Customer Reviews

The Snows of Yesteryear (New York Review Books Classics)

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This is an exceptional book. Everyone in von Rezzori's family is fascinating--including his governess, who was a friend of Mark Twain. The Bukovina, where the author grew up, is remote, strange, and beautiful. The politics of the period are byzantine, yet von Rezzori clarifies beautifully. His writing style is fresh, vivid, easy. He has a cosmopolitan vocabulary. If you like this book, definitely read his MEMOIRS OF AN ANTI-SEMITE, also very fine.

Gregor Von Rezzori has quickly become a favorite writer and his works, companions in my life journey. The Snows of Yesteryear is a stylized memoir that reads much more like fiction. It is a non-linear memoir that has little regard to time or place as Rezzori jumps wherever his thoughts and reminiscences lead him. This jumping around leads to a lack of clarity and unevenness that at times hurt the overall work, however these relatively rare moments are offset by beautifully painful passages that evoke not only lost moments in his life, but in the readers as well. These moments are the heart of Von Rezzori's talent, at his best he can distill a fragment of time, or a time period down to its existential core, giving the reader that joyous, yet painful realization of a precious moment and the pain of its passing... and subsequently our passing as well.

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'.

In brilliant, naturally flowing prose, Gregor von Rezzori brushes a sublime portrait of his parents, his sister, his nanny and a governess during the violent whirlwind of times, in which an age-old order was destroyed by war (the Double Monarchy).
Myth
The author grew up with the myth of that lost bygone `golden and miraculous' world of `property and learning', characterized by an unbridgeable gulf between the so-called educated classes and the so-called common people.
The author is still not capable to bridge this gap: `A species of man arose from that ghostly landscape of bomb craters and trenches whose bestiality was unconstrained. A free field was given to the Hitlers and Stalins.' He forgets to mention that the `landed aristocracy' itself was responsible for the outbreak of WW I and their own downfall.

Female archetypes, death
The author grew up among three archetype embodiments of the female: a nanny (`brood-warm, protectively enveloping motherliness'), his sister (`the airy, spiritual, nimbly evasive figure of the nymph') and his mother (`interplay of all arch female characteristics: sensual excitement, the fitful capriciousness of the potential mistress, vacillating between stormy tenderness and pretended indifference, between lovingly passionate empathy and cruelly punishing iciness.'
His nanny taught him the all important lesson that `we all have to die one day.' From then on, `I took up life as if it were but a succession of leave-takings in the course of a long journey.'

Parents
His mother's life was a long journey of disappointments. Her secretly entertained dream of becoming a pediatrician could not be realized by a girl of her class. After one too many waltzes during her first ball, she knew herself to have been cheated of life's happiness. All her life she had true obsessions and outbreaks of impotent rages. She kept all her energy for her son: `it was an amorous relationship, a love-affair.'
His father was `a solitary to the point of melancholia', `a leftover functionary of a liquidated empire.' His view of the world was that of `a medieval woodcut': the huntsmen and the others. Anything to do with soldiering was repugnant to him. Socially unacceptable were all those in trade, and totally despicable was anyone dealing in money.

With his sharply delineated psychological portraits, Gregor von Rezzori evocates the lost world of an enormous empire, dominated and ruled by the landed aristocracy.
It made this aristocracy (and his parents) `sleepwalkers in an alienated present', `members of a dying and largely already superannuated class.'

Not to be missed.

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.