Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Poring over his grandparents' memoirs, grainy photographs of his distinguished ancestors and relating family lore passed from father to son, Michael Ignatieff begins a moving journey to come to terms with his inheritance that is bound up with the violent tumult of Russian history.With great care and complexity, Ignatieff reconstructs a vanished way of life. Beginning in the opulent court of Catherine the Great, he traces his family's rise to great influence in the imperial regime of Tsar Nicholas II before the country is swept up in revolution, civil war and exile. A profound meditation on rootlessness and belonging, The Russian Album explores both how we are formed by our pasts, but also how we must write our own stories in the present.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 382
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
vfor theo and his grandfather
… in what shape
was it we first perceived it—the unstanched
hereditary thing, working its way
along the hollows of the marrow…?
amy clampitt‘what the light was like’
Contents
Ignatieff and Mestchersky Family Tree
ix
Preface to the Second Edition
In 1987, when this book was first published, Ukraine was still a province of the Soviet empire. In 2023, as this new edition appears, an independent Ukraine is fighting for its freedom, against an unprovoked Russian invasion of savage brutality.
For an émigré family like mine, with roots in both countries, war has forced us to reckon with realities that our family histories did not face truthfully. My great-grandparents built an estate in Ukraine and lived there from the 1860s until the Russian Revolution. They are buried in a small Russian Orthodox church, in a village called Kroupodernitsa in Russian and Krupoderyntsi in Ukrainian, on the banks of the river Ros, three hours southwest of Kyiv. Their son, my grandfather, farmed the rich black soil there in the 1890s. After 1905, he became civilian governor of Kyiv and two of my uncles were born in the city. In exile after the Revolution, my grandfather sometimes sang his children mournful songs in Ukrainian. My family believed Ukraine was part of Russia, but they understood it was a place all its own, with its own language and traditions. Loving the land and the people as they did, they could not conceive of themselves as imperial occupiers. Now, descendants like me must reckon with our family’s role in a history of domination. xiv
This reckoning is complicated because the history of the two peoples is so deeply intertwined. The invasion ripped apart the fable that Russians and Ukrainians were one people, but it has also ripped apart the real lives that Russian and Ukrainian speakers built together, in my ancestors’ time, in the Soviet period and in the Ukraine that became independent after 1991.
Once Ukraine fully regains its land and its freedom, as it must, the country will have to deal with its Russian heritage and those Russian landmarks that dot its landscape.
Will that Russian Orthodox church in Krupoderyntsi, once protected as a monument of the Ukrainian nation, be left to fall into ruin? Will other confessions take it over? Will anyone watch over our graves as priests and parishioners have done for a century? Will old Russian monuments be pulled down, as Catherine’s statue was toppled in Odesa? Having watched the Russians pulverize their heritage with missiles and artillery, Ukrainians have reason, when peace finally comes, to extinguish all traces of the invader.
Yet no one controls the past. It is a river, which if forced underground for a time, will always re-surface with a force that has a way of subverting the stories that nations tell themselves.
Once this terrible war is over, future historians will interpret the terrible events of the recent past in the context of what was done to Ukrainian language, heritage and traditions in the Soviet and Czarist periods. But will they also acknowledge the complex, real history of how Russian and Ukrainian speakers lived together both then and now? I still hope that one day Ukrainians will come to accept that those Russian graves of ours also belong to the heritage of a free and independent people.
January 2023
1
The Broken Path
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—we survived—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 2you 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 3before 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, ‘Still 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: ‘Anyone 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 4privilege 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—the mass pastime of family history—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 5done 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 6place 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.
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, 7almost 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 8subvert 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, 9
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. 10
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 11own. 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 12past 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 13photograph 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 14himself, 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 prerevolutionary 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.
In my inability to learn Russian, I can now see the extent of my resistance to a past I was at the same time choosing as my own. The myths were never forced upon me, so my resistance was directed not at my father or my uncles but rather at my own inner craving for these stories, at what seemed a weak desire on 15my part to build my little life upon the authority of their own. I wasn’t sure I had the right to the authority of the past and even if I did have the right, I didn’t want to avail myself of the privilege. Yet as one of my friends wryly says when I talk like this, no one ever gives up his privileges. So I used the past whenever I needed to, but with a guilty conscience. My friends had suburban pasts or pasts they would rather not talk about. I had a past of Tsarist adventurers, survivors of revolutions, heroic exiles. Yet the stronger my need for them, the stronger too became my need to disavow them, to strike out on my own. To choose my past meant to define the limits of its impingement upon me.
My father always said that I was more Mestchersky than Ignatieff, more like his mother than his father. Since he was more Ignatieff than Mestchersky, the statement underlined how complicated the ties of filiation really were between us. Inheritance is always as much a matter of anxiety as pride. If I was a Mestchersky what could I possibly make of myself? How could I ever master my temperament, that tightly strung bundle of fears and anxieties that seemed to have me locked in its grasp? From the beginning, the project of finding out about my past was connected to a struggle to master the anxiety of its influence.
I also found myself face to face with what I liked least about myself. My grandfather’s favourite phrase was, ‘Life is not a game, life is not a joke. It is only by putting on the chains of service that man is able to accomplish his destiny on earth.’ When Paul talked like this, my grandmother Natasha always used to mutter, ‘The Ignatieffs would make hell out of Paradise.’
Early on I learned that both my father and my uncle Nicholas had wanted to write a history of the family. My father had even 16been to Bulgaria to research the story of his grandfather’s role in the creation of Bulgaria after the Russian defeat of the Turks in the war of 1877–78. Nicholas had had similar ideas, but he was dead and his manuscripts lay in his widow’s basement. My father was a busy man and his project languished. So the idea of a history of the family had germinated: it was an idea I could bring to fruition if I wanted to. But I held back.
I was in my teens when I first read my grandparents’ memoirs. Beginning in September 1940 in a cottage in Upper Melbourne, Quebec, my grandmother Natasha typed out a stream of free associations, beginning with childhood on the estate, her marriage to my grandfather Paul Ignatieff, life in Petersburg, revolution, civil war and escape. She wrote in the English she had learned from her governess, in the English she knew her grandchildren would grow up speaking. When she got to 1919—when she got to the moment they left Russia—she stopped. Everything became harder then, harder to say and all the period in exile she left in silence. By then there were over 250 pages, a jumble that my aunt Florence sorted and retyped after her death.
My grandfather Paul had written his memoirs in Sussex and in Paris during the 1920s. He wrote in Russian and only much later translated them into English with the help of a Canadian friend. My grandmother’s recollections are a frank and faithful echo of the woman she was, put down just as she spoke in every meandering turn of phrase, but his dry, orderly and restrained prose was, or so I felt, an exercise in discretion and concealment. He confined himself to his official career, as gentleman farmer, governor of Kyiv province, deputy Minister of Agriculture and Minister of Education in the final Cabinet of the Tsar. It is a 17restrained public document. Emotion cracks through the shell of measured phrases just once, when he describes his last meeting with Nicholas II in the final days of the regime.
Their memoirs were unpublishable, hers because what made them so alive also made them unreadable, his because they so meticulously excluded the personal and because the events he described had been so exhaustively retold in the deluge of Tsarist memoir. I decided, nearly ten years ago now, to retell their story in my own words. As a historian, I thought my first task would be to locate them in their historical setting, to distance myself from them as members of my family and to treat them instead as historical specimens, as objects of study. It took me some time to realize the unintended consequences of this strategy. I can remember a moment during the early days of my research when I was reading the proceedings of a Russian land-reform commission of 1902, searching for a mention of the family estates through spools of faint microfilm. Since my grandfather was a local marshal of nobility, he had to write a report for the commission. It was the first time I had read something by him that was not addressed to his family: the memoirs, the letters I had read before all had us as their intended audience. In this little report he was suddenly a tiny figure in a historical setting. The irony was that the process of tracking him into his historical context did not make the contours of his character come into sharper relief. The reverse occurred. The more I came to know about him as a historical being—as a quite typical member of the liberal service gentry, as a non-party constitutional monarchist—the more he began to slip out of reach. The sharper I drew his definition as a historical being, the more blurred he became as my grandfather. As an object of historical knowledge 18he could only be grasped in the plural; as an object of desire, I sought him in his singularity. In the process of finding him as an exemplary imperial character, I lost him as my grandfather. The historical way of knowing the past is to place a figure in the background of serial time; I wanted the opposite, to make him present in simultaneous time with me. Yet I always knew that this was an impossible desire and that even a history of their lives was doomed to failure. I could never recreate the past as my uncles remembered it or hope to conciliate the quarrels between contending memories. Even today the brothers still argue heatedly about some things and I could not hope to establish who was right. Most of all, I could not hope to bring back Paul and Natasha. Even the simplest physical detail about them, how she moved the hair off her face, how he used to snap a book shut when he had read it, required acts of painstaking reconstitution for me; for my father these details were such simple primary memories he scarcely bothered to mention them. It soon became apparent that the only portrait I could hope to paint of Paul and Natasha would always be a crude sketch, a study in the unbridgeable distances between first and second generations. For a long time I thought that if a history was doomed to failure anyway, I should abandon history and turn my grandparents’ life into fiction. It was a tempting idea: my characters would be just sufficiently grounded in a real past to be authentic and yet they would do my bidding. They would wear my clothes, speak my lines, live out my dramas and fulfil my ambitions. In creating them I would create myself. In the end the idea of fiction foundered on the realization that such a novel would be peopled by characters neither real in themselves nor faithful to their originals. 19
It was years before I began to see Paul and Natasha apart from my needs for them. I learned that their lives were not an adventure that existed so that I could quarry them for meanings of my own. There were too many silences, too many things I could not know about them for me to ransack their experience for my purposes. Very slowly, it dawned on me that instead of them owing me the secret of my life, I owed them fidelity to the truth of the lives they had led. Fiction would have been a betrayal. I had to return and stay close to the initial shock of my encounter with their photographs: that sense that they were both present to me in all their dense physical actuality and as distant as stars. In recreating them as truthfully as I could, I had to respect the distance between us. I had to pay close attention to what they left unsaid; I had to put down a marker at the spots that had not been reclaimed by memory. I could not elide these silences by the artifice of fiction.
I went twice with my father to the Soviet Union to find their traces. There was a lot to find: until the fall of Khrushchev the folk drama of socialist reconstruction justified the levelling of palaces and the conversion of churches to printing plants or lumberyards. Only poverty and backwardness saved old buildings. A country too poor to replace them lived out the drama of the new in the tattered stage sets of the old. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the vandalism of Khrushchevian modernism produced a counter-reaction that reached back to national traditions untarnished by Communism. Now not just the great palaces and monasteries were regilded but anything with a patina of age began to reacquire authority. A new national past uniting pre- and post-1917 was constructed by artful elision of the revolution’s destructive work. As a result of this ironic and 20uneasy attempt to recuperate the Tsarist past, in some ways it is easier to find traces of a Tsarist family past in the Soviet Union than it is in the West. In the leafy shade of the cemetery of Novodevichy convent in Moscow, near the graves of Khrushchev and Stalin’s wife, we found the grave of the family renegade, Uncle Alyosha, who began his career as a Tsarist officer and ended it as a Red general. In Leningrad, we found the family house on Fourstatskaya street where my father had watched the first demonstrations of the February Revolution in 1917. It is now the Leningrad Palace of Marriages. In the ballroom where my grandmother once served tea, young couples were being married, one pair every ten minutes, by an imposing woman in a red ball gown and a sash of office. Downstairs in the schoolroom where my uncles used to take their lessons from their French tutor, Monsieur Darier, mothers with pins in their mouths were making last-minute adjustments to their daughters’ wedding dresses. And down a small back hallway, with dim portraits of Lenin on the wall and an Intourist calendar of scenes from a Crimean resort, my father found the room that had been his nursery.
In Kislovodsk, a south Caucasus spa town between the Black and Caspian Seas, one September afternoon, my father and I found the green gate of the garden in which stood the house he had lived in with his family during the civil war in 1917 and 1918. Several houses had been crammed into the garden since the family’s wretched years there, but there were still apple trees and poplars at the back, just as there were in 1918.
Yet the apparent ease with which we picked up the traces of the family past inside the Soviet Union proved deceptive. I remember suddenly feeling the unseen distances separating me 21from my past while standing in front of the Matisse paintings in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, all collected by Tsarist merchants before the First World War. For Russian visitors to the museum, the Matisses are a strange and discordant departure from the realism of Russian nineteenth-century genre painting; they are equally alien to the socialist realism that was to carry this tradition forward in the Soviet period. For Russians, the Matisses are thus fragments of modernism suspended out of reach of the European tradition that nurtured them. For us the Matisse paintings are the founding canvases of our very way of seeing. As I looked at the sunlit ateliers, the bright deck chair, the bowl of flowers, the woman in the lustrous blue dress and looked at the dates of their composition, 1910, 1911, 1912, I realized that they were collected by my grandparents’ generation. This generation was the first to have successfully resolved the old dilemma of whether Russians were a European or an Asian people. Natasha spoke and thought in German and English; her dentist was an American who lived in Dresden; she bought her lingerie in Nice; she had Lyle’s Golden Syrup for tea in her nursery. Paul was raised by French tutors and grew up thinking and speaking in French. Yet both were passionately attached to the religions, customs, smells, architecture, curses and chaos of their native land.
They travelled across an open frontier to countries whose painting, food and landscape they regarded as their own. Matisse’s Mediterranean light was as much their own as the eternal summer light of Petersburg. They were the first generation to reconcile their European and their Russian identities, and they were the last. A border of barbed wire, searchlights and gun emplacements has been sawed across a Europe they once believed stretched from Moscow to the Atlantic, and when I 22try to follow their footsteps across that frontier I am aware that I am entering a country that now seems more a strange new Asian empire than an old heartland of European culture. The distance that I now must try to cross between them and me is much more than the distance of time. It is the chasm marked by the no man’s land of barbed wire that divides European culture into two armed camps.
My Soviet guides were often unsettled by my estrangement from their native land. They wanted to help my search for connections, phoning local history museums to find the new names of streets we knew only from their original names in the 1914 edition of Baedeker’s guide to Russia, and helping us even to find the jails and interrogation rooms where my grandfather spent the loneliest hours of his life in 1918. The Soviet guides admired my father’s slightly old-fashioned Russian, so much softer and gentler in enunciation than their own, and they were puzzled but polite when I said I understood not a word of my father’s native tongue. There were a few sites that it was not possible to visit—Krupoderyntsi, the Ignatieff estate in the Ukraine where my great-grandfather and great-grandmother are buried, seemed to be off limits, though for reasons that were never explained. Yet the authorities sent a photographer to the village church and took pictures of the family graves, dressed with bouquets of fresh flowers. We were told the estate is now a village school. Of Doughino, the eighteenth-century estate near Smolensk where my grandmother grew up, there was no trace. It was burned to the ground in 1917. My father wept when he left Russia, and I left dry-eyed.
There must be something to the superstition that by returning to a place one can return in time to the self one once was in 23those places. My father was six when he left Russia in 1919, and his memories are few and indistinct. Yet he found a catharsis in returning, a rounding out of his life. For me, the trips to the Soviet Union redoubled my sense of the irrecoverable distance of my family past. But by a paradox that must be at the heart of writing itself, the more distant everything became, the more urgent it became to get the story down before the death of my father’s generation broke the last living links.
My father and his brothers gave me every kind of help but they could not conceal their misgivings. I was like an auctioneer sent to value their treasures for sale. Our long sessions together over the tape recorder were harbingers of their mortality. I often thought that it would be better if I left the project aside until they were safely dead and buried. Then I would be free to say it all. But what kind of freedom is that, the freedom to say everything one never dared to say in person? Who is not haunted by the silences, the missed chances for truth that slip between father and son, mother and daughter, the chances that slip finally into the grave? I do not want to miss my chance.
I have done my best to disentangle history from myth, fact from fancy, but in the end I cannot be sure of the truth, either of what happened or what is remembered. I wasn’t there. I can only register the impact of their struggle to remember: I can tell them the wave did reach the shore. Because Paul and Natasha managed to remember what they did and passed it on, I owe to them the conviction that my own life did not begin with my birth, but with hers and with his, a hundred years ago in a foreign land, and that now as the last of the generation who knew what life was like behind the red curtain of the revolution 24begins to depart, it is up to me to pass on their remembering to whoever comes after.
After all these years spent searching for their traces, I can hear their voices at last as if they were in the room. This is how Natasha began her memoirs, her first sentence:
‘I decide while I am still in my fresh mind to put down all dates and years of main episodes of our lives, my dear husband’s and mine, so that when we pass into eternity our sons and their families may have a picture more or less of interesting episodes of our lives, colourful lives, thanks to so many striking events and in the middle age of our lives tremendous upheavals we had to pass through and which left a totally different side of our further existence.’
