Beginning a book is like entering someone's house for the first time. You might feel a little uncomfortable and unsure about your host; your initial apprehension may develop into a sense of ease and reassurance or, barely across the threshold, you might feel that you are about to have a experience you will savour, with someone whose every word and action is beguiling. I was half way through the prelude to the first chapter of'The Snows of Yesteryear' when I felt completely beguiled. That feeling of being in the company of someone who not only had an engaging story to tell, but who could tell it with vivid details and astounding insight, using fully ripened language was there from the beginning and never let up until, at the point of departure, it faltered just a little. Through five main chapters we learn about the life of a boy whose family is materially privileged but emotionally fractured. Each of those chapters focuses on a person who was central to Gregor's life as he grew towards manhood, beginning with Cassandra, a maid as untamed as she is spirited. Right at the start we learn that They had peeled her out of her peasant garb and had instantly consigned the shirt, the wrap skirt, the sleeveless sheepskin jacket and the leather buskins to the flames. Devoid of all her colour, Cassandra says: They turned a goldfinch into a sparrow. For Gregor she represents a whole other way of being. Described as "simian", she nonetheless introduces Gregor, in a casual, though not entirely unintentional way, to sensual experiences which, even at a young age, he recognises as significant: behind the black silken curtain of Cassandra's hair, in the baking-oven warmth of her strong peasant corporeality, I found refuge at all times from whatever pained me. Their closeness is a cause of irritation to Gregor's neurotic mother, but eventually it is age that begins to break the bond as, at age 8, the intrusive nature of potty time can be tolerated no longer and a rift occurs. But nothing can take from the impact that this woman with strong roots in the north of Romania has on a boy whose early childhood is marked by a sense of belonging nowhere.Not only did the family have to flee Czernowitz, in Bukovina because of World War 1, but on making their way as far as Trieste they were forced, after less than a year, to move again this time to a village in Lower Austria. That idyll had to be abandoned too for a house in Vienna before an eventual return to Czernowitz. But had they never left Bukovina, the turmoil and empire-building of the 20th century would have meant that they would have been a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then Romania, then split between Romania and the Soviet Union before becoming a part of the Ukrainian SSR, at which time Czernowitz became Chernovtsy!Little wonder that Gregor's mother was a deeply unhappy woman, but it seems that far more than history impinged on her and formed her into a woman who was incapable of being happy and who seemed to have no idea of how contentment might be achieved and so remained always in the rusting shell of her unapproachability. Dissatisfaction with a life that was permanently out of focus meant that she was continuously finding fault with those around her, with vexation all too easily turning into sharp cruelty. Even so I was shocked when Gregor said that All too often her demonstrations of maternity had had the earmarks of rape. It is difficult to find any evidence in Gregor's detailing of their relationship that quite justifies that accusation, but he has nonetheless an astonishing ability to incisively analyse the precise nature of his mother's dilemma: The strictness of her own upbringing had established for her a world cast in primer-like simplicity, which contained no real human beings but merely standard roles whose comportment was assigned irrespective of individuality, character, temperament or nervous disposition...any deviation into the specifically individual was a step towards chaosAnother element in the unsatisfactory life of Gregor's mother is her marriage to a man whose passion is hunting which results in his being absent much of the time. In attempting to explain his father's compulsion to kill wild animals Gregor says: that his all consuming passion for hunting was in reality an escape to and a shelter from the reminder of a truer and unrealised vocation...A gesture of defiance stood at the very origin of his fixation- indeed, obstinate defiance was the determining trait in his character. He does have a job too which involves visiting old monasteries to examine the artifacts they possess. Some of Gregor's happiest times were spent accompanying his father on expeditions which encompassed both facets of his life and allowed Gregor to experience moments of transcendent and revelatory beauty:We are guests of the abbot; with paternal kindliness the prior shows me fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts in bindings of chased silver ; sunlight falls through the tall windows, in broad stripes alive with dancing motes of dust, into the semidarkness of the library, and outside, jays are heard quarreling in the pines; my longing thoughts wander to the glories of the autumnal forest beyond the church walls blazing in picture-book colours.He portrays his father as a man who was far more even-tempered than his mother,but who had several dark and unpleasant aspects to his character too, most notably a vicious antisemitism which contrasts with Gregor's mother who was much liked by her Jewish neighbours.Gregor's sister was four years older than him and he attached major significance to those years, believing that she had foundational experiences which steadied her life in a way which eluded him. But he would eventually become much older than her because her life was to end long before it should have when she succumbed to just the sort of disease her mother had spent her life worrying about and through this horrible affliction her mother finally found a purpose by attending constantly to the daughter who, when she was healthy had been much less favored by her mother. In contrast she had always been doted on, and indulged fully, by a father who, now that she was ill, withdrew completely and stayed where he could not witness the indignity of her final weeks.Above, around and within this family the benign presence of the children's governess Bunchy prevailed. Warm and encouraging Bunchy whose laughter was reminiscent of pigeons cooing. Both children learned much from this deeply knowledgeable woman:When a certain pettiness of outlook degenerated into stubborn narrow-mindedness , Bunchy's determined intervention drew our attention to basic discrepancies between the conception of life held by normal civilized people and that held by us. We then made haste to follow her implicit injunctionAlthough Gregor was not suited to the conventions of the school system he developed into a man with an outstanding ability to record the endlessly complicated ways in which people choose, or are forced, to live their lives. Bunchy, it would seem, more than any of the others opened up the world for him. Within that world Gregor had available to him four amazingly divergent examples of womanhood. Yet he is honest enough to tell us that he had, throughout his life and in his relationships with women, a cold heart.I found some evidence of that cold heart in the epilogue to this book and I still can't decide whether or not it was wise to include it. By revisiting Czernowitz he was always going to be disappointed. What I feel he fails to appreciate is the extent to which a city of ones youth - a place in which one can , for a little while, believe in the limitless possibilities of oneself and of the city - can never be revisited because it was always more than just a physical reality. By recounting his understandable disappointments he risks being just another grumpy man, finding fault with the many ways in which the world has changed. Except that here, because of the subjugations of communism, almost nothing has changed: I couldn't get over it. There could be no doubt that this was indeed the Cernauti of my childhood, tangibly concrete and real- and yet it wasn't the Czernowitz whose vision I had carried in me for half a century. Famously, of course, you can't go home again and I'm inclined to wish he hadn't.But this is a remarkable book, evocative, witty and beautifully written.
THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR. (1989). Gregor Von Rezzori. ****.A friend of mine recommended this book. It’s by an author I never heard of, but will follow up and seek out more of his titles. When you look at his name, you can’t tell where he is from – other than somewhere in Europe. ‘Gregor’ might be Russian; ‘Von’ usually comes from Germany; ‘Rezzori’ smacks of Italy. When you read this book, you will discover that those regions all played a part in the author’s life. The book itself is a masterful approach to an autobiography, using the technique where the author defines himself by his memories of the major personalities who are around him at various stages in his life. The author is a fantastic and has the ability to accurately define his landscapes and personalities to a tee. This talent makes for a slow-reading book; you can’t take a chance on missing any detail by trying to read quickly. This must have been a difficult book to translate from the German, but the translator did a marvelous job. It is difficult which portrait I liked best of those presented by Rezzori, but I suspect that I would have to vote for the peasant companion who lived with his family, Cassandra. Recommended.
Do You like book The Snows Of Yesteryear (1991)?
Stunning account of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire told by way of the figures of Von Rezzori's childhood. A very special and beautiful book.
—Brad
Gregor von Rezzori was born in 1913, and his childhood saw his hometown of Czenowitz pass from Austro-Hungary to Romania in the wake of World War I. This region, Bucovina, which is now split between Romania and Ukraine, was host to a remarkable diversity: Germans, Ruthenians (Rusyns), Romanians, (Yiddish-speaking) Jews, Poles, Russians and Armenians lived side by side in Czernowitz. In his memoir THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR (originally published in German as Blumen im Schnee), Rezzori depicts the changing ethnic and political landscape of the town until roughly the mid-1940s, with reminisces that continue into the post-war era and an epilogue from 1989 seeing him return to Czernowitz after five decades away.But this is mainly a family chronicle. Rezzori divides the book into five parts focusing on a particular member of his household. His nanny Cassandra was illiterate and brutish, hired out of some isolated place in the Carpathians. His mother is remembered as overprotective and more than a little neurotic, tragically trapped in a loveless relatioship with Rezzori's father. That father was obsessed with hunting, using his business trips as a government functionary to bag all kinds of animals in the vastness of the Carpathians. His dislike for the Jews was great, but he stayed forever faithful to Austro-Hungarian values and was aghast at the rise of the Nazis and German agression. His sister, four years old than him and a perennial but beloved rival, died in young adulthood after a long illness. Finally, his governess Ms. Lina Strauss (nicknamed "Bunchy" in a German-language pun) brought a cosmopolitan flair to his home.Rezzori mentions Marcel Proust early on in this book, but even if he didn't, many readers would think of Proust nonetheless. Rezzori has the same passion for introspection on the most mundane issues of childhood. I must admit, his reveries and his psychological analyses of his family do tend to drag, especially in the last third or so of the book. I must admit to skimming for long passages about his sister and Bunchy.However, as a source of first-hand information on the dying of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a cosmopolitan Bucovina that is now gone forever, this is a valuable book, and however frustrating its longwindedness might be, I am very glad I read it.
—Christopher
Essentially this book is a series of portraits of Rezzori's family and two most intimate nurses/governesses, and their lives during the two World Wars and the time in between, when their home city of Czernowitz was caught in the post-collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when it was handed over (and over again) between Romanian, German, and Russian rule. The people of the Bukovina were basically in the hands of whatever army happened to be roaming through the land at the time, and eventually the whole identity of the region seemingly vanished. There are many parallels throughout the story of the dissipation of the empire and the disintegration of the family, but what this book did so well, and so brilliantly, was elucidate that strange, mythological period of adolescence and early childhood, when we, at the time, are experiencing such vivid and lasting impressions but do not yet have the faculty to express what they mean, even to ourselves, while all the while our individuality and personality are being formed by these same occurences. One can't help but draw the comparison of lost empire/lost childhood, but there is more going on here than that. A melancholy nostalgia, a dry and absurd humor, intimate emotional observation, and a sense of something irrevocable that we all seem to experience when looking back at our own lives are what this book succeeds in communicating. Perhaps only Speak, Memory has come so close to illustrating those twilight years. But Rezzori's prose is more centered in the emotional, while Nabokov is solidly discoursing through the intellect. As far as memoirs of childhood go, I can't say yet which I prefer. But if you enjoyed Speak, Memory definitely give this a go.Some favorite parts: Cassandra making the snow flowers (which inevitably dissolve in time); the image and detail of the sinking toy ship (which is referenced throughout); his father dragging a dead, bloody boar through his mother's snobby, aristocratic social gatherings; all the descriptions of the gardens, the roads into the wilderness, the ecstatic recollection of the weather and natural surroundings of the Bukovina and how that was reflected in the people. There is so much here to sift through, I will certainly reread this at some point.
—Geoff
