The Night before the Exam

The impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak was born in Odessa and trained there and in Munich. In 1889, he settled in Moscow, where he taught at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1894 to 1918. Although not a nationalist painter, he often painted Jewish subject matter and was close to Jewish intellectual circles, producing illustrations for publications of the Society for Jewish Folk Music. He moved to Berlin in 1921, leaving behind in Moscow his son, the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, a convert to Russian Orthodoxy who shared none of his father’s Jewish interests. Leonid Pasternak lived in Berlin until 1938, when he fled to England, living first in London and then Oxford.