Free Ebook The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography, by Gregor von Rezzori
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The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography, by Gregor von Rezzori
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Gregor von Rezzori was born in Czernowitz, a onetime provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was later to be absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine—a town that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of astonishing diversity. Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his aristocratic parents and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century. The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear.
The book is a series of portraits—amused, fond, sometimes appalling—of Rezzori’s family: his hysterical and histrionic mother, disappointed by marriage, destructively obsessed with her children’s health and breeding; his father, a flinty reactionary, whose only real love was hunting; his haughty older sister, fated to die before thirty; his earthy nursemaid, who introduced Rezzori to the power of storytelling and the inevitability of death; and a beloved governess, Bunchy. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance.
- Sales Rank: #1122809 in Books
- Published on: 1989-12-03
- Released on: 1989-12-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.44" h x 5.33" w x .81" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 290 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Born into the Austro-Hungarian aristocratic class, Rezzori saw his family reduced to nomadic refugees by WW I. Despite his parents' marital break-up and the occupation of his native duchy, Bukovina, by Rumania in 1919 and by Russia in 1940, his family lived under the illusion of pseudofeudal grandeur. In this intense group portrait, the author of the novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite limns five key people who molded him. His overprotective, proud mother, a woman of "lifelong rancor," was a mismatch for his cheerful, voluble father, an architect and hunting enthusiast set in his rigid ways and pathological prejudices. Cassandra, his nanny, a peasant woman who wore exotic garb, kept up his spirits with clownish pranks. We also meet Bunchy, his worldly German governess, and his sister with whom Rezzori had a sibling rivalry, but whose death at age 22 haunts him.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Von Rezzori, author of the novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite , focuses on a childhood in Bukovina "spent among mad and dislocated personalities." His nurse, an illiterate peasant called "the savage" by the family, provides him the warmth and love his parents cannot give and symbolizes for him his visceral connection to his homeland. His mother's real tenderness alternates with neurotic anxiety and rage; rather asexual, she is the wrong match for his father's vital, "highly luminous temperament." They separate, and her remarriage is disastrous. Von Rezzori's "astonishingly precocious" sister dies an early death mysteriously linked to a failed business venture of his mother. His governess fosters his drawing talent, but his sister's death and his mother's "need" of him stifle his budding career. These five portraits shed light on the old Europe of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the way of life that passed with it.
- Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"One of those rare and lovely books that defy category. Fiction and non-fiction meet in the precision and quality of Rezzori's prose, in his passion for the perfect detail, and in his power to capture the reader's heart."-Alan Furst
“Von Rezzori's best-known novel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, and his recent memoir, The Snows of Yesteryear, were works of sly, silky lyricism filled with sharp detail and a deft, ironic moral weight. Above all they offered marvelous character-portraits in prose, with the novel wryly evoking the women who shaped its narrator's sensual and intellectual life and the memoir giving an indelible account of von Rezzori's tragicomically dysfunctional family as it weathered the cataclysms of a war-stricken Europe.” –Washington Post
The Snows of Yesteryear “leads into a world now irretrievably lost, its values blown away by World War I and its fortures wrecked by the inflationary ‘20s…Strong material, then; and Rezorri follows this family back with a fine disdain for sentiment, a transparency of feeling, an acid sense of humor and a vigilant eye for nuances of love and indifference, language, landscape and class behavior. It is not a young man’s (or a moralist’s) book. But it is intensely moving and contains, in its winding and ironic cadences, not a slack sentence.” –Time magazine
“Writing in lyrical, allusive prose–elegantly translated from the German by H. F. Broch de Rothermann–Mr. von Rezzori uses his portraits…to create a book that is, at once, an autobiography and a picture of a vanished age…The Snows of Yesteryear reveals its author’s rich pictorial imagination, his seemingly total recall, his gift for revealing character through anecdotes colored by memory…His book remains both an elegiac tribute to a receding past and a testament to the redemptive powers of memory–a family photography album, beautifully translated into words.” –Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“The Snows of Yesteryear is a classic which bears comparison in its artistic integrity with Nabakov’s Speak, Memory and Sarte’s Les Mots.” –The Independent (London)
“The Snows of Yesteryear is autobiography as portraiture…Each portrait is a miniature of the Bukovinian past.” –The New York Review of Books
“If any individual life could encapsulate the geographic and psychic dislocation that has been the central experience of the 20th century, that life might be Gregor von Rezzori’s…Rezzori has explored the consequences of this century’s disruptions in a series of remarkable books…The Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, and The Snows of Yesteryear.” –Newsday
“[Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear are] works sly, silky lyricism filled with sharp detail and a deft, ironic moral weight. Above all they offered marvelous character-portraits in prose.” –The Washington Post
“The Snows of Yesteryear’s five ‘portraits’ add up to a nonfiction Bildungsroman…an eclectic cultural smorgasbord almost comical in its complications…Shrewdly dovetailing psychological observation and factual background in five marvelous interdependent narratives, Rezzori blends public and personal history with brilliance and aplomb. Praise should go to translator H. F. Broch de Rothermann for rendering Rezzori’s German into such seductively lyrical English prose.” –The Seattle Times
“The weight of history lies heavily on the people of Central Europe; this powerful memoir shows us how painful that weight can be.” –Newsday
"Dazzling prose, humane insights and good humor…[Rezzori] has created, not simply recorded a memoir of growing up in the linguistic and political no-man's-land of interbellum central Europe." –Boston Globe
“The iconoclastic author of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Death of My Brother Abel mulls over his childhood. Like Elias Canetti, a modern Homer of Central European aristocracy, Rezzori frames the past like a classicist, feels it like a tormented youth.” –Philadelphia Inquirer
“The Snows of Yesteryear is a classic which bears comparison in its artistic integrity with Nabokov's Speak, Memory and Sartre's Les Mots.” –The Independent (London)
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Tales of displacement
By R. M. Peterson
In his Introduction to this edition, John Banville writes that THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR "is a masterpiece in that rare genre that might be classed as incidental autobiography." Banville compares the book with Nabokov's "Speak, Memory" - high praise, indeed. I won't suggest that THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR is quite on the same plane as "Speak, Memory", but SNOWS definitely is worth reading.
Two different aspects of the book make it of special interest. The first has to do with the historical and social milieu in which the author lived his early years, the years covered by THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR. Gregor von Rezzori was born in 1914 in Czernowitz, then the capital of the Bukovina, which in turn was one of the autonomous former crown lands of the House of Habsburg and, as such, part of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. Thus, his formative years coincided with what he calls the "truce between two phases of the European suicide" (i.e, 1919-1939) and the collapse of the bourgeois culture of Mitteleuropa founded on the pillars of property and learning. Rezzori's account of that milieu and those years is among the richer and more rewarding that I have read.
The other noteworthy aspect of the book consists of the family figures around whom he structures his memoir: his mother, father, and sister, and his nanny and his governess. Each of them - at least as portrayed by Rezzori - is a memorable figure. Even works of fiction rarely feature a quintet of such distinctive characters.
To my mind the most memorable (though it is a close call) is Rezzori's father, who regarded himself as a Habsburg aristocrat through and through (the Rezzori family came from Sicily, at a time when it still belonged to the Holy Roman Empire). By profession, he was an architect and art historian, whose work responsibilities involved overseeing the monasteries of the Bukovina as a civil servant. By avocation, he was a hunter, and some of Rezzori's anecdotes are set in the dense forests of the Carpathians, hunting with his father. Although Rezzori elder was a strident anti-Semite and a social conservative, he was not a supporter of Hitler. Shortly after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, he drew his son's attention to a magazine article, replete with pictures of the new Führer, and commented: "It's all very fine and well, Germany rises once more. But have a look at this fellow: I wouldn't hire him as a stable boy!" His political ethos was from the snows of yesteryear, amongst the Habsburgs. "[H]e counted Romanians (after Czechs and Poles) among the body-strippers of the corpse of the defunct Dual Monarchy. Russians, Poles and Ruthenians were mere colonial populations. He saw himself as a leftover functionary of a liquidated empire. `We have been left here as a kind of cultural fertilizer,' was one of his favorite sayings." He stayed away from his daughter when she was dying of Hodgson's disease and he refused to summon his son to his own deathbed; those decisions were "based on the sober conviction that dying is a strictly private matter that cannot be shared with anyone."
(A quick word about Rezzori's governess, a woman born in Pomerania in the 1860's and clearly a major influence in his life. Rezzori gives her name as Lina Strauss and he writes that in the 1890s she had been the "lady companion" of Mark Twain during his years in Florence (at a time long before the death of Twain's beloved wife, Livy). Curiously, in neither my Mark Twain library (which, admittedly, is hardly comprehensive) nor on the Internet can I find any reference to a Lina Strauss as a companion of Twain or a member of the Twain household. If anyone has information to support the association, I would appreciate learning of it either by a comment or by e-mail.)
The book closes with a touching epilogue, dealing with Rezzori's visit in 1989 to Czernowitz (by then re-named Chernovtsy and within the borders of the Ukraine) for the first time in 53 years. After so much effort trying to reconstruct and re-inhabit the past, his visit to the city of his birth and boyhood proved to be another bittersweet exemplification of Thomas Wolfe's adage that you can't go home again. Rezzori published this memoir in 1989. He died in 1998.
Given my own fascination for the Habsburg Empire and Mitteleuropa, I was a natural reader for THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR. Nonetheless, at times it dragged, even for me. Rezzori is prone to over-write and over-analyze. Appropriate perhaps for a chronicler of a lost empire, he can be somewhat fusty and ornate in his prose. But for the most part he is clear-headed and unsentimental. What pervades THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR is not nostalgia so much as displacement.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
The Central European Soul in All Its Baroque Splendor
By Poetcomic1
When von Rezzori falls into his best central-European 'Baroque' style he is aboslutely unsurpassed. I simply give this paragraph as an example of the man's geniius:
"In a cameo set as a brooch, a melancholy faun, sitting under an olive tree, blows on his panpipe; above him are seen the three richly flowing feather panaches of the crest of the Prince of Wales, together with the device Ich dien. The brooch lies in a velvet jewelry box in the lid of which, tipped open, the warrant of arrest for Landru, mass murderer or women, has been pasted. There are ice-flowers on the windows, and some newspapers in cane frames are lying on the marble tabletop of a Viennese coffeehouse. The lady in the back, behind the cash box, wears her short-cropped hair brushed down over her brow and is clad in a wasp-waisted dress; as with “The Lady Without a Lower Half” in a circus sideshow, only her upper trunk can be seen. She holds a magnifying glass in her hand which she discreetly hides whenever someone looks at her.”
The book is full of felicities of expression and delicious anecdotes and piercing insights into those around him. Grossly under-appreciated.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A vanished culture
By An admirer of Saul
Rezorri writes of the five people who shaped his life and were entwined with the life and culture of Bukovinia;a country that was a crossroads for east and west;that had absorbed all the mish mash of languages and customs that had passed through and decided to stay. Rezorris family found themselves there at the tail end of the Hapsburg empire of which Bukovinia was part.His memoirs start between the first and second world wars;Bukovinia being ceded to Romania,then later to Soviet Russia.Always in the background is the sad knowledge that Bukovinia,with its gypsies,jews,colonials and uniqueness,is doomed by politics.If not Hitler,then Stalin.It made no difference.
Rezorri returns to his old home and finds the vibrancy and life has been squeezed out of the place;made sterile by the drabness of communism after being exterminated in the war.The racial tensions and diversity of customs and languages that gave Bukovinia its vibrancy,wiped out for some skewed political ideal.It makes you realize that-as long as it doesn't boil over into holocaust-racial and social frictions are part of what makes humanity click.
A great book;many of the anecdotes and reflections feature in arguably Rezorris greatest work,'The death of my brother Abel'.
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