Edith Ignatieff, 1900–1985

Abstract

The recent death of Edith Ignatieff marks the end of an era for a generation of Michigan language students, to whom she personified much of what was best in prerevolutionary Russian society. She grew up in St. Petersburg and was a student at the Bagaev School of Architecture when her family left the Soviet Union in 1919. Eventually resettling in Ann Arbor, Ignatieff worked as a fashion illustrator and resumed her studies (M.A. in German, 1949). Beginning in 1945, she taught Russian for twenty-five years first at Eastern Michigan University, then at the University of Michigan. During this period she led numerous summer study tours to the Soviet Union. After retiring in 1971, she moved to Florida and, despite health problems, gave her time to working with patients in a nursing home, where she was very much loved and is missed by all. Ignatieff was a dedicated and lively teacher, convinced that students needed much more exposure to idioms and colloquial conversation than they were receiving in traditional programs, yet always concerned about the purity of the language. She prepared instructional materials for courses at all levels, and in her own classes she introduced students to exercises using chastitsy and Russian idioms and helped them to understand and appreciate the style of contemporary authors as well as that of the nineteenth-century classics. Above all, she believed that teachers do not help their students by trying to make things too easy. She was never noted for slow speech in any language, and her instructional Russian was no exception. Most students experienced a form of culture shock during the first weeks in her class, but by the end of the term they were amazed at how much they could take in. In her life and her teaching, Edith Ignatieff was a positive force, emphasizing the uses that could be made of the present rather than regrets for what might have been. She will be remembered as, a very special person, filled with the graceful spirit of a Russian culture which has passed into history.