжающих сюда говорят о Бостоне как о самом европейском городе Америки.
Более тридцати лет я живу в Бостоне. Этот небольшой фотоальбом — моя дань признательности этому городу.
—Leon Spivak / Леонид Спивак, August 2025
Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1962, Leon Y. Spivak is a Russian language writer who explores many unique topics in both American and Russian history. After graduating from New York University, Leon Spivak moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1997. In 2001, he published a book on several fascinating episodes in Boston’s history, entitled Stories of the City of Boston. In 2005, Leon Spivak published a historical novelette Judah, devoted to a topic seldom touched on by writers or historians — the political biography of US Senator and Secretary of the Confederate States of America, Judah P. Benjamin. Leon Spivak published a large number of articles on various aspects of Russian-American political and cultural relations from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Some of these articles were included in his well-received set of historical essays, Between Two Shores (2014). His documentary novelettes, including Stories of the City of Boston, A Diplomat’s Solitude, and When There Was No America, are devoted to lesser-known moments in American history.
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…My friend Leon Spivak, the author of many fascinating books on American history — especially the history of Boston — has sent me his newest and most unusual work. It is an album of his architectural photographs in which Boston appears sometimes as Sherlock Holmes’s London, sometimes as Walter Scott’s Edinburgh, and at moments even as Harry Potter’s Hogwarts. Leafing through the book, one sees clearly how much the city where America began has remained un-American: how strongly it wishes to preserve itself as old, familiar England — yet also where it inevitably fails in doing so.
There are very few people in these photographs. And yet their presence is felt in the half-open door, in the perspective of a cobblestone alley — you almost sense them watching us from behind shuttered windows. But who are they, these elusive Bostonians living in the scenery that has become the flesh and blood of New England? One can let the imagination wander — or return to Leon’s other books.
— Ivan Kurilla, Department of History, Ohio State university