At lectures on historical memory, to show how unstable this substance is, I sometimes ask the audience: do you know when your grandmother and grandfather were born?

At lectures on historical memory, to show how unstable this substance is, I sometimes ask the audience: do you know when your grandmother and grandfather were born? As a rule, people have only the vaguest notion, to say nothing of great-grandmothers and beyond. Those who know for certain are the rarest of the rare. If you are among them, congratulations: you have managed to escape the programme that erases self-awareness.

More often than not, this elementary ignorance of one's own origins (quite natural, chiefly because of a lack of interest in anyone or anything except the personalities imposed by pop culture and the digital box) sits side by side with a myth of grandmothers who were maids of honour, grandfathers who were princes, and secret children of some great man such as Leo Tolstoy or, at a pinch, Dostoevsky. In Milan, after all, there lives Brodsky's unknown daughter. How many granddaughters of eminent merchants, or of plain nobles, one has had to meet in this way is beyond counting. I receive messages with such tales by the hundred.

Friends, if you are not an orphan and nobody in your family was lost at a moment of some historical or domestic cataclysm, then it is simply shameful not to know at least the birth years of your parents' parents. Once you know that date, it is very easy to guess the likely birth years of your great-grandfathers; a hint: no further than 50 years from that date, and even that only in a fairly rare case. The most general rule: simply subtract 25 from your own birth year three times, and the result may well resemble the birth year of your great-grandparents. Finally, ask your parents at least what year your grandmother was born, and that is all: every fable about Pauline Gebl will vanish as if by magic. I will not even speak of the fact that renouncing one's ancestors and inventing fantastic princely roots is simply a sin against one's true lineage.