Editor’s note: Alexander Pasternak (1893-1982) was the younger brother of the poet Boris Pasternak. He was three years Boris’s junior. Both of their parents were artists—their father, Leonid Pasternak, a distinguished painter of the Russian Impressionist school, and their mother, Rosa Koffmann, a concert pianist. Alexander Pasternak was an architect by profession and a learned writer on architectural subjects, author of (among other works) a treatise on Methods of Investigating the Architectural Composition of Town Centers in Classic and Western Europe before the Eighteenth Century. In the Twenties he designed the Karpov Biochemical Institute and collaborated with Melnikov on preparations for the first Lenin Mausoleum. From 1929 to 1933 he and his wife, who was also an architect, worked with Le Corbusier on the Centrosoyuz Building in Moscow. From 1932 to his retirement in 1956 he served on the faculty of the Architectural Institute in Moscow.

In the last years of his life Alexander Pasternak turned his talents to literature, translating (at his brother’s request) Thornton Wilder’s novel, The Ides of March, and writing a memoir, A Vanished Present, which evokes with a Proustian delicacy the lost world of his parents’ milieu—the world of the cultivated liberal intelligentsia which flourished in Russia in the years preceding the revolutions of 1917—and of his own early life. In that world the art of music, very much including the art of the pianist, occupied a commanding position—not, it should be pointed out, as what we would now call entertainment, but