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Most of the collection consists of letters to Golśteĭn; there are some as well to her second husband, Vladimir A. Gol'shtein. The materials reflect Gol'shtein ties to Russian liberalism and populism and also to both French and Russian art and literature. There are groups of cataloged letters from Renʹe Arcos (15), Mykhailo Drahomaniv (52), Andrʹe Fontainas (31), Renʹe Ghil (32), Viacheslav Ivanov (17), Petr Lavrov (49), Vladimir Vernadskii (20), and Maksimilian Voloshin (29). There are also items by Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Henri Martin Barzun, Henri Bergson, Ivan Bunin, Sergei Diagilev, Paul Fort, Vladislav Khodasevich, Aristide Maillol, and Odilon Redon. Manuscripts are chiefly by Golśhteĭn, and include her memoirs on Drahomaniv. There are also poems by Voloshin and by Konstantin Bal'mont. Subject files deal with such topics as the Russian famine of 1891-92 and the Russian Liberation Committee at the time of the Civil War. There is a copy of Gol'shtein's book, "Serf Life in Russia."

The typescript memoirs "Vospominaniia: Zhizn' i rabota v Khudozhestvennom Teatre" discuss her childhood, education, theatrical career, personal life, the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War, and the emigration in Germany in the 1920s. Persons appearing more or less briefly in the memoirs include Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Konstantin Stanislavskii-Alekseev, Sergei Diagilev, Savva Morozov, Mstislav Dobuzhinskii, and Ol'ga Knipper. However, the memoirs are chiefly personal in nature, and provide relatively little information on Pavlova's theatrical career or the Khudozhestvennyi Teatr in particular. A sizeable part concerns the period of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath (1918-22) in the Ukraine and the Crimea.