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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2023

In Search of a Lost Past: Family Photography and Postmemory in Michael Ignatieff’s The Russian Album

Résumé

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 memoirs, but also of narratives written by the descendants of Russian migrants. The Russian Album, published by Michael Ignatieff in 1987, offers a minute reconstruction of the lives of the author’s grandparents, Paul and Natacha Ignatieff, based on their memoirs and family photo albums. Ignatieff’s Russian Album is remarkable for the central role it gives to the family pictures, a selection of which can be found in the middle of the book. Their significance, which goes beyond the decorative or merely illustrative function they are usually limited to, illustrates Marianne Hirsch’s claim that in the XXth 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.” (Family Frames, xvi) Raising questions about the meaning of memory and identity for younger generations dealing with the traumas experienced by their parents and grandparents, The Russian Album is an instance of what Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory”. The memoir is characterized by an ambivalent attitude of the narrator to his roots: his wish to answer the ethical call experienced in front of the pictures and his desire to know his past are matched by his conjoined fear of being claimed by it. This ambivalence underlies the complex relationship between text and images in Ignatieff’s memoir. Pictures are presented as the matrix of the book; the narrator exhibits a deep trust in them as an archival material that will help him conjure up a vanished past with documentary accuracy and bring to light family secrets. His narrative, however, betrays a fear of their latent power which ultimately leads him to try to contain them by reasserting the primacy of words.

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Littératures
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Dates et versions

hal-03818223 , version 1 (17-10-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03818223 , version 1

Citer

Laure de Nervaux Gavoty. In Search of a Lost Past: Family Photography and Postmemory in Michael Ignatieff’s The Russian Album. Combining Text and Image in Life Writing: The Pragmatics of Hybridity, , In press, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. ⟨hal-03818223⟩

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