Russian Blood

"In books like African Madness and The Rivers Amazon Alex Shoumatoff has taken readers to the most remote and fabled corners of the earth. Russian Blood, however, journeys backward in time to disinter the intricately entwined roots of Shoumatoff's own family and to unravel the strands of sentiment and shrewdness, piety and aestheticism, that make up Russianness. Shoumatoff traces his origins back to the fifteenth century (one relative, he notes, traced them further, claiming descent from Jesus Christ and Cleopatra). But history for him is always personal: a process of imaginative entry into the lives of distant antecedents. He re-creates as though firsthand Chekhovian gatherings at a family estate, the obsessive Himalayan odyssey of an uncle who loved rare butterflies, that same uncle's melancholy recognition that the old Russia was about to collapse and that there was no choice but to leave it. In America, Shoumatoff explores the ways in which his family adapted to a new country, and the ways in which its members carried Russia with them. Elegant and often moving, illustrated with extraordinary period photographs, Russian Blood is a memoir that says volumes about the nature of all families, everywhere."--Provided by publisher.