The Russian Album
Authors: Michael Ignatieff
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CONTENTS
IGNATIEFF AND MESTCHERSKY FAMILY TREE
I wish to acknowledge the generosity of the Leverhulme Foundation in supporting research for this book and also the assistance of the Institute for the Study of the
USA
and Canada, Moscow, during two study tours of the Soviet Union in 1983 and 1986. Neither institution should be held responsible for the facts and opinions contained in this book.
I wish to thank Carmen Callil, Andrew Motion, Elisabeth Sifton, Cynthia Good and Anthony Sheil for advice, criticism and support above and beyond the call of their duties as my editors and agents. My uncles Vladimir, Alec and Lionel Ignatieff and my aunts Florence Hargreaves Ignatieff, Marjorie Adams Ignatieff and Helen Fraser Ignatieff were unstinting in tracking down photographs, manuscripts and missing facts. My wife, Susan Barrowclough, read the manuscript in all its stages and did her best, as usual, to save me from myself. The book is dedicated to my father, who managed to be both detached and helpful, and to my son, who, bless him, couldn't have cared less.
I am grateful to the following copyright holders who have granted permission to reprint material:
âStill Life' from
The House on Marshland
by Louise Gluck, copyright © 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975 by Louise Gluck. Published by The Ecco Press in 1975.
âThe Untelling' from
The Story of Our Lives
by Mark Strand, copyright © 1973 by Mark Strand.
SOURCES
The memoirs of Count Paul and Countess Natasha Ignatieff, upon which this book is based, are on deposit with the Public Archives of Canada in Ottawa.
NOTE
My grandmother was referred to both as Natalie and Natasha. In what follows, I have chosen the Russian form, Natasha.
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FOR THEO AND HIS GRANDFATHER
Â
Â
⦠in what shape
was it we first perceived it â the unstanched
hereditary thing, working its way
along the hollows of the marrow�
AMY CLAMPITT
â
What the Light Was Like
'
Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye.
Ignore the past and you'll lose both of them.
OLD RUSSIAN PROVERB
No one I know lives in the house where they grew up or even in the town or village where they once were children. Most of my friends live apart from their parents. Many were born in one country and now live in another. Others live in exile, forming their thoughts in a second language among strangers. I have friends whose family past was consumed in the concentration camps. They are orphans in time. This century has made migration, expatriation and exile the norm, rootedness the exception. To come as I do from a hybrid family of White Russian exiles who married Scottish Canadians is to be at once lucky â we survived â and typical.
Because emigration, exile and expatriation are now the normal condition of existence, it is almost impossible to find the right words for rootedness and belonging. Our need for home is cast in the language of loss; indeed, to have that need at all you have to be already homeless. Belonging now is retrospective rather than actual, remembered rather than experienced, imagined rather than felt. Life now moves so quickly that some of us feel that we were literally different people at previous times in our lives. If the continuity of our own selves is now problematic, our connection with family ancestry is yet more in question. Our grandparents stare out at us from the pages of the family album, solidly grounded in a time now finished, their lips open, ready to speak words we cannot hear.
For many families, photographs are often the only artefacts to survive the passage through exile, migration or the pawnshop. In a secular culture, they are the only household icons, the only objects that perform the religious function of connecting the living to the dead and of locating the identity of the living in time. I never feel I know my friends until either I meet their parents or see their photographs and since this rarely happens, I often wonder whether I know anybody very well. If we are strangers even to our friends, it is because our knowledge of each other is always in a dimension of time that my grandparents' culture would have considered inconceivably shallow. In the world of both the rich and the poor of even a century ago, one knew someone as his father's son, his grandmother's grandson and so on. In the Russian style of address, first name and then patronymic, this kind of knowing is inscribed in the very way one names a friend or relation. To a Russian, I am Michael Georgevitch, George's son, a self rooted in a family past. In the non-Russian world I live in, I am known for what I do, for how I am now, not for the past I embody. Looking at someone's family album is a way towards a deeper temporal knowing of another. But nowadays, a frontier of intimacy has to be crossed before these photographs are shown even to friends. Within the family itself, photographs are not really icons, hovering presences on the wall. Styles of inheritance are now individual: we are free to take or refuse our past. Children have as much right to refuse interest in these icons as they have to stick to their own opinions. Yet the more negotiable, the more invented the past becomes, the more intense its hold, the more central its invention becomes in the art of making a self. Eventually there are few of us who do not return home one holiday weekend, go to the bottom drawer, pull out the old shoe box and spread the pictures around us on the floor.
Father has his arm around Tereze
She squints. My thumb
is in my mouth: my fifth autumn.
Near the copper beech
the spaniel dozes in the shadows.
Not one of us does not avert his eyes.
          (Louise Gluck, âStill Life')
From its beginnings, photography was recognized as a new source of consciousness about the family past. As a contributor to
Macmillan's Magazine
wrote in 1877: âAnyone who knows what the worth of family affection is among the lower classes and who has seen the array of little portraits over a labourer's fire place will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies, social and industrial, which are every day sapping the healthier family affections, the sixpenny photograph is doing more for the poor than all the philanthropists in the world' (quoted in Susan Sontag,
On Photography
). In democratizing the privilege of a family portrait gallery, the sixpenny photograph deserves a place in the social history of modern individualism. With the coming of the photograph, poor families had a new kind of inheritance: sixpenny tokens coded with the signs of their genetic legacy. If they could not bequeath property, they could bequeath the history of the handing down of the curve of a lip, the shape of a forehead, the set of a jaw. In giving silent presence to vanished generations and in diffusing this presence throughout the whole culture, photography has played a part in bringing the problem of personal identity to the centre of cultural concern. The awareness that we must create ourselves and find our own belonging was once the privilege of an educated elite and is now a generalized cultural condition. For in helping to constitute identity in time, photography also poses the problem of the freedom of the self to make its own present. To look at an old photograph and to discover that one has inherited the shape of one's eyes, to hear from one's parents that one has also inherited a temperament, is both to feel a new location in time but also a dawning sense of imprisonment. The passion for roots â the mass pastime of family history â represses the sense of suffocation that family photographs can engender. That is one reason why the old photographs get consigned to the old shoe box at the bottom of the drawer. We need them but we do not want to be claimed by them. Because they bring us face to face with an inheritance that cannot be altered, photographs pose the problem of freedom: they seem to set the limits within which the self can be created.
The photographs in a family album bring us closer to the past and yet their acute physical tactility reminds us of all the distance that still remains uncrossed. As such, photographs have done something to create that very modern sense of the past as a lost country. My first impression of that sense came when I was very young. I was watching an interview on television with an old black man who was supposed to be the last American who had lived under slavery. In a whisper, he told how he had been born in what must now be Liberia and how he had been enticed onto a ship with promises of corn fritters growing on trees in a land where you never had to work all day. I can remember thinking that if this tiny man with his faint voice and papery skin were to die, the past of slavery, the chains and the chanting, would slide away from me like a cliff subsiding into the sea. I still cannot shake off the superstition that the only past that is real, that exists at all, is the one contained within the memories of living people. When they die, the past they hold within them simply vanishes, and those of us who come after cannot inherit their experience, only preserve the myth of its existence. We can mark the spot where the cliff was washed away by the sea, but we cannot repair the wound the sea has made. In my lifetime the last of the people born before the Russian Revolution will die. My father is the very last of that generation, aged four in February 1917, just old enough to remember the bayonets glinting like glass below the window of the house in Petrograd on the morning the soldiers stormed to the Duma and said they had had enough of hunger and war. His memory just bestrides this abyss dividing everything before and everything after the revolution. I in turn am the last generation to know his generation, the last to be able to plumb their memory, to feel the presence of their past in the timbre of their voices and in the gaze they cast back across time. Already I am so far away from what happened, so much a Canadian born of this time and place and no other, that I feel fraudulent in my absorption in the vanishing experience of another generation. Yet so swiftly does time move now that unless I do my work to preserve memory, soon all there will be left is photographs and photographs only document the distance that time has travelled; they cannot bind past and present together with meaning.
