The Russian Album (2 page)

I am a historian and historians are supposed to believe that they can transport themselves in time to recapture experience swept away by the death of earlier generations. In even the most rigorously scientific history, there is a resurrectionary hope at work, a faith in the power of imagination and empathy to vault the gulf of time. To do their work at all, historians have to believe that knowledge can consummate desire – that our dull and patient immersion in the records of the past can ultimately satisfy our desire to master time's losses. The historical imagination emerges from loss, dispossession and confinement, the same experiences which make for exile and migration. It is roused when the past can no longer be taken for granted as a felt tradition or when the past has become a burden from which the present seeks emancipation. It is a sense of fracture or a sense of imprisonment that sends historians back to the archives, the memoirs, the tape-recorded voices. Yet this relation between loss and the imagination is full of irony. History has less authority than memory, less legitimacy than tradition. History can never speak with the one voice that our need for belonging requires. It cannot heal the hurt of loss. Our knowledge of the past cannot satisfy our desire for the past. What we can know about the past and what we want from it are two different things.

Photographs of ancestors seem to capture this irony precisely. In the family album, my grandfather seems almost real, almost on the point of speaking. But his clothes, the frock coat, the hands held down the striping of his court uniform, mark him as a historical being irrevocably distant in time. The more palpable the photograph renders his presence, the more sharply I realize that the gulf that divides us involves both my mortality and theirs.

That it is
my
death which is in question, and not just his, becomes apparent when we look at photographs of ourselves. They awaken a sense of loss because they work against the integrative functions of forgetting. Photographs are the freeze frames that remind us how discontinuous our lives actually are. It is in a tight weave of forgetting and selective remembering that a continuous self is knitted together. Forgetting helps us to sustain a suspension of belief in our own death which allows us time to believe in our lives. At the end of his life, the French writer Roland Barthes gave a talk to an audience much younger than himself, and thought out loud about the hope – and the passion for life – that forgetting makes possible: ‘In order to live, I have to forget that my body has a history. I have to throw myself into the illusion that I am the contemporary of these young bodies who are present and listening to me, and not of my own body weighed down with the past. From time to time, in other words, I have to be born again, I have to make myself younger than I am. I let myself be swept along by the force of all living life – forgetting' (
Nouvel Observateur,
31 March 1980).

Photographs do not always support the process of forgetting and remembering by which we weave an integral and stable self over time. The family album does not always conjure forth the stream of healing recollection that binds together the present self and its past. More often than not photographs subvert the continuity that memory weaves out of experience. Photography stops time and serves it back to us in disjunctive fragments. Memory integrates the visual within a weave of myth. The knitting together of past and present that memory and forgetting achieve is mythological because the self is constantly imagined, constructed, invented out of what the self wishes to remember. The photograph acts towards the self like a harshly lit mirror, like the historian confronted with the wish-fulfilments of nationalistic fable or political lie. Look at a picture of yourself at four or five, and ask yourself honestly whether you can feel that you still are this tender self, squinting into the camera. As a record of our forgetting, the camera has played some part in engendering our characteristic modern suspicion about the self-deceiving ruses of our consciousness. Memory heals the scars of time. Photography documents the wounds.

So it is not only the dead ancestors who seem as distant as stars but even the younger versions of ourselves who take up our positions in the family album. It is this double process of loss, the loss of them, the loss of oneself, which the struggle of writing tries to arrest.

His pursuit was a form of evasion.

The more he tried to uncover

the more there was to conceal

the less he understood.

If he kept it up

he would lose everything.

He knew this

and remembered what he could –

always at a distance,

on the other side of the lake,

or across the lawn,

always vanishing, always there.

    (Mark Strand, ‘The Untelling')

Yet loss is only one of the emotions awakened by exile and dispossession. There is also the ‘syncopal kick', the release of stored energies that Vladimir Nabokov describes in
Speak Memory
as being one of exile's least expected gifts. It was exile that made Nabokov a writer; it was exile that turned the taken-for-granted past into a fabled territory that had to be reclaimed, inch by inch, by the writer's art. Just as in the moment of flight exiles must grab the treasures that will become their belongings on the road into exile, so they must choose the past they will carry with them, what version they will tell, what version they will believe. From being an unconsidered inheritance, the past becomes their invention, their story.

Once the story has been handed on from first to second generation, the family past becomes still less a fate and ever more a narrative of self-invention. For someone like myself in the second generation of an émigré tradition, the past has become the story we write to give weight and direction to the accident and contingency of our lives. True, we cannot invent our past out of nothing: there are photos and memories and stories, and sometimes our invention consists mostly in denying what it is we have inherited. Yet even when we disavow it, we are inventing a past in our denials. The problem of invention is authenticity. In the second generation we are free to choose our pasts, but the past we choose can never quite seem as real, as authentic, as those of the first generation.

In my own case, I have two pasts. My mother's family, the Grants and the Parkins, were high-minded Nova Scotians who came to Toronto in the last century and made a name for themselves as teachers and writers. They were close to me as a child: as close as my grandmother's house on Prince Arthur Avenue in Toronto.

My father's past is Russian. My grandfather Paul Ignatieff was Minister of Education in the last Cabinet of Tsar Nicholas II. His father, Nicholas Ignatieff, was the Russian diplomat who in 1860 negotiated the Amur-Ussuri boundary treaty that defines the border between Russia and China in the Pacific region to this day; in 1878 he negotiated the treaty bringing the Russo-Turkish War to a conclusion; and in 1881 he was the minister who put his name to the special legislation against the Jews.

My grandmother was born Princess Natasha Mestchersky on an estate near Smolensk bequeathed to her mother's family by Empress Catherine the Great in the late eighteenth century. In her family she counted a chancellor of Russia, a general who put down the peasant rebellion of Pugachev and the first modern historian of her country, Nicholas Karamzin.

When my Russian grandfather was nineteen and choosing a career, the tramlines of his past ran straight into the future: he would enter a Guards regiment like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him. He could then make a career in the army or return to the family estates and live as a gentleman farmer. At some point in his life he would be expected to leave the estate and serve the Tsar, as his grandfather and father had done. He would ‘shoulder the chains of service'. It is in these precise senses – a destiny inherited and shouldered without questioning – that his identity is irrevocably different from my own. My identity – my belonging to the past he bequeathed me – is a matter of choosing the words I put on a page. I am glad that this is so: his is not a fate or an identity which I would wish as my own. But it is a difference that makes full understanding between us impossible.

My grandmother's self was made within a frame of choices even narrower than those of her husband: to be a dutiful daughter and then a faithful wife. The fulcrum of her life, the one moment when fate could be heaved this way or that, was marriage. There would be some choosing for her to do, among the young officers with wasp-waisted uniforms who were allowed to dance with her at the Petersburg debutante balls. But she was a Princess Mestchersky and once her eyes had fallen on a man, his particulars ‘back to Adam and Eve' would be investigated and if they were found wanting, she would have to choose again.

Both of them were born into a time when their past was also their future. Life had a necessity to it: it was not a tissue of their own making. They grew up in a time measured by a protocol of family decorum. They ended their lives in the formless time of exile, a time with no future and a past suspended out of reach. When they landed in England in the summer of 1919 they were already too old to start again, too old to feel the emancipating energies of exile. My grandparents could only remember: they could no longer invent the present.

Between my two pasts, the Canadian and the Russian, I felt I had to choose. The exotic always exerts a stronger lure than the familiar and I was always my father's son. I chose the vanished past, the past lost behind the revolution. I could count on my mother's inheritance: it was always there. It was my father's past that mattered to me, because it was one I had to recover, to make my own.

My earliest memories are not memories of myself, but of my father talking about his ancestors. I recall being on board the
Queen Mary
during a crossing between New York and Southampton in 1953 when I was six and hearing my father tell the story of how his grandfather Nicholas rode from Peking to Petersburg in six weeks to bring the Tsar the news of the treaty he had signed with the Chinese Emperor; and how when a blizzard struck on the Siberian plains Nicholas had formed his Cossack horsemen into a circle, bivouacked in the centre and warmed themselves through the blizzard by the breath from the horses.

Since my father was a diplomat who moved every eighteen months of my childhood, the things I came to count on as icons of stability were not the houses we lived in, since they changed all the time, but the very few Russian objects we carried with us from one posting to the next. There was a silver ewer and basin that stood on a succession of dining tables in a succession of official apartments, which had once been used by my maternal great-grandmother to wash her hands when she awoke at her country estate in the mornings during the 1880s. Objects like the silver ewer and basin, like the Sultan's diamond star that my mother wore on family occasions, were vital emblems of continuity in a childhood without fixed landmarks. Few of these were still left: some embossed volumes of Nicholas Karamzin's history of Russia, an icon or two on the wall above my parents' bed. Sometimes these objects turned up in family photographs. I still remember the pleasure I got as a child from discovering that a piece of jewellery my mother wore was to be seen in a photograph of my grandmother Natasha taken seventy years before. It was as if the little pearl and diamond brooch had flown free of its amber imprisonment in the photograph, vaulting all the time between me and her.

I heard very little Russian as a child: my father did not speak it at home. I went with him to the Russian church in the cities where I grew up – New York, Toronto, Ottawa, Belgrade, Paris, Geneva and London – and I was moved by the service because I did not understand it. Standing beside him in the church, watching him light his candles, say his prayers and sing in his deep vibrating voice, I always felt that he had slipped away through some invisible door in the air. Yet he kept his distance from the Russian émigré community, from their factional intrigues and antediluvian politics. He presented himself to the world throughout my childhood as the model of an assimilated Canadian professional. And to this day he is a much more patriotic and sentimental Canadian than I am. For him Canada was the country that gave him a new start. For me, being a Canadian was just one of those privileges I took for granted.

Father often met Soviet diplomats in his work and they always spoke Russian together. Yet the meetings were edgy. I remember one Soviet diplomat, dressed like a Zürich banker with a large black onyx ring on his finger, being introduced to both of us in a lobby of the United Nations building in New York. He doffed his astrakhan and in a great sweeping gesture said in English, ‘As the son of a peasant I salute you.' Other Soviets treated the family past with the same mixture of respect and irony. In 1955, my father returned to the Soviet Union as part of an official Canadian delegation led by the Foreign Minister, Mike Pearson. The Soviet officials, led by Nikita Khrushchev himself, called my father
Graf
(Count) and took him aside and asked in all sincerity why he didn't come ‘home' again and continue the diplomatic work of his grandfather instead of serving the diplomacy of a small satellite state of the Americans. But my father didn't feel at home at all in the Soviet Union of the 1950s. Even the moments of memoried connection were brief, as when he was shown into his room at the Hotel Astoria in Leningrad, frozen in its pre-revolutionary decor, and saw on the writing desk two silver bears exactly like two little bears that had once stood on his father's desk in the same city forty years before. On that visit, he also realized how archaic his Russian sounded to Soviet citizens and how rusty it had become. He found himself stumbling in his native tongue.

Back home, family feeling on the Russian side was intense, but there were few actual occasions when we came together. Throughout my childhood, the Russian half of the family was scattered abroad. My father's eldest brother, Nicholas, had died in my childhood, and the remaining four were thousands of miles apart. When the brothers did come together for the wedding of my cousin Mika, we all made a little space for them apart and they sat on the couch, balding giants each over six feet tall, talking in Russian, while none of us understood a word. They had all married outside the Russian circle and so none of their children grew up in the Russian tongue. I never learned the language.