The Russian Album
by Michael Ignatieff
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Winner of the Royal Society of Literature AwardIn The Russian Album, Michael Ignatieff chronicles five generations of his Russian family, beginning in 1815. Drawing on family diaries, on the contemplation of intriguing photographs in an old family album, and on stories passed down from father to son, he comes to terms with the meaning of his family's memories and histories. Focusing on his grandparents, Count Paul Ignatieff and Princess Natasha Mestchersky, he recreates their lives before, show more during, and after the Russian Revolution. show lessTags
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A moving memoir of the Russian ancestors of the author, who has written and presented programmes for the BBC and Channel 4. I have read other memoirs of this type and, as ever, one is struck by the discontinuity and dislocation of the revolution and the feeling that the world would never be the same, whether better or worse depending on one's view of the past, station in society, and attitude towards the future of Russian society, notwithstanding the appalling acts carried out by both Reds and Whites in the Civil War. A very human book also, with interesting and thought provoking things to say about the nature of real and constructed genealogical memory.
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Author Information
52+ Works 3,306 Members
Michael Ignatieff, born in Toronto in 1947. But at the age of 11, Ignatieff was sent to Toronto to attend Upper Canada College as a boarder in 1959. At UCC, Ignatieff was elected a school prefect as Head of Wedd's House, was the captain of the varsity soccer team, and served as editor-in-chief of the school's yearbook. As well, Ignatieff show more volunteered for the Liberal Party during the 1965 federal election by canvassing the York South riding. He resumed his work for the Liberal Party in 1968, as a national youth organizer and party delegate for the Pierre Elliott Trudeau party leadership campaign. He then went on to continue his education at the University of Toronto and Harvard and Cambridge universities. In 1976, Ignatieff completed his Ph.D in History at Harvard University. He was granted a Cambridge M.A. by incorporation in 1978 on taking up a fellowship at King's College there. Michael Ignatieff has written television programs for the BBC, novels, and works of nonfiction. He has also authored essays and reviews for several publications including The New York Times. From 1990-93, he wrote a weekly column on international affairs for The Observer. His family memoir, The Russian Album, received Canada's Governor General Award in 1988. His second novel, Scar Tissue, was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1993. Other nonfiction works include A Just Measure of Pain, the Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution and the Warrior's Honor: Ethic War and the Modern Conscience. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Awards and Honors
Awards
Distinctions
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1987 (1st American edition, New York, Viking) (1st American edition, New York, Viking)
- People/Characters
- Ignatieff family; Michael Ignatieff
- Important places
- Russian Empire; Belarus; Ukraine
- Epigraph
- ...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' - Dedication
- For Theo and his grandfather
- First words
- No one I know lives in the house where they grew up or even in the town or village where they once were children.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)There and then, the priest and his wife, and the sexton and his wife, who had come along too, began singing the pannihida, and in the damp darkness, with the blue icon's lamp light glittering on the tombs of my family, they sang the words which end the Orthodox service for the dead -- Eternal Memory, Eternal Memory Grant Him O Lord -- and I felt, as tears finally came, that I had laid to rest at last not only my Russian ancestors but my father as well.
- Original language
- English
- Disambiguation notice
- 1st American edition (1987): The Russian album / Michael Ignatieff
Classifications
- Genres
- Biography & Memoir, Nonfiction, History, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 947.65 — History & geography History of Europe Russia and neighboring east European countries Moldova, Transnistria [Belarus now 947.8]
- LCC
- CT1217 .I38 .I38 — Auxiliary Sciences of History Biography Biography National biography
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 188
- Popularity
- 173,319
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.75)
- Languages
- 6 — Dutch, English, French, German, Russian, Spanish
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 23
- ASINs
- 1
