Ignatieff family. - The Russian Album

PENGUIN CELEBRATIONS

THE RUSSIAN ALBUM

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF is a writer, historian, and politician. His many books include Scar Tissue, nominated for the Booker Prize; Blood and Belonging, winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize; and The Russian Album, winner of the Governor Generals Award. Until 2000, he was a professor at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and since 2006 has been member of Parliament for Etobicoke-Lakeshore, Toronto. Mr. Ignatieff is the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

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First published in a Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1987
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada),
a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1988, 1995, 2006
Published in this edition, 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright Michael Ignatieff, 1987

Portions of this book first appeared, some in different form, in Granta, the Observer magazine,
the History Workshop Journal and Harpers.

The Acknowledgements on pp. 24344 constitute a continuation of this copyright page.

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ISBN: 978-0-14-317165-2

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FOR THEO AND HIS GRANDFATHER

in what shape

was it we first perceived itthe unstanched

hereditary thing, working its way

along the hollows of the marrow?

Amy Clampitt What the Light Was Like

Dwell on the past and youll lose an eye.

Ignore the past and youll 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 luckywe survivedand 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 fathers son, his grandmothers 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, Georges 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 someones 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