Keywords

The Revolution of 1917 caused the departure of a great many Russian families from their home country. This experience of exile is at the heart of a number of works of life-writing, the best known of which is probably Nabokov’s Speak Memory (2000), a dazzling account of the author’s Russian childhood and cosmopolitan youth. But exile is also the object of narratives written by the descendants of Russian migrants. Such is the case of The Russian Album, published by Michael Ignatieff in 1987. His narrative is a minute reconstruction of the lives of his grandparents, Paul and Natasha Ignatieff, based on their memoirs and photo albums.

Paul Ignatieff was the son of Nicholas Ignatieff, a prominent diplomat and statesman who worked in favour of Russia’s expansionist policy in the nineteenth century. He made a name for himself by signing the Treaty of Peking in 1860 and went on to become Minister of the Interior. Following in his father’s footsteps, Paul Ignatieff became Minister of Education in Nicolas II’s government where, contrary to his reactionary father, he—unsuccessfully—tried to advocate liberal reforms. He and his wife Natalia Mestchersky were forced to leave Russia in 1917; they fled to France with their children, before reaching Great Britain and settling, ten years later, in Melbourne, Canada. Many years later, in the 1980s, their grandson and Canadian-born Michael Ignatieff undertook to write the story of their lives.

The Russian Album is remarkable for the crucial importance it gives to family pictures in its exploration of the past. Evoked through minute ekphrastic descriptions, they are also physically present, for some of them, in a kind of miniature tipped-in family album located in the middle of the book. Their role, which goes beyond the decorative or merely illustrative function they are usually limited to, illustrates Marianne Hirsch’s claim that, following the democratization of photography with the invention of the Kodak at the end of the nineteenth century, “the camera has become the family’s primary instrument of self-knowledge and self-representation—the primary means by which family memory is perpetuated, by which the family’s story is told” (Hirsch 1999, xvi).

The presence of photographs in autobiographies and memoirs raises a number of formal and theoretical questions related to their mode of presence (are they merely described or also reproduced? If so how?) and their relationship to the text they accompany. Do text and image coalesce to produce meaning or do images produce a kind of silent counter-discourse? Is there a resistance of images to text or vice versa? What kind of silent tug-of-war is at play? Another question that emerges in the case of life-writing is the type of memory work pictures perform, the relationship to the past they implicitly build.

The Russian Album’s approach to these questions reflects the narrator’s conflicted relationship with his roots. Looking back two generations earlier and before, Ignatieff’s work investigates the meaning of memory and identity for younger generations dealing with the traumas experienced by their parents and grandparents. The narrator’s deep desire to know his past is here matched by his conjoined fear of being claimed by it. This ambivalence underlies the relationship between text and images in The Russian Album: pictures are presented as the matrix of the book; the narrator also exhibits a deep trust in them as an archival material that will help him recover, understand and come to terms with a vanished past. His use of family photographs, however, reflects an awareness of their limits and a fear of their latent power that ultimately lead him to hold them in check and to reassert the primacy of words.

1 Migration, Exile and Dispossession

1.1 Photography’s Silent Call

Ignatieff’s literary enterprise arises from a bitter sense of loss, the need to reconnect the scattered fragments of a family story shattered by exile and to come to terms with a multicultural identity: “This century has made migration, expatriation and exile the norm, rootedness the exception. […] If the continuity of our own selves is now problematic, our connection with family ancestry is yet more in question” (1). In this context of dislocation and rootlessness, photographs play a crucial anchoring role; they are depicted as the highly valuable relics of a vanished past that have survived the experience of exile: “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 locating the identity of the living in time” (2). The religious metaphor reflects their capacity to transcend time and space’s alienating effects and to enshrine some kind of truth: photographs are the repository of family identity, the place where the individual must go back to understand who he is and where he comes from.

The sacred dimension of these family pictures can also be read as an effect of their “auratic” value. As Walter Benjamin explains, analysing the decline of the cult value of images that followed the rise of mechanical forms of reproduction, family portraits remained imbued with a moving, elusive quality:

In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. (Benjamin 2007, 225–226)

Benjamin’s definition of the aura as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be” (Benjamin 2007, 222) echoes the complex emotions that the narrator experiences before old family pictures; his ancestors are described as both strikingly real and irretrievably unreachable, “distant as stars” (7).

While the first chapter suggests that the narrator’s quest was impelled by a number of factors, family pictures are however foregrounded as the very source of the narrative: “Our grandparents stare 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” (1–2). This startling evocation of family photographs echoes Emmanuel Levinas’s reflections on the vulnerability of the human face and the ethical call emanating from it: “There is a command in the appearance of the face, as if a master were speaking to me. Yet, at the same time, the face of the other is destitute; it is the poor person for whom I can do everything and to whom I owe everything. And I, whoever I am, as the ‘first person’, am the one who finds the resources to respond to the call” (Levinas 1982, 83, my translation).Footnote 1

The narrator feels indeed summoned by the mute call of these fragile, silent faces. Delving into the memoirs written by his grandparents, Natasha and Paul, he quickly realizes that they are unpublishable as such and sets out to give them a voice: “I decided […] to retell their story in my own words” (14). The narrator thus becomes a vessel for a past that is expecting to be told, the connecting point between past and present (14). He takes on the task implicitly set forth by his ancestors and embarks on an attempt to restore, through a narrative, the continuity threatened by exile and displacement:

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 begins to depart, it is up to me to pass on their remembering to whoever comes after. (20)

Thus, while his undertaking has to do with a search for identity and self-knowledge, the need to locate a self through its roots and trace a lineage, it is also impelled by a powerful ethical impulse, a deep-seated sense of indebtedness to his grandparents and to a vanishing past.

1.2 Writing Through Images

Photographs do not only provide the narrator with the initial impetus to write; they also show him how to write. One of the difficulties the narrator finds himself faced with when he starts his project is to decide upon an appropriate form. As he soon discovers, a historical, objective approach would cause his grandfather to slip away into abstraction: “In the process of finding him as an exemplary imperial character, I lost him as my grandfather” (15). But the opposite, a fictional recreation would be inadequate too, as it would result in a form of betrayal. Pictures help him solve the problem of how to write about the past: “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 physicality and as distant as stars. In recreating them as truthfully as I could, I had to respect the distance between us” (16).

In a manner that echoes Barthes’s method in Camera Lucida (1981), affects provide the narrator with the right angle to approach the past.Footnote 2 The source of The Russian Album is an emotion, the shock of an encounter with an image which the rest of the text will have to stay true to if it is to give an ethically and aesthetically satisfactory representation of it. Pictures’ paradoxical mode of presence offers a programmatic starting point that his narrative will have to emulate in its recreation of his ancestors. Making this choice, the narrator also acknowledges the limits of his undertaking: he understands that he must not try to abolish the distance between him and his object; the past will always remain out of reach.

1.3 Photography and Postmemory

Ignatieff’s enterprise of reconstruction of an elusive past that obsesses him can be understood as an instance of what Marianne Hirsch describes as “postmemory”:

In my reading, postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. […] Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated. I have developed this notion in relation to children of Holocaust survivors, but I believe it may usefully describe other second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences. (Hirsch 1997, 22)

One of the characteristics of postmemory, as defined by Hirsch, is the central role played by imagination, which is often called upon to make up for the gaps in memory: “Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch 1997, 22). Ignatieff’s memoir is a work of reconstruction that relies on documentary evidence but also on hypotheses. The truth remains elusive: “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” (20). Ignatieff’s project is thus marked by its fundamental fragility and an awareness of its precarious basis.

This fragility is increased by the variety of the visual sources of the narrative. While the main source is of course the family albums, those of Peggy Meadowcroft, the governess, also play a significant role. Later pictures representing the family members as adults and pictures taken during the narrator’s journey to Kroupodernitsa are also included. These multiple sources complexify the visual/textual narrative, occasionally creating tensions or contradictions.

2 Conjuring Up the Past and Coming to Terms with It: The Uses of Photography

A question which often arises about hybrid works of life-writing is that of the relative importance given to the visual medium and the latent hierarchy that governs text-image relationships. The pictures that accompany biographies, memoirs and autobiographies traditionally serve a purely illustrative function, lending more vividness to the text and fleshing out the characters at the heart of the narrative. While Paul’s and Natasha’s memoirs no doubt provide the informational backbone of the narrative, Ignatieff’s text is striking for the crucial role it ascribes to pictures however. Long descriptions of photographs included in the central album and more fleeting references to other family pictures are woven into the text in a manner that seems to challenge traditional text-image hierarchies. Pictures actually guide the narrator’s investigation, his inquiry into the past.

The pictures described and/or reproduced in the book can be said to perform three functions that serve the narrative’s complex, ambivalent goals: as historical documents, they bring back the past with remarkable accuracy; as personal material, they serve a revelatory function, shedding light on family secrets and allowing the narrator to come to terms with painful submerged episodes; but as elegiac tokens of a vanished age, they also emphasize the irrecoverable dimension of the past, thus inviting the narrator to put it at a distance.

2.1 Conjuring Up a Vanished Past

The ethical concern that underlies Ignatieff’s work expresses itself in his constant attempt to record the past and delineate his ancestors with the greatest possible accuracy. Pictures are therefore foregrounded as a material that can help him grasp an elusive past.

Photographs are thus relentlessly scrutinized for information about his ancestors’ way of life: “I search the photographs of Doughino, prowl through the rooms with my magnifying glass” (27). The sentence is followed by a long ekphrasis that conjures up the splendour of a vanished past. The artwork and furniture of the room, dominated by the statue of Nikita Panin, the family’s glorious ancestor, capture the family’s elegant aristocratic lifestyle and testify about its status. Photography brings back a lost world: doors are open and a quill pen lies on a table as if the room’s inhabitants were shortly to return. The insistent lexical field of light and reflection that transfigures the description of the picture echoes the sacred dimension attributed to family photographs in the initial chapter: “The parquet gleams in the light; a shadow cast by the curtained light from the windows streams across a room. […] I see the reflection of a white Corinthian column in the sheen of a mahogany table” (27).

Doubly present, through minute descriptions but also through reproductions (central album, page 4),Footnote 3 pictures authenticate the narrative and anchor, through material details, a world that has disappeared. The narrator thus makes the most of the referential and documentary dimension of family photographs, illustrating Adams’s claim in Light Writing and Life Writing that because “photography operates as a visual supplement (illustration) and a corroboration (verification) […], photographs may help to establish, or at least reinforce, autobiography’s referential dimension” (Adams 2000, xxi). While Ignatieff’s work is not an autobiography but a memoir, the same referential agenda is at work here.

Interestingly, the family albums also fulfil a documentary function through their very exclusions: the peasants who are a crucial part of the country’s agrarian economy almost never appear in the pictures: “They were another world beyond the gates. Only one photograph in the family album shows peasants in the frame” (38). Pictures define the limits of Natasha’s world, what was deemed worth recording on the eve of the First World War. Servants are by contrast visible in the pictures taken in 1915 by Peggy Meadowcroft, the family governess; described in Chap. 5, these pictures are also visible in the central album on pages 7 and 8: “Peggy Meadowcroft’s album is full of pictures from that Easter at the estate: the thatched cottages of the village, the family retainers, Sessoueff and Rudnitsky, standing stiffly beneath the tree in the dusty village square with their children and barefoot wives raged around them; Vassilief, the groom, with two new foals; […]” (98). The family’s and the governess’s albums thus weave two mutually exclusive visual narratives that foreshadow the clashes that were to tear apart Russian society two years later.

Psychological truth also emerges as one of the narrator’s main concerns in his attempt to recapture the past. The ekphrasis woven around the picture of Natasha’s parents (included in the central album on page 2) is a case in point: “Only one photograph remains of Natasha’s mother and father. […] He is bending to graze his wife’s hand with his lips. His eyes gaze at her devotedly. She does not spare him a glance. She stares out at the camera, massive, stout and ugly […]” (22). The picture and its faithful description eloquently sum up the personality of his great-grandparents and the distribution of power in the couple. The ekphrasis then expands into a moral portrait of Natasha’s formidable mother, a domineering woman presiding over the destinies of those around her (22–3), whose husband is unsurprisingly described as “a patriarch ruled by others” (23). The portrait, while impelled by the picture, is presumably documented by Natasha’s memoir. Sources merge to provide a significant whole; what comes from one or the other is difficult to tell but, in a characteristic manner, it is the picture which is presented as the seed, the seminal element which sets off the description, allowing the narrative to grow and move forward. The narrative thus exhibits a great faith in the ability of pictures to bring back what seemed to have vanished forever and to yield the truth about ancestors.

Behind the documentary and psychological dimensions surfaces the question of identity in relation to time. The pictures of Doughino mentioned above reflect a sense of temporal depth and continuity: portraits of ancestors cover the walls and the library shelves are lined with the three volumes of the History of Russia written by Karamazin, one of Natasha’s ancestors. These volumes, described as Natasha’s talismans, are some of the few relics she takes away with her in exile (26–7). Even more to the point, pictures give back ancestors in their now lost physical presence, not as mere abstractions, suggesting, through family resemblances such as “the pucker of [an] upper lip” (46),Footnote 4 the weight of lineage, and thus helping the subject trace his identity back in time. As Linda Haverty Rugg notes, “photographs as physical evidences re-anchor the subject in the physical world, insist on the verifiable presence of an embodied and solid individual” (Rugg 1997, 2). The question of legacy is a central one in a text which stages a politician looking at ancestors who were themselves involved in politics. Uncanny repetitions in Paul and his father’s political careers are highlighted (108), clearly revealing the need to identify some form of continuity through time. In a narrative characterized by its uncertainty (26), photography is thus used as evidence; pictures are invested with a very powerful documentary dimension, as if the past were enclosed, embalmed in them.

2.2 Uncovering Family Secrets

Ignatieff’s memoir is also an attempt to untangle a painful family history and the complex dynamics, often resulting from historical upheavals, underpinning his grandparents’ relationships. The text thus captures the effect of public events on private lives, laying bare family secrets kept out of sight. Some of the pictures commented on in the narrative actually come from the family governess’s photo albums. These pictures operate in a contrapuntal way, shedding light on muted conflicts.

As Pierre Bourdieu points out, family photographs play a central role in reinforcing the integration of the group by strengthening the perception it has of itself: “photographic practice exists and subsists for most of the time by virtue of its family function, or rather by the function conferred upon it by the family group, namely that of solemnising and immortalizing the high points of family life, in short, of reinforcing the integration of the family group by reasserting the sense that it has both of itself and of its unity” (Bourdieu et al. 1990, 19). Marianne Hirsch also notes that pictures, while apparently simply recording moments in the family history, actually help maintain an “imaginary cohesion” that perpetuates “familial myths” (Hirsch 1997, 7). A family picture taken at Misdroy, a German resort on the Baltic, which is both described in the text (88) and included in the book (central album, page 6), thus projects the image of a privileged and united family: the parents are holding their children lovingly, the boys are wearing impeccable sailor suits, and the family’s devoted servants are smiling.

And yet, a careful study of what Hirsch calls “the optical relations” at work in less official pictures, not displayed in the selection but nonetheless described by the narrator, allows family secrets to surface. Photographs, Hirsch explains, can in fact be analysed as “sites at which numerous looks and gazes intersect” (those of the photographer, the subjects of the picture and the viewer) (Hirsch 1999, xvi). The play of looks exchanged between subjects and photographer in the holiday pictures taken by Peggy Meadowcroft captures the undercurrent of attraction flowing between Paul and her: “His gaze seems to bask in hers” (90). Conversely, Natasha, then pregnant, seems to avoid Peggy’s probing camera eye: “Natasha’s averted gaze flickers with a sense of invaded privacy” (90).Footnote 5

As Serge Tisseron explains in his work on family secrets, the unsayable is often conveyed through body language: “what is not said in words is always said in other ways, through gestures, attitudes, facial expressions… Human beings in fact resort primarily to their bodies to give themselves a representation of what they are experiencing, and this is why the body is the privileged space for the staging of the unspeakable” (Tisseron 2022, 4, my translation).Footnote 6 Some of this silent body language is captured by photography.

The question of who is behind the camera also reveals a lot about the dynamics of the family unit, the imbalance of power within the family circle. Quite strikingly, Peggy’s visual narrative takes over as the narrator’s main source of information during the First World War, reflecting her disturbing ascendency in the family and the slow dislocation at its centre.

In a narrative in which images weave a silent narrative, absences are also fraught with meaning. Paul’s erasure from the private sphere of the family album reflects the devouring demands of his public life: “There are no pictures of him [Paul] during this period. He had been swept out of the family frame altogether by the final convulsions of the regime” (103). Paul’s absence takes on an even darker meaning a year later: Peggy’s photographs of the family’s summer in the Caucasus keep out of sight a man consumed by his feeling of failure: “In her family album there are several pictures of the three oldest boys in Cossack caps eating sandwiches while perched on rocks in a steep canyon at the edge of town. But back at the villa, Paul sat slumped in a deck chair on the veranda locked in his depression” (120). Discussing the meaning of the off-frame in films and photography, Christian Metz analyses it as “another form of death” (1985, 87) “an irreversible absence, a place from which the look has been averted forever” (87). Paul’s then unutterable condition is thus kept off-frame in most pictures.Footnote 7 It is only retrospectively, in his grandson’s memoir, that it assumes its full significance.

Pictures thus become the silent mirror of a fractured relationship damaged in part by the constant impingement of politics upon family life. At the end of their lives, his grandparents are reconciled but not close: “In the photographs, they always stand a distance apart” (162), a remark rather aptly illustrated by a picture included in the central album on which they appear slightly distant (14). Pictures hint at what is left unsaid. They become the receptacle of family secrets, holding them veiled but ready to be uncovered by perceptive viewers. As Tisseron notes, “Secrets ‘ooze’ … […] [P]oorly healed psychic wounds result in visible manifestations, just like physical wounds” (Tisseron 2022, 20, my translation).Footnote 8

2.3 Relics of a Lost World: Photography and Mourning

At the same time as photographs document the past, bringing it back with great accuracy, they also emphasize its irrecoverable dimension, the definite break brought about by historical upheavals. As noted by Susan Sontag, they allow the viewer to get a glimpse of the past and simultaneously show it as over: “A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence” (Sontag 2002, 16); “[p]hotographs (…) transmut[e], in an instant, present into past, life into death” (Sontag 2002, 70).

Retrospectively, some pictures acquire the status of testimonies, remainders not just of a lost past but a lost world. Such is the case of a ceremonial picture of Natasha taken during the 300th anniversary of the Romanoff dynasty in 1913, shortly after her presentation to the Empress: “Immediately afterwards Natasha was ushered before the photographers set up in an adjacent room of the Winter Palace, and there in a puff of magnesium flare, she was fixed unblinkingly in the amber of another world” (87). Taken on the brink of war and disaster for the imperial family, the photograph (included in the central album on page 10) becomes retrospectively laden with symbolic significance.

Pictures are synonymous with loss in The Russian Album. They are the only belongings one keeps when one has to leave everything behind, as the example of Natasha, leaving Doughino forever after her mother’s funeral with a photograph album (73),Footnote 9 then fleeing the Revolution with her albums in her trunk, shows (118). Yet, the narrator’s repeated emphasis on the pastness of the past is by no means meant to be perceived as nostalgic or melancholy. It is part of a process that is meant to assign it a clear position and let it rest forever. As Christian Metz explains, photography “by virtue of the objective suggestions of its signifier (stillness, again) maintains the memory of the dead as being dead” (84). Because it helps the subject to love the object as dead, it plays a central role in the mourning process. Mourning must of course be understood metaphorically here, as a way to come to terms with an ever-present past that keeps making claims upon the subject.

The happy moments captured in August 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the war in Russia, are a case in point: “In the photographs the girls are all wearing bright floral pinafores and floppy white hats against the sun. The boys are in sailor suits with short pants and straw boaters. […] the poplars lining the long drives flickered with sunlight. […] The photographs from that holiday are full of small happy faces out of focus” (92). While the vividness and precision of the descriptions try to fix those moments forever, their disappearance seems in a way already inscribed in the blurred surface of the image.Footnote 10 As Walter Benjamin explains, picture viewers always look for the unexpected imprint of history in pictures, thus complexifying their temporal significance:

No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. (Benjamin 1999, 510)

In Ignatieff’s memoir, the narrator’s tendency to see the signs of an impending disaster in the pictures taken on the brink of war or the revolution can be read as a way to emphasize the irrecoverability of the past: loss does not simply follow happy moments; it is already inscribed within them.

3 Locating a Self: Photography Under Control

This need to assign a clear place to the past reflects the narrator’s conflicted relationship to his family photographs. While pictures are foregrounded throughout as a crucial material in the narrator’s reconstruction of the past, the text also expresses an awareness of their limits and a fear of their latent power.

3.1 Memory and Photography

In a very striking passage, Ignatieff draws an opposition between memory and photography which underscores the limits of the latter and points out the crucial importance of narratives: “Photography stops time and serves it to us in disjunctive fragments. Memory integrates the visual within a weave of myth. […] Memory heals the scars of time. Photography documents the wounds” (7). While memory converts oblivion and remembrance into a seamless text that reflects the subject’s self-image, photographs are bound up with loss, they pierce us with their blunt presence signifying loss and absence; they must therefore be sewn together by a narrative, integrated into a memory text.

Moreover, the threat of meaninglessness hovers over pictures, making the work of narrative reconstruction even more pressing: “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” (5). Ignatieff’s remarks echo Kracauer’s reflections on photography and its opposition to memory-images in a very striking way:

The old photograph has been emptied of the life whose physical presence overlay its merely spatial configuration. In inverse proportion to photographs, memory-images enlarge themselves into monograms of the remembered life. The photograph is the sediment that has settled from the monogram, and from year to year its semiotic value decreases. The truth content of the original is left behind in its history; the photograph captures only the residuum that history has discharged. (Kracauer 1993, 429)

This threat of meaninglessness may explain why pictures are not allowed to stand on their own in Ignatieff’s memoir; they are always accompanied by a brief, factual caption and converted into detailed verbal descriptions. Photographs are fragile fragments that must be brought together and cemented by a narrative. They are never juxtaposed to the text, but always woven into it.

3.2 Narration as Self-definition

Photographs must also be held in check because of the limits they can set to the subject’s freedom, to what he wants to be: “We need them but we don’t want to be claimed by them” (4). The whole book shows Ignatieff’s ambivalent relationship to his own past: he is both deeply drawn to it, impelled by a need to recover it, and at the same time afraid of being defined by it. A resistance expressed, for instance, in his incapacity to learn Russian (12).

The photographs shown to the reader are therefore inserted in a visual narrative that reflects the narrator’s appropriation of his past. The album in the middle includes a nineteenth-century press cutting about his glorious ancestor Nicholas Ignatieff, pictures from the family albums and from Peggy Meadowcroft’s albums, but also pictures of him taken during his journey as an adult to Ukraine, while he was researching the book. This multiplicity of sources is a way to disrupt the grip of the past, and avoid any form of fetishization, while the inclusion of pictures of the narrator can be read as a way to write himself into the story, position himself as a subject and not just as a passive vessel passing on his grandparents’ life story. The photo album in the middle is thus a kind of personal statement: the pictures of the past are integrated into a visual narrative that also tells us about the narrator’s present self. Binding past and present is crucial here; the past must make sense in the present, for the writing subject.

The whole memoir, like the tipped-in photo album, is actually intended as an assertion of the narrator’s personal freedom: “My identity is a matter of choosing the words I put on the page” (9). Words do not reflect a pre-existing self; they bring it into being in a performative way. Asserting the power of his own narrative is Ignatieff’s way of positioning himself as an autonomous, multicultural self that acknowledges his roots but is not defined by them and claims instead a multiplicity of geographical strata and identity layers: “I do not believe in roots. […] I am the grandchild of [Natasha’s] uprooting, the descendant of her dispossession. I am an expatriate Canadian writer who married an Englishwoman and makes his home overlooking some plane trees in a park in north London. That is my story and I make it up as I go along” (184). The narrator’s last sentence echoes Paul Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity, which sees narration as the only way to reconcile the paradox of change and sameness at the heart of personal identity; answering the question “who” can only be done by telling the story of a life (442). Applying his analysis to the genre of autobiography, Ricoeur goes on to argue that identity is produced (and not merely reflected) by these personal narratives: “The story of a life keeps being refigured by all the true or fictitious stories that a subject tells about himself. This refiguration turns life into a fabric made up of the stories we tell about it”Footnote 11 (Ricoeur 1985, 443, my translation).

3.3 Laying the Past to Rest

Ignatieff’s version of postmemory reflects the complexity of contemporary subjects’ approaches to memory, the need to acknowledge it, identify oneself as part of a lineage and, at the same time, the fear of being claimed by it and the will to assert oneself as a free, independent individual unfettered by family links. Family pictures are caught in the narrator’s complex negotiation with his legacy; a tension between text and image, voice and photography, runs throughout the text, reflecting the narrator’s conflicted relationship to his past. The inclusion of family photographs may at first sight appear as a nostalgic attempt to bring back a vanished time; his use of photography as a way to shed light on family secrets and as a mourning device that puts the past at a distance clearly shows, however, that his relationship to the latter is a careful, analytical one. Because they embody the past’s most intense affective claims, images must ultimately be held in check as Ignatieff’s additions to the family album and insistence on his wish for self-determination through narration suggest.

Two striking scenes express this need to put the past at a distance. In Chap. 9, during his visit to his uncle Dima (Vladimir), the narrator discovers his grandmother Natasha’s trunk in the attic. The antique piece of luggage, overlaid with inscriptions and stickers added at the different stages of her exile, is described as “the source of all we became in Canada”:

everything from that other life which has haunted me since childhood was in this trunk, the icons, the embossed volumes of Karamzin’s history, the square silver basin and the ewer in which my great-grandmother used to wash her hands every morning at Doughino, the photograph albums, the Sultan’s stars. All of this has flowed from the trunk down the branching capillaries of a family that now stretches out from here to Australia, to England, to New Mexico and that still has branches, unknown, on Russian soil. (180)

This discovery appears as a moment of recognition that authorizes the narrative by allowing Natasha’s grandson to come face to face with the origins of his own self. Interestingly, the trunk is now “quite empty” (179), its relics and attendant memories shared among its descendants, thus sparing the narrator a confrontation with a congealed, fetishized past or a mythified fatherland. The water metaphor describes the past instead as a fluid, nurturing presence that has flowed in many directions, thus echoing at the larger family level the narrator’s own multicultural self described above.

This confrontation with the source of the narrative is mirrored by a reverse scene in which the narrator symbolically puts a final stop to his quest. The “Afterword”, in which he discovers that, because of the Revolution of 1917, his great-grandmother and his great aunt Katia were not properly buried, and therefore asks for gravestones to be cut is highly significant: doing so, the narrator brings to completion the ethical task he had set himself with the book, but he also lays his ancestors to rest forever in what is both a gesture of loyalty and an assertion of personal freedom.