Elderly ladies in lace jabots and stiffly polite gentlemen in somewhat frayed double-breasted black suits filled five small rooms in Munich's Municipal Gallery. They were members of Munich's large Russian colony, and they had come to see their own past reflected in an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Leonid Pasternak, father of the late Russian poet-novelist, Boris.
The drawings, all done with a swinging and resonant network of strokes, were portraits of some of the chief figures of Russia's pre-Revolution Parnassus—Sergei Rachmaninoff, Feodor Chaliapin, Alexander Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy—all close friends of the...
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