The Russian Album (3 page)

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 my 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 been 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 Kiev province, deputy Minister of Agriculture and Minister of Education in the final Cabinet of the Tsar. It is a restrained 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 he 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.

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 uneasy 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 from 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 try 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 – Kroupodernitsa, 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.