Word: pasternaks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
NONFICTION: The Chief, Lance Morrow -- Citizen Hughes, Michael Drosnin -- Henry James: Literary Criticism, edited by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson -- The Periodic Table, Primo Levi -- Up for Grabs, John Rothchild -- A Vanished Present: The Memoirs of Alexander Pasternak, edited by Ann Pasternak Slater...
...Pasternak, who died in 1982 at the age of 88, views prerevolutionary Moscow from a lofty perspective. His mother Rosa Koffmann was a celebrated concert pianist. His father Leonid, an impressionist painter and graphic artist, became a dominant figure in 20th century Russian art. Brother Boris started out as a promising composer and became one of Russia's greatest poets and, in 1958, a Nobel laureate...
Music dominated this household of creative artists. The Pasternaks haunted the city's concerts, which were more like family gatherings than formal affairs. At the beginning of the concerts the chairs were arranged in the usual rows. "But since the same people attended nearly every concert . . . and knew each other well by sight, the arrangement was regularly disturbed by the audience's imperative need to share its pleasures," Pasternak recalls. The listeners "shifted, straggled, and clustered," taking their chairs with them. "By the end of the evening the seating had turned into a map charting the music's magnetic field...
...Pasternak apartments were wonderfully well situated, offering panoramas of the city. When he wrote these memoirs the old architect returned to the windows of his youth, mapping out the neighborhood's elegant old houses and gardens, its serene little squares and grandiose churches and monuments as they opened up before him in memory...
...18th century Moscow Post Office, a structure that he invests with churning life. In a paean to the Mushroom Market on the banks of the Moscow River, the author offers pungent and densely textured scenes of ancient commerce, which have been fluently rendered by his niece, Ann Pasternak Slater. "Everything was primitively displayed in open barrels, the frozen carcasses of great fish simply laid straight on the snow," he writes. "Pickled, soused, and salted products stood in ranks . . . vats of bilberry, cranberry, cloudberry...