Alexander Leonidovich Pasternak, brother of the famous writer and Nobel Prize laureate Boris L. Pasternak, paints in his memoirs an expressive picture of life in Moscow at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With the accuracy of an architect, he describes the buildings, streets and districts of the city in which the author's family lived during his childhood and youth. The author represents the life of his family, the attitude towards his brother, their children's games, which were a reflection of their environment.