The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff

servants would come running to see who the visitors might be. There was Chomiakoff, after 1905 one of the presidents of the Duma, a ‘queer man’, Mongolian in appearance, always contradicting himself; and the elegant Ourousoffs, as delicate as moths, in their fawn riding clothes, recounting the latest gossip from the Riviera in a Russian flavoured with a slight French accent. She remembered best Professor Rachinsky, an excitable little man, with a face like a squeezed-out lemon, yellow but full of life. An indefatigable eccentric, he arrived with tremendous bustle from his estate in Tver province and seemed to inspect every leaf in the garden, and quizzed the village priest about the state of the peasants’ moral education. At his own estate, he ran a school for peasant children.
    Natasha wondered whether Professor Rachinsky’s philanthropy ever came to anything – one of his peasant children became a priest, another became an artist – but the rest returned to the soil, untouched by the Professor’s lessons. She was generous enough herself, as her father had been, but she was unburdened by that Tolstoyan sense of guilt and responsibility for the peasants that drove the old Professor on his grinding round of benevolence.
    There was another visitor who talked like Rachinsky, a typical Russian madcap of a doctor, who had handsome red hair and who used to sit and spill out all his Tolstoyan theories to Natasha after dinner in the study. She was attracted to him, though marriage with a young country doctor was out of the question, and she liked the look of Russian absorption which came over him when he talked of putting the country to rights. He told her that he liked her austerity, the plain black dresses, the simple unadorned meals at table, the frugality observed in this most splendid of old houses. He said it would prepare her well for whatever life had to offer. She found the compliment amusing: it was said so sombrely, as if darkness lay ahead for both of them.
    The subject of the peasantry always seemed to send the men at Doughino into that special mood of earnest self-importance which came over aristocratic Russians when they discussed a ‘social question’. She herself had very few thoughts about the peasants. They were in another world beyond the gates. Only one photograph in her family album shows peasants in the frame. The picture was taken sometime in the 1890s at the festival of St Peter and St Paul by the doorway of the family chapel at Doughino. Women in white kerchiefs crowd around the icons which are draped in white and carried by deacons with flowing black hair and vestments. The sea of faces is turned towards the icons, but one face – that of a woman in a white kerchief – is looking over her shoulder. Her back is broad and strong; there is an apron around her waist. She is staring at someone ‘from the big house’, and her gaze is curious and unafraid.
    In just twenty years these peasants were to burn Doughino to the ground and make the owner, mild stooping Sasha, sweep out the latrines in the prison yard at Sichevka. This irony – that I know what is coming and Natasha could not – is one of the barriers between us. I have to forget what comes next. To share her past, I have to forget her future.
    But so did she. How, for example, was she to preserve the original colour of her memories of the Coronation ceremonies of 1896 from the wash of retrospective foreboding that swept over all recollections of Nicholas and Alexandra after 1917? She was watching from the stands outside the cathedral in Moscow as the imperial couple arrived and she believed afterwards that she had felt a chill of anxiety when she saw the Tsarina descend from the coach, with her stiff, strained expression, holding on tight to the arm of her tragic-eyed consort. As the Tsarina passed their stand, bowing to right and left at the old families, Natasha and her mother noticed that