The Russian Album

Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Award

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, during, and after the Russian Revolution.

A fascinating portrait of turn-of-the-century Russia emerges from an historian's account of his ancestors' lives.

Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Award

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, during, and after the Russian Revolution.

Publishers Weekly

As minister of education, Count Paul Ignatieff, the author's grandfather, resigned out of disgust from Czar Nicholas II's cabinet. A liberal, he tried to preserve statesmanlike traditions, but an increasingly reactionary regime stifled him. With the 1917 revolution he went into exile. While his wife Natasha cared for their five sons in England, then in Canada, the count immersed himself in White Russian emigre politics in Paris. The couple's reunion is one of the touching moments in this family history. The author, an expatriate Canadian living in London, combed family memoirs and made two trips to the Soviet Union to track down material on four generations of his aristocratic ancestors. He is not proud of his great-grandfather Nikolai, an imperial ambassador who persecuted Jews and plotted against the Ottoman Empire, yet he hides nothing. His painfully honest search for roots leads him to the realization, ``You make yourself with your own hands, here and now.'' (August 10)

Michael Ignatieff is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, among other publications, and the author of many acclaimed books, including Blood and Belonging, Isaiah Berlin, Virtual War, The Warrior's Honor, The Needs of Strangers, and The Russian Album. He lives in London and Cambridge, Massachusetts.