Download or read book A Vanished Present written by Aleksandr Leonidovich Pasternak and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P. This book was released on 1985 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An affectionate remembrance of a Russian childhood and youth - before and after the Revolution. In this beautifully written and evocative memoir, Alexander Pasternak describes the life of a family and of a bygone age. With an architect's practiced eye, he records the streets, squares, and people of old Russia; with true Russian warmth, he chronicles the intimate life of one of the most cultured families of the dying Czarist empire. There are vignettes of Tolstoy, whose works his father illustrated, and of Scriabin, whose music his mother played on the piano. There are warm and humorous recollections of his brother, Boris, and of his classmate Mayakovsky, and rich memories of houses and markets, carriages, cobbles, and churchbells. This is a book full of the sounds and smells, lights and shadows, of a vanished day." --