The Russian Album

By Michael Ignatieff

This dramatic and poignant chronicle of four generations of a Russian family begins in the dazzling court of Tsar Alexander III, traces the Ignatieff family's rise to power and influence in the imperial regime of Tsar Nicholas II, and sweeps us into an avalanche of revolution, civil war, and exile. Drawing on family diaries, photographs in an old family album, and stories passed down from father to son, Michael Ignatieff movingly comes to terms with the meaning of his family's memories and history in an extraordinary time. Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award and the Heineman Prize.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Sep 8, 2009
• ISBN: 9780143175162

Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff is a writer, historian and former politician. He has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, the University of Toronto and Harvard and is currently university professor at Central European University in Vienna. His books, which have been translated into twelve languages, include Blood and Belonging, Isaiah Berlin: a life, The Needs of Strangers, The Russian Album and The Ordinary Virtues.

Reviews for The Russian Album

[john257hopper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

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.