“It was a long time ago... I asked my late mother to write down for me her memories of life at the Catherine Institute and of her later relations with Empress Maria Feodorovna, who until her death did not forget her as one of her best students. Much in my mother’s stories seemed interesting to me, because even then, in the 50s, when I became quite “big”, even a student, in our life there were already such shades or, in today’s terms, “trends” that from other sides made this life of the 50s more similar to the present than to the life of the first quarter of our century...”