Speak, Memory a Vanished Present: the Memoirs of Alexander Pasternak

By Patricia Blake

The surname is familiar; Boris made it famous with Doctor Zhivago. But his brother Alexander, an architect unknown in the West, also had a talent for the literature of loss. A Vanished Present meticulously re-creates old Moscow during the last two decades of the Russian empire.

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 of attraction and repulsion. Not a row survived."

The 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.

From one window Alexander could see the 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."

The nostalgia for sounds and tastes is palpable. "The mild spring evening air no longer swims with the sweet, full chime of the city's 40 times 40 churches, and waffles are no longer sold, as they were in our childhood, on every boulevard and each street square." The memory sends Alexander into a lyrical flight: "Wonderfully smelling, thin, fresh waffles, which were twisted, still hot, into cornets and crammed with cream--the very image of waves, heaving hump-backed and white-crested as they reach the shore, to topple, curl and close like the wave of Hokusai!"

Alexander composes a hymn to the cobblestones, "small, regular granite blocks of all colours" on old Moscow's streets: "When the rains washed away the dirt and dust, drawing colours from the heart of the stone, their chance mosaic was far richer than the asphalt's colourless monotony." Winter is a cause of wonderment as sleighs move silently through the snow-hushed city. Finally comes the happiest of seasons in Russia, spring, with its ritual opening of windows. "Fresh spring air, wild and cool, fills the room, bringing with it the city's bright polyphony of voices, bells, and squealing wheels . . . the pulse of the living town."

These are incantations, summoning up a joyous past from deepest grief for a vanished world. Alexander's celebrations recall a poem by his brother that begins, "Violently the spring bursts into Moscow houses." In the poem, the poet and his friends meet to hail the season. Yet Boris adds: "Our evenings are farewells/ Our parties are testaments/ So that the secret stream of suffering/ May warm the cold of life." The party is long over, but Alexander's book still serves the same high purpose.