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An Ermine in Czernopol
Set just after World War I, An Ermine in Czernopol centers on the tragicomic fate of Tildy, an erstwhile officer in the army of the now-defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, determined to defend the virtue of his cheating sister-in-law at any cost. Rezzori surrounds Tildy with a host of fantastic characters, engaging us in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears—a city of discordant voices, of wild ugliness, and heartbreaking disappointment, in which, however, “laughter was everywhere, part of the air we breathed, a crackling tension in the atmosphere, always ready to erupt in showers of sparks or discharge itself in thunderous peals."
400 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1958
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1,097 people want to read
About the author
Gregor von Rezzori
40 books89 followersGregor von Rezzori was born in 1914 in Chernivtsi in the Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Ukraine. In an extraordinarily peripatetic life von Rezzori was succesively an Austro-Hungarian, Romanian and Soviet citizen and then, following a period of being stateless, an Austrian citizen.
The great theme of his work was the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual world in which he grew up and which the wars and ideologies of the twentieth century destroyed. His major works include The Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and his autobiographical masterpiece The Snows of Yesteryear.
He died in his home in Donnini, Italy in 1998.
The great theme of his work was the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual world in which he grew up and which the wars and ideologies of the twentieth century destroyed. His major works include The Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and his autobiographical masterpiece The Snows of Yesteryear.
He died in his home in Donnini, Italy in 1998.
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November 27, 2024
Have you heard of the Ukrainian city named Chernivtsi, located in Bukovina, a region which is now split between Romania and Ukraine? This book is a portrait of the Chernivtsi of a certain time, between the world wars. It was a place of many cultures and many peoples, past and present: Ruthenians/Ukrainians, Moldavians/Romanians, Austrians (the novel's narrators), Hungarians, Russians, Romany and Jews of diverse backgrounds. It was a crossroads city, of sorts, and frequently conquered. Here the laughing city is given a different name: Czernopol.
This dense and dizzying kaleidoscope of a novel was an enchanting experience. So many lives examined, and with a certain amusement. But maybe the word "enchanting" gives the wrong impression, as there is dirt and grit in this story, characters of flexible morality and axes to grind, melancholy fates and tragic endings, and a cosmopolitan outlook that combines a shrug with a laugh. There is an urbane, nonchalant quality to much of the cast and, especially, to the storytelling - one of my favorite tones of voice in narration. A rather surprising urbanity, given that the story is narrated by children. Perhaps the only character who completely lacks that rather decadent sophistication, that moral flexibility - and who is the object of the children's obsession - is the rigidly honorable Major Tildy, the book's tragic central character. Poor Tildy! Always immaculately dressed, always correct. So tightly wound. He did not bend like a reed to all those around him. And so he fell like an oak...
The book's Proustian narrative can feel random, chaotic. So many different characters, so many lives, so many stories to tell within the greater story, so many digressions. Is there even a greater story? One could get lost in the mix. But there is a method here and all of the book's many effects weave together to form a tapestry of a place, a city that is always changing, always laughing at its tragedies. The complexity of the narration itself is a remarkable achievement, when taking a step back from the book to analyze its construction (hard to do - this is an immersive experience). We start with a narrator that is often a "we": a group of children from a well-off bourgeois clan. They narrate the stories of the many lives around them, most of all the adults, fascinating or frightening or sometimes both. As they get older, the "we" often becomes "we" + Tanya - the oldest of the children, and the first of the group to achieve individuality. Near the end, the "we" finally alternates with an "I" and so we at last meet our true narrator, a boy who has carefully observed the world around him while growing up, a young man who is no longer a child, no longer of the group.
Key to this novel's concerns are the idea of "losing face" (the very phrase terrifies the children) and the way we create identities that prop us up, that serve as shields or provocations, that are sometimes all that we have left after everything else has been taken away.
Perhaps the most important part of the novel, the message that the author wanted to communicate above all, is the awful ease in which anti-semitism can be normalized. The terrible yet almost offhand way that contempt for Jews is a part of the fabric of many societies. In the past, certainly, but perhaps in the present as well. Here is the passage where our narrator(s) finally comes to an understanding about Jews, after meeting and befriending them at a new school:
This dense and dizzying kaleidoscope of a novel was an enchanting experience. So many lives examined, and with a certain amusement. But maybe the word "enchanting" gives the wrong impression, as there is dirt and grit in this story, characters of flexible morality and axes to grind, melancholy fates and tragic endings, and a cosmopolitan outlook that combines a shrug with a laugh. There is an urbane, nonchalant quality to much of the cast and, especially, to the storytelling - one of my favorite tones of voice in narration. A rather surprising urbanity, given that the story is narrated by children. Perhaps the only character who completely lacks that rather decadent sophistication, that moral flexibility - and who is the object of the children's obsession - is the rigidly honorable Major Tildy, the book's tragic central character. Poor Tildy! Always immaculately dressed, always correct. So tightly wound. He did not bend like a reed to all those around him. And so he fell like an oak...
The book's Proustian narrative can feel random, chaotic. So many different characters, so many lives, so many stories to tell within the greater story, so many digressions. Is there even a greater story? One could get lost in the mix. But there is a method here and all of the book's many effects weave together to form a tapestry of a place, a city that is always changing, always laughing at its tragedies. The complexity of the narration itself is a remarkable achievement, when taking a step back from the book to analyze its construction (hard to do - this is an immersive experience). We start with a narrator that is often a "we": a group of children from a well-off bourgeois clan. They narrate the stories of the many lives around them, most of all the adults, fascinating or frightening or sometimes both. As they get older, the "we" often becomes "we" + Tanya - the oldest of the children, and the first of the group to achieve individuality. Near the end, the "we" finally alternates with an "I" and so we at last meet our true narrator, a boy who has carefully observed the world around him while growing up, a young man who is no longer a child, no longer of the group.
Key to this novel's concerns are the idea of "losing face" (the very phrase terrifies the children) and the way we create identities that prop us up, that serve as shields or provocations, that are sometimes all that we have left after everything else has been taken away.
Perhaps the most important part of the novel, the message that the author wanted to communicate above all, is the awful ease in which anti-semitism can be normalized. The terrible yet almost offhand way that contempt for Jews is a part of the fabric of many societies. In the past, certainly, but perhaps in the present as well. Here is the passage where our narrator(s) finally comes to an understanding about Jews, after meeting and befriending them at a new school:
But, as I say, the most important thing was that we came to converse with our friends in the first place, and only later - quite a bit later - did we find out that they were Jews. So we didn't make the usual discovery that Jews are also people, but rather the reverse, that people are sometimes also Jews. This was one of the most beautiful of the invaluable discoveries that we owed to Madame Aritonovich and her Institute d'Education, as well as to our parents' temporary inattentiveness.Sadly but alas predictably, once the adults learn how rife their children's new school is with the Jewish kind - a kind those adults have been quick to scorn - the children are eased out of that school. Late in the book comes a pogrom targeting the Jews of Czernopol. And, of course, after all of the stories have reached their various ends, the characters meeting their often predetermined fates (or not!), after the book itself has ended, there came World War 2...
In this way we learned that what these people known as Jews shared was not so much a common character, but rather common forms of expression: in other words, that there were no "typically Jewish" traits, but rather a characteristically Jewish way of expressing traits that were simply human.
January 15, 2012
I absolutely loved this book. It combines Proust's elegant and deep reflection of becoming an adult with the Josepth Roth topic of Austro-Hugarian decline, and with it the sense of a lose of a unique multiculturalism and impending doom, with the craziness hilarity of Don Quixote.
Not sure what else to say. It is written superbly, a mix of funny tales told from the eyes of children, though through a pretty sophisticated adult voice, with longer looks into the motivations of people, and how we perceive them, and how our perception of them and the world creates us and changes through time and age. The cast of characters are wonderful, Herr Tarangolian being by far the best. The location of Czernopol intriguing with it's mix of ethnicities, humour, and violence. And the children's own expanding identity and knowledge of the world and those around them--a world made even weirder because we know it won't last--all make this one of the best books I've read in a long time.
Highly recommended.
Not sure what else to say. It is written superbly, a mix of funny tales told from the eyes of children, though through a pretty sophisticated adult voice, with longer looks into the motivations of people, and how we perceive them, and how our perception of them and the world creates us and changes through time and age. The cast of characters are wonderful, Herr Tarangolian being by far the best. The location of Czernopol intriguing with it's mix of ethnicities, humour, and violence. And the children's own expanding identity and knowledge of the world and those around them--a world made even weirder because we know it won't last--all make this one of the best books I've read in a long time.
Highly recommended.
July 17, 2012
A super fun romp through the old world...a multicultural mishmash in Bukavina, where the cultures of Austro-Hungarians, Germans, Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews all come together in a time between the two Great Wars, when the horror of violent anti-semitism was on the rise and the specter of Nazism was forming and becoming known in all things, but in the meantime, the child narrator gazes with eyes wide open at the hilarious (laughter defined life in Czernopol), grotesque (that same laughter was used to ill effect), and beautiful web of society that made up the town of Czernopol, where everyone is a character.
This is such a typical New York Review of Books release, I love it. A true lost gem of world literature that I am so happy is now seeing the light of day in the English-speaking world. A great historical read that is as funny as it is philosophical about the nature of cultural interactions, addressing the evils within all of us, and all the tragedies and beauties that are human love.
This is such a typical New York Review of Books release, I love it. A true lost gem of world literature that I am so happy is now seeing the light of day in the English-speaking world. A great historical read that is as funny as it is philosophical about the nature of cultural interactions, addressing the evils within all of us, and all the tragedies and beauties that are human love.
March 31, 2024
Eravamo bambini allorché i nostri eroi ci apparvero come una visione, e abbiamo perduto un mondo meraviglioso mano mano che essi si dimostravano reali e morivano.
“’Un ermellino a Cernopol’ è la storia o meglio la precisa e turbata enciclopedia dell’infanzia, la ricognizione dei volti, dei nomi, delle figure e degli eventi con i quali la magia infantile dà un’immagine ai propri indicibili e indefinibili struggimenti.” (dall’introduzione di Claudio Magris)
In un alone d’oro e di miele, simile a una divinità pastorale, la signora Ljubanarov stava al cancello del giardino contro lo sfondo del fogliame autunnale che aveva i toni dello zafferano e del legno di sandalo. Chiusa nell’involucro teso della pelle, personificazione del mistero di una carnalità pregna di sangue e di calore, respirava e occhieggiava in mezzo a uno scenario fastoso, intessuto di luce, d’aria e di colori, di una profondità trasparente, nel quale venivano a raccogliersi a stormi, con strida grigie e rotte, i più terrestri degli uccelli, le cornacchie. Stava là nello splendore perfetto del frutto maturo, il viso striato dall’oro fino che filtrava attraverso il fogliame già rado e annegava nell’ombra calda della sua pelle, come se i fuochi di un antico sole piovessero sulla superficie di uno stagno nascosto tra le querce nel mistero dei giunchi: i capelli neri inanellati in una corona compatta che le scendeva fin sopra gli occhi di topazio; le labbra piene e pallide rialzate agli angoli in un sorriso pieno di dolci adescamenti e sfumate in un richiamo acuto e sottile come un accordo di flauto. E intorno a lei tambureggiava la scoppiettante caduta delle castagne, dai cui ricci spinosi i frutti smaglianti uscivano e rotolavano ai suoi piedi come rustiche offerte sacrali da una cornucopia.
Io le davo nomi come “Madre del mais” – per la gloria delle sue spalle e del seno – “Stallona” perché mi sembrava la mitica sposa del nervoso stallone sul quale avevo visto cavalcare l’ussaro – o anche “Tetide” o “Nereide” – per la frusciante ricchezza dei suoi capelli, nei quali era come un ribollire di onde. Ma il più bello di tutti, il più divino, mi sembrava il nome che le aveva dato il signor Adamowski: “Bellissima svergognata” …
“’Un ermellino a Cernopol’ è la storia o meglio la precisa e turbata enciclopedia dell’infanzia, la ricognizione dei volti, dei nomi, delle figure e degli eventi con i quali la magia infantile dà un’immagine ai propri indicibili e indefinibili struggimenti.” (dall’introduzione di Claudio Magris)
In un alone d’oro e di miele, simile a una divinità pastorale, la signora Ljubanarov stava al cancello del giardino contro lo sfondo del fogliame autunnale che aveva i toni dello zafferano e del legno di sandalo. Chiusa nell’involucro teso della pelle, personificazione del mistero di una carnalità pregna di sangue e di calore, respirava e occhieggiava in mezzo a uno scenario fastoso, intessuto di luce, d’aria e di colori, di una profondità trasparente, nel quale venivano a raccogliersi a stormi, con strida grigie e rotte, i più terrestri degli uccelli, le cornacchie. Stava là nello splendore perfetto del frutto maturo, il viso striato dall’oro fino che filtrava attraverso il fogliame già rado e annegava nell’ombra calda della sua pelle, come se i fuochi di un antico sole piovessero sulla superficie di uno stagno nascosto tra le querce nel mistero dei giunchi: i capelli neri inanellati in una corona compatta che le scendeva fin sopra gli occhi di topazio; le labbra piene e pallide rialzate agli angoli in un sorriso pieno di dolci adescamenti e sfumate in un richiamo acuto e sottile come un accordo di flauto. E intorno a lei tambureggiava la scoppiettante caduta delle castagne, dai cui ricci spinosi i frutti smaglianti uscivano e rotolavano ai suoi piedi come rustiche offerte sacrali da una cornucopia.
Io le davo nomi come “Madre del mais” – per la gloria delle sue spalle e del seno – “Stallona” perché mi sembrava la mitica sposa del nervoso stallone sul quale avevo visto cavalcare l’ussaro – o anche “Tetide” o “Nereide” – per la frusciante ricchezza dei suoi capelli, nei quali era come un ribollire di onde. Ma il più bello di tutti, il più divino, mi sembrava il nome che le aveva dato il signor Adamowski: “Bellissima svergognata” …
March 22, 2013
I am here to lay down my qualifed love for An Ermine in Czernopol. The first thing I loved is the title. I especially loved to say it. I had no idea what an Ermine was and Czernopol didn't ring any bells either (neither did it in google or, apparently, in my spell check). But the back copy just about sold me - I'm a sucker for anything about Europe between/before the WWs and, added to that, the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire - sign me up. And the first couple of pages are phenomenal writing - following a drunk slowly making his way home, tapping the railroad tracks with a stick and reflecting on the isolation of modern life. The rest of the writing takes on a much more leisurely, hangout tone. It's a mesmerizing recreation of a town that doesn't exist anymore, filled with memorable characters, and telling anecdotes, making the town itself a character, one that changes over the course of the book, slowly adding gravity and seriousness to reflect the rise of the Nazis and the fall of a now-lost and inconceivable pan-European culture(which in some ways was even more connected than the EU of today.)
About half of the book concerns the black-humor-filled tragedy of Major Tildy - a humorless military officer, left behind by the recently defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, trying and failing to live by an obsolete moral code. The book is narrated, for the most part, in the first person plural by a group of two or three siblings. So, it's maybe more accurate to say it's about the children's experience of Czernopol as channeled through Major Tildy's inept attempts to survive in its sophisticated, multicultural, morally grey environment - and then, later, through the children's interactions with a host of other characters, drawn from all the various cultures and classes of the city.
The only disappointment was a sense of meandering plotlessness for most of the book. It takes forever to get anywhere, so don't read this book in a hurry. It's a hangout book - enjoy the quality and humor of the writing, the strange characters that all represent different aspects of the town's character, and especially Von Rezzori's amazing spot on observations of what it's like to be a child - the weird fascinations and often irrational feelings about things and people you have when you're still a human being in training.
About half of the book concerns the black-humor-filled tragedy of Major Tildy - a humorless military officer, left behind by the recently defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire, trying and failing to live by an obsolete moral code. The book is narrated, for the most part, in the first person plural by a group of two or three siblings. So, it's maybe more accurate to say it's about the children's experience of Czernopol as channeled through Major Tildy's inept attempts to survive in its sophisticated, multicultural, morally grey environment - and then, later, through the children's interactions with a host of other characters, drawn from all the various cultures and classes of the city.
The only disappointment was a sense of meandering plotlessness for most of the book. It takes forever to get anywhere, so don't read this book in a hurry. It's a hangout book - enjoy the quality and humor of the writing, the strange characters that all represent different aspects of the town's character, and especially Von Rezzori's amazing spot on observations of what it's like to be a child - the weird fascinations and often irrational feelings about things and people you have when you're still a human being in training.
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August 11, 2012An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori (Trans. from the German by Philip Boehm). New York Review Books Classics (2011).
Having read Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, I knew I was in for a treat when I bought An Ermine in Czernopol. Like his other books, this one too is largely autobiographical, though it is written as if it were a novel. No doubt, for the sophisticated Rezzori, the current distinctions between “memoir” and ���fiction” would have been laughable. In fact, in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the narrator states that he doesn’t differentiate between reality and fiction, and often mixes things from other people’s lives with his own. The unspecified genre of An Ermine in Czernopol is part of its originality, and not simply because it mixes memoir and fiction, but because of the way it does so: written in an apparently shapeless way, the narrative seems to be nothing more than the writer’s random memories. For example, when he introduces a character and sketches the role (s)he will play in the story, he also tells us how that character will end. He is not concerned at all with what passes for one of the main rules of storytelling, suspense. At a closer look, however, it becomes clear that the each chapter is centered on a specific character. The shapelessness is only an illusion created by the author, who instead of unspooling a single thread has constructed his story in many layers.
Like Rezzori’s other books, An Ermine in Czernopol is set in his native province of Bucovina. Bucovina had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 (a few years after Rezzori’s birth) when it was added to Romania, and it now belongs to Ukraine. The portraits Rezzori draws of the particular species of individuals living in the province of Bucovina in the 1920s are the best representation of his genius. Having lived in Romania—albeit at a very different historical time—I can testify that this species, for which wit was at the top of hierarchical values and “lowliness was never a fault,” is not simply a fantastical creation of a writer with great imagination: it does exist. However, the amazing world of Czernopol—with its mixture of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Gypsies, Romanians, and other ethnicities that are now extinguished, such as the Ruthens (most of them peasants who lived in a very traditional way)—has disappeared. Czernopol is a barely veiled version of Cernautzi (its Romanian name—Cernivtsi in Ukrainian, Chernovtsy in Russian and Czernowitz in German and Yiddish). In fact, in one instance the writer slips and calls the city by its real name. The city is brought to life with a descriptive power unequaled in anything else I’ve read.
The main character here being the city itself, the “plot” of the “story” is almost irrelevant. But there is a plot, which is narrated in the voice of a child (presumably, young Rezzori), though the voice doesn’t have the “innocence” one usually associates with childhood, but rather the wisdom and knowledge of adulthood. The child gains this knowledge in a series of narrations by other characters with whom he comes in contact. The pronoun used by Rezzori is “we”—a curious choice, which sometimes includes the narrator’s sister, Tanya, but at other times is hard to explain. Who is “we”? Its usage is reminiscent of the French impersonal pronoun on, which often appears in Proust (with whom Rezzori has much in common). Like Proust, Rezzori often starts a sentence by describing the feeling of his protagonist, and then turns it into a generalization about human beings. The grammatical shift (to “we” or on) allows the story to move from the particular to the universal, and thus to acquire the power of myth.
What could be called the book’s plot is what the child hears and patches together from the adults around him. Tildy, a major of Hungarian (and possibly German) origin, who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army and is now enlisted in the nationalist Romanian army, is the main character. He is the symbol of the now defunct Empire, but also of a system of values that are absent in Czernopol: honor and a high sense of justice. He also happens to be the ideal physical representation of what today we would call a role model for the child-narrator. A handsome, mysterious hussar, Tildy always acts in accordance with an aristocratic code of values for which the city of Czernopol, which only values wit and laughter, has no use.
The underlying social and historical context may be difficult for an American reader to understand because of the complicated ethnic relations in the Bucovina of that era. To oversimplify, Tildy is to a large extent the victim of Romanian nationalism. But, like all heroes, he is also the victim of something that belongs only to him (call it “greatness”) and sets him apart from the society in which he lives. Married to Tamara, a woman just as enigmatic as he, and who suffers, apparently, from a combination of depression and drug abuse, he challenges to a duel a series of Romanians who have insulted both his wife and sister-in-law. The latter is another fascinating character, a beautiful woman who, in spite of being married, is extremely “generous” to all the males in town. For defending the honor of these women, to the people of Czernopol Major Tildy is a fool without a sense of humor. To the narrator Tildy is a character from a vanished world who, in a town like Czernopol, can only meet a tragic end.
The final chapter, “Love and Death of the Ermine,” is masterly in the way it shows Tildy’s demise not as heroic but as pure grotesque. In a city in which the conflict between the hero and the others is a conflict between two systems of a different nature (justice, an ethical value, and wit, an esthetic value), the result can only be grotesque. And the only way the tragic could manifest itself in an amoral city (that is, a city that opposes to the idea of justice the idea of wit) is through the grotesque.
The chapter takes place in a cheap dive with the pretentious and ridiculous name “Etablissement Mon Repos.” Here, Major Tildy and his brother-in-law (a former Professor of Latin who is an alcoholic) drown their sorrows in the company of a young prostitute, Mititika (“the Little One”). The description of this prostitute, the mixture of cheapness and vulgarity but also of beauty and innocence, and of her interaction with Tildy is extraordinary. They fall in love, but this love is as grotesque as its setting. In the morning, as they walk together with the drunken brother-in-law who keeps quoting Latin authors, Tildy saves him from an oncoming streetcar with broken brakes and Tildy is killed. The novel ends, symbolically, with the scene of his body covered by the prostitute’s ermine coat, whose whiteness is soon soaked in blood.
Gregor von Rezzori may be the greatest writer you’ve never heard of.
Having read Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, I knew I was in for a treat when I bought An Ermine in Czernopol. Like his other books, this one too is largely autobiographical, though it is written as if it were a novel. No doubt, for the sophisticated Rezzori, the current distinctions between “memoir” and ���fiction” would have been laughable. In fact, in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the narrator states that he doesn’t differentiate between reality and fiction, and often mixes things from other people’s lives with his own. The unspecified genre of An Ermine in Czernopol is part of its originality, and not simply because it mixes memoir and fiction, but because of the way it does so: written in an apparently shapeless way, the narrative seems to be nothing more than the writer’s random memories. For example, when he introduces a character and sketches the role (s)he will play in the story, he also tells us how that character will end. He is not concerned at all with what passes for one of the main rules of storytelling, suspense. At a closer look, however, it becomes clear that the each chapter is centered on a specific character. The shapelessness is only an illusion created by the author, who instead of unspooling a single thread has constructed his story in many layers.
Like Rezzori’s other books, An Ermine in Czernopol is set in his native province of Bucovina. Bucovina had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 (a few years after Rezzori’s birth) when it was added to Romania, and it now belongs to Ukraine. The portraits Rezzori draws of the particular species of individuals living in the province of Bucovina in the 1920s are the best representation of his genius. Having lived in Romania—albeit at a very different historical time—I can testify that this species, for which wit was at the top of hierarchical values and “lowliness was never a fault,” is not simply a fantastical creation of a writer with great imagination: it does exist. However, the amazing world of Czernopol—with its mixture of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Gypsies, Romanians, and other ethnicities that are now extinguished, such as the Ruthens (most of them peasants who lived in a very traditional way)—has disappeared. Czernopol is a barely veiled version of Cernautzi (its Romanian name—Cernivtsi in Ukrainian, Chernovtsy in Russian and Czernowitz in German and Yiddish). In fact, in one instance the writer slips and calls the city by its real name. The city is brought to life with a descriptive power unequaled in anything else I’ve read.
The main character here being the city itself, the “plot” of the “story” is almost irrelevant. But there is a plot, which is narrated in the voice of a child (presumably, young Rezzori), though the voice doesn’t have the “innocence” one usually associates with childhood, but rather the wisdom and knowledge of adulthood. The child gains this knowledge in a series of narrations by other characters with whom he comes in contact. The pronoun used by Rezzori is “we”—a curious choice, which sometimes includes the narrator’s sister, Tanya, but at other times is hard to explain. Who is “we”? Its usage is reminiscent of the French impersonal pronoun on, which often appears in Proust (with whom Rezzori has much in common). Like Proust, Rezzori often starts a sentence by describing the feeling of his protagonist, and then turns it into a generalization about human beings. The grammatical shift (to “we” or on) allows the story to move from the particular to the universal, and thus to acquire the power of myth.
What could be called the book’s plot is what the child hears and patches together from the adults around him. Tildy, a major of Hungarian (and possibly German) origin, who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army and is now enlisted in the nationalist Romanian army, is the main character. He is the symbol of the now defunct Empire, but also of a system of values that are absent in Czernopol: honor and a high sense of justice. He also happens to be the ideal physical representation of what today we would call a role model for the child-narrator. A handsome, mysterious hussar, Tildy always acts in accordance with an aristocratic code of values for which the city of Czernopol, which only values wit and laughter, has no use.
The underlying social and historical context may be difficult for an American reader to understand because of the complicated ethnic relations in the Bucovina of that era. To oversimplify, Tildy is to a large extent the victim of Romanian nationalism. But, like all heroes, he is also the victim of something that belongs only to him (call it “greatness”) and sets him apart from the society in which he lives. Married to Tamara, a woman just as enigmatic as he, and who suffers, apparently, from a combination of depression and drug abuse, he challenges to a duel a series of Romanians who have insulted both his wife and sister-in-law. The latter is another fascinating character, a beautiful woman who, in spite of being married, is extremely “generous” to all the males in town. For defending the honor of these women, to the people of Czernopol Major Tildy is a fool without a sense of humor. To the narrator Tildy is a character from a vanished world who, in a town like Czernopol, can only meet a tragic end.
The final chapter, “Love and Death of the Ermine,” is masterly in the way it shows Tildy’s demise not as heroic but as pure grotesque. In a city in which the conflict between the hero and the others is a conflict between two systems of a different nature (justice, an ethical value, and wit, an esthetic value), the result can only be grotesque. And the only way the tragic could manifest itself in an amoral city (that is, a city that opposes to the idea of justice the idea of wit) is through the grotesque.
The chapter takes place in a cheap dive with the pretentious and ridiculous name “Etablissement Mon Repos.” Here, Major Tildy and his brother-in-law (a former Professor of Latin who is an alcoholic) drown their sorrows in the company of a young prostitute, Mititika (“the Little One”). The description of this prostitute, the mixture of cheapness and vulgarity but also of beauty and innocence, and of her interaction with Tildy is extraordinary. They fall in love, but this love is as grotesque as its setting. In the morning, as they walk together with the drunken brother-in-law who keeps quoting Latin authors, Tildy saves him from an oncoming streetcar with broken brakes and Tildy is killed. The novel ends, symbolically, with the scene of his body covered by the prostitute’s ermine coat, whose whiteness is soon soaked in blood.
Gregor von Rezzori may be the greatest writer you’ve never heard of.
February 17, 2019
Quando l’estrema periferia diventa il centro
Un ermellino a Cernopol è la prima opera di Gregor von Rezzori che ho letto, e devo dire che si è trattato di una lettura importante, che mi ha permesso di scoprire un autore che – almeno da quanto ho potuto dedurre da questo romanzo - merita un posto non del tutto secondario nel panorama della letteratura europea del novecento. Non è un caso che utilizzi termini generali quali europeo e novecento per posizionare questo romanzo e il suo autore: non appena si cerca infatti di stringere l’inquadratura per cercare di classificarli meglio sorgono infatti alcune difficoltà.
La prima riguarda la nazionalità dell’autore: von Rezzori nacque nel 1914 a Czernowitz, storica capitale della Bucovina, allora remota ma vivace città facente parte dell’Impero Austro-Ungarico, che dopo la prima guerra mondiale e la conseguente dissoluzione dell’impero entrò a far parte del Regno di Romania e quindi, nel secondo dopoguerra, dell’URSS: oggi il suo nome è Černivci ed è situata in Ucraina, a pochi chilometri dal confine rumeno. La sua famiglia era di antiche origini siciliane, ed egli fu, in relazione alle vicende della sua città natale, dapprima suddito dell’Impero, quindi cittadino rumeno, in seguito cittadino sovietico, apolide nel primo dopoguerra per ottenere poi la cittadinanza austriaca, vivendo però a partire dagli anni ‘60 prevalentemente tra Roma e Parigi e quindi stabilirsi definitivamente, con la moglie italiana (anch’essa nobile), in Toscana, dove morì nel 1998. Anche se è indubbia l’appartenenza di Rezzori all’area culturale tedesca (non fosse altro per la lingua nella quale scrive le sue opere) è altrettanto certo che la movimentata vita di questo raffinato scrittore, di questo aristocratico viveur, elegante e affascinante, che parlava correntemente otto lingue, ci indica che il suo essere austriaco si diluiva al contatto con le molte altre culture europee con cui aveva avuto contatti non occasionali, come in modo curioso fisiognomicamente dimostrato dal fatto che invecchiando mostrò una progressiva straordinaria (o inquietante?) somiglianza con Gianni Agnelli.
La seconda problematica nasce dal fatto che, pur essendo essenzialmente Rezzori uno scrittore del secondo dopoguerra (il primo romanzo che attirò l’attenzione della critica su di lui – le Storie di Maghrebinia - è del 1953) il nocciolo duro della sua produzione letteraria è legato alla descrizione del suo mondo d’origine, quello dell’est europeo, nel periodo tra le due guerre mondiali; e non si tratta di una semplice ambientazione nel passato ma – almeno per quanto posso giudicare da questa prima lettura – della vera e propria rievocazione di un mondo scomparso, condotta anche avvalendosi di una precisa scelta stilistica, cosicché risulta veramente difficile etichettare Rezzori come uno scrittore del secondo novecento. Questa difficoltà di classificazione – non fine a sé stessa, se si pensa quale immensa cesura rappresentò la seconda guerra mondiale per la cultura europea – è maggiore che nel caso di altri scrittori austriaci che condividono con Rezzori questo sguardo all’indietro, come, tra quelli che conosco, Alexander Lernet-Holenia o Heimito von Doderer, perché Rezzori è di una ventina d’anni più giovane di loro: ha solo quattro anni quando l’impero crolla e una trentina alla fine della seconda guerra. Per lui quindi il secondo dopoguerra non è una sorta di appendice più o meno lunga di una vicenda esistenziale e culturale essenzialmente immersa nella prima parte del secolo, ma il periodo in cui di fatto diviene scrittore (oltre che autore radiofonico, sceneggiatore e attore cinematografico): questo suo rivolgersi al passato, avendo quindi il sapore di una precisa scelta e non di un obbligo biografico, risulta a mio avviso un elemento estremamente significativo nel contesto della sua poetica, che lo differenzia sostanzialmente da molti autori a lui contemporanei.
Un ermellino a Cernopol, edito nel 1958, è uno dei romanzi più significativi dell’autore, e anche uno di quelli in cui si riscontrano appieno le problematicità di classificazione sopra accennate.
Protagonista assoluta del romanzo è la città di Cernopol, capoluogo della Teskovina, nomi immaginari ma nei quali è agevole riconoscere la città e la regione nelle quali Rezzori nacque e dove visse sino ai vent’anni.
Le vicende narrate si svolgono nel periodo dopo la prima guerra mondiale, quando la città è divenuta parte del regno di Romania: Cernopol è un crogiuolo di etnie: ucraini, galiziani, ruteni, lipoveni, tedeschi, ebrei e zingari convivono in una città di circa 100.000 abitanti, non senza tensioni ma con una leggerezza ed uno scetticismo di fondo che riescono a sublimare le differenze etniche e di classe con l’ironia e il sarcasmo, espressi esteriormente attraverso il riso: in una delle prime pagine del romanzo, dedicate a descrivere il paesaggio urbano e umano entro il quale si svolgeranno le vicende del romanzo, Rezzori ci dice che a Cernopol si rideva di tutto, che il riso era elevato ad arte, non era quasi mai liberatorio o fine a sé stesso, ma derivava dall’atteggiamento comune nei confronti della vita quotidiana della città.
Questo universo - come detto ad un tempo urbano ed umano - postbellico in cui tuttavia sopravvive, sempre più a stento, lo spirito multinazionale del defunto impero e prendono forma le prime avvisaglie delle tragedie che seguiranno, ci viene raccontato da un soggetto complesso: l’io narrante è infatti un uomo, figlio di una famiglia bene della città, che molti anni dopo rievoca la sua infanzia a Cernopol. L’elemento di complessità è dato dal fatto che egli, riferendosi a quel periodo, non usa quasi mai l’io, ma il noi, perché accanto a lui sono testimoni e interpreti delle vicende narrate anche i suoi fratelli, di cui tra l’altro mi pare non venga mai specificato il numero, e dei quali conosciamo solo la sorellina Tanja. La domanda che sorge spontanea è quale sia stato il motivo che ha spinto Rezzori ad immaginare un io narrante che assume la voce di alcuni bambini che anni prima hanno vissuto collettivamente le vicende del romanzo. La risposta, tutto sommato ovvia, è che l’autore abbia voluto in questo modo rimarcare come il romanzo sia da leggersi come una metafora della perdita dell’innocenza della città di Cernopol, che è ad un tempo estrema periferia d’Europa e centro simbolico di ciò che, agli occhi dell’autore, l’Europa è stata. La perdita collettiva dell’innocenza primigenia della città/società è espressa con forza dal fatto che degli avvenimenti non è testimone un singolo bambino, ma un soggetto collettivo, verrebbe da dire l’infanzia in quanto tale, e che quegli stessi avvenimenti determinano l’uscita per molti versi traumatica dall’infanzia di questi testimoni, analogamente a quanto succede alla città. Questo complesso meccanismo narrativo ha un indubbio fascino letterario, perché permette all’autore di far vedere al lettore gli avvenimenti con gli occhi dei bambini, salvo reinterpretarli e filtrarli come io narrante anziano quando la loro completa comprensione richiede l’intervento dell’adulto. Ma quali sono questi avvenimenti?
Va subito detto che il romanzo è pieno di personaggi, di digressioni e di storie diverse, tra le quali tuttavia ne emergono per importanza quantomeno due, che peraltro si incrociano in più punti: quella del maggiore Tildy e quella del vecchio Pasckano. Tildy è l’ermellino del titolo del romanzo: è un ussaro, già nell’esercito austroungarico ed ora in quello rumeno. Nessuno sa di dove sia originario, forse dell’Ungheria. Ha sposato Tamara, figlia di una principessa e del vecchio Pasckano, una donna non bella e che vive isolata a causa di misteriose malattie dalle quali si cura facendo uso di morfina. Il maggiore Tildy rappresenta uno dei pochi elementi di continuità tra il mondo austroungarico e quello postbellico, nel senso che il suo universo valoriale è legato al passato. Nella Cernopol come detto ormai disincantata e cinica, pettegola e volgare, ma proprio per questo viva, del primo dopoguerra Tildy, con la sua uniforme impeccabile, con l’inalterabile espressione inglese vive ancora seguendo i dogmi e i formalismi che costituivano l’essenza del vecchio ordine: sorta di novello Don Chisciotte, in un mondo in cui la cavalleria non esiste più non esita a sfidare a duello chi insinua dubbi sulla moralità della moglie e della cognata, compresi i suoi stessi superiori, figure simpaticamente volgari o cinicamente avide di potere che rappresentano i tempi nuovi. Pagherà le conseguenze dei valori che lo guidano e che pochi ormai riconoscono come tali, anche perché è inevitabile che nel mondo nuovo quei valori, il senso dell’onore e del dovere, non siano più tali ma si riducano ad un senso di superiorità etica e morale solo esteriore, stampato sulla faccia, quella stessa faccia che il maggiore Tildy perderà quando li abbandonerà per scendere sulla terra.
Il contraltare di Tildy è Sandrel Pasckano, selvaggio, astuto e spietato self-made-man che non ha mai avuto altro valore che quello dell’accumulazione di denaro. Commerciante di legname che non sa scrivere, ha accumulato sin dai tempi dell’impero una immensa fortuna attraverso speculazioni e truffe, giungendo a sposare una principessa Sturdza, che ha costretto a convivere a lungo con la sua amante contadina: alla morte quasi contemporanea delle due, ha eretto nei boschi nei pressi di Cernopol un mausoleo, riproduzione in piccolo del Taj Mahal.
Se Tildy è la personificazione dei valori formali su cui si basava la Kakania, la storia di Pasckano dimostra come questi valori fossero effettivamente solo formali, e che anche in quell’epoca i veri valori dominanti erano quelli legati al potere economico e alla capacità di arrampicarsi senza scrupoli lungo la scala sociale.
Accanto a queste due storie principali il romanzo ce ne narra molte altre, alcune delle quali molto divertenti, grazie alla prosa raffinata e allo stesso tempo scoppiettante di Rezzori, che ci restituiscono l’affresco di una città nella quale si riassume un mondo disfatto che sta cercando nuovi equilibri ma che cova in sé il germe delle ulteriori catastrofi cui andrà incontro dopo poco.
Particolarmente riuscite sono a mio avviso le figure del giovane signor Alexianu, precettore per un certo periodo dei ragazzi/narratori, e del suo mentore, il filosofo Nastase. La confusa filosofia di Nastase basata sulla rifondazione del cristianesimo su altre basi, che il giovane Alexianu espone alla signorina Iljutz, la sarta gobba della famiglia dei bambini, e le reazioni piene di doloroso buon senso di quest’ultima sono pagine splendide quanto a capacità di mettere alla berlina la vacuità di un certo mondo intellettuale.
Ma è con lo spirito tedesco, con la pretesa superiorità morale ed intellettuale, in realtà generatrice di tragedie, di quella cultura alla quale pure appartiene che Rezzori riserva le frecciate più feroci, senza risparmiare una pregnante critica al militarismo che ha sempre accompagnato la kultur.
La presentazione dei tre tipi rappresentativi dei tedeschi di Cernopol, l’antisemita professor Feuer, dalla straordinaria somiglianza con Strindberg, il giornalista Adamowski, che con una praticità tutta tedesca distrugge l’immagine quasi magica che i bambini si erano fatti della cancellata della loro villa, e il rozzo ed insensibile Romoald Kunzelmann, capace di atterrire i bambini con l’indifferenza crudele con cui tratta un cavallo morto, ci consegna in poche pagine, anche attraverso la loro caratterizzazione fisica quasi caricaturale, un efficacissimo ritratto di vizi dello spirito tedesco che ritroviamo in gran parte immutati ancora oggi.
In un altro capitolo, intitolato Metamorfosi dell’immagine della «bella» guerra, Rezzori si fa a mio avviso emulo di Karl Kraus, che non a caso è più oltre citato nel romanzo, fornendoci una immagine estremamente potente del militarismo tedesco: la rappresentazione dei generali tedeschi, in particolare Hindenburg e Ludendorff, e del loro rapporto con le truppe, la caratterizzazione seriale dei soldati tedeschi, con le facce tutte uguali (il tema della faccia è centrale nel romanzo) e soprattutto il passo nel quale esemplifica la parabola della guerra moderna come il passaggio da un ordine perfetto di truppe in marcia ad un temporaneo disordine durante la battaglia per pervenire ad un ordine di grado ancora superiore nelle file di croci bianche perfettamente allineate, se forse non hanno la lucidità analitica di molte delle considerazioni di Kraus sulla guerra posseggono una indubbia carica in grado di evocare l’essenza della concezione morale della guerra da parte delle élite tedesche.
Brevemente è necessario citare un altro personaggio chiave del romanzo, il prefetto Tarangolian, il rappresentante del nuovo potere che frequenta la casa dei bambini e commenta pacatamente e argutamente gli avvenimenti che si susseguono nel romanzo. Egli rappresenta di fatto l’illusione che il precario equilibrio che si è stabilito a Cernopol dopo la guerra, quel momento sospeso tra una catastrofe e l’altra, a cui vanno le maggiori simpatie di Rezzori, possa durare nel tempo. ”Io non ho mai voluto mutare nulla di Cernopol”, afferma in un lungo e rivelatore monologo nel momento in cui deve lasciare la città e saluta la famiglia dei bambini, significativamente subito dopo la malattia che sancisce la definitiva uscita dall’infanzia del narratore e dopo il primo pogrom che ha causato quaranta morti.
Questa simpatia per la Cernopol di mezzo, per un mondo che rappresenta sia un dopo sia un prima, pur con tutte le sue bassezze e le sue meschinità, anche se rappresenta a mio avviso il punto più debole del romanzo, figlio probabilmente di un miscuglio tra una buona dose di paternalismo aristocratico e nostalgia per la giovinezza perduta (ed ecco che forse si spiega così la scelta dell’autore di parlare del passato), la perdoniamo volentieri a Rezzori, che ci ha regalato con Un ermellino a Cernopol più di quattrocento pagine di una prosa densa, brillante e piena, di una storia carica di significati.
Se un appunto si può fare al romanzo è forse quello di essere troppo ambizioso, di voler mettere troppa carne al fuoco: alcuni personaggi e situazioni, delle moltissime che Rezzori presenta, si perdono nel nulla oppure sono solo abbozzati. Ma anche questo perdoniamo al romanzo, perché forse non vi era altra possibilità per trasmetterci il grande affresco di un mondo racchiuso in una remota, brutta città situata alla estrema periferia d’Europa, della quale grazie a queste pagine diventa l’emblema.
Un ermellino a Cernopol è la prima opera di Gregor von Rezzori che ho letto, e devo dire che si è trattato di una lettura importante, che mi ha permesso di scoprire un autore che – almeno da quanto ho potuto dedurre da questo romanzo - merita un posto non del tutto secondario nel panorama della letteratura europea del novecento. Non è un caso che utilizzi termini generali quali europeo e novecento per posizionare questo romanzo e il suo autore: non appena si cerca infatti di stringere l’inquadratura per cercare di classificarli meglio sorgono infatti alcune difficoltà.
La prima riguarda la nazionalità dell’autore: von Rezzori nacque nel 1914 a Czernowitz, storica capitale della Bucovina, allora remota ma vivace città facente parte dell’Impero Austro-Ungarico, che dopo la prima guerra mondiale e la conseguente dissoluzione dell’impero entrò a far parte del Regno di Romania e quindi, nel secondo dopoguerra, dell’URSS: oggi il suo nome è Černivci ed è situata in Ucraina, a pochi chilometri dal confine rumeno. La sua famiglia era di antiche origini siciliane, ed egli fu, in relazione alle vicende della sua città natale, dapprima suddito dell’Impero, quindi cittadino rumeno, in seguito cittadino sovietico, apolide nel primo dopoguerra per ottenere poi la cittadinanza austriaca, vivendo però a partire dagli anni ‘60 prevalentemente tra Roma e Parigi e quindi stabilirsi definitivamente, con la moglie italiana (anch’essa nobile), in Toscana, dove morì nel 1998. Anche se è indubbia l’appartenenza di Rezzori all’area culturale tedesca (non fosse altro per la lingua nella quale scrive le sue opere) è altrettanto certo che la movimentata vita di questo raffinato scrittore, di questo aristocratico viveur, elegante e affascinante, che parlava correntemente otto lingue, ci indica che il suo essere austriaco si diluiva al contatto con le molte altre culture europee con cui aveva avuto contatti non occasionali, come in modo curioso fisiognomicamente dimostrato dal fatto che invecchiando mostrò una progressiva straordinaria (o inquietante?) somiglianza con Gianni Agnelli.
La seconda problematica nasce dal fatto che, pur essendo essenzialmente Rezzori uno scrittore del secondo dopoguerra (il primo romanzo che attirò l’attenzione della critica su di lui – le Storie di Maghrebinia - è del 1953) il nocciolo duro della sua produzione letteraria è legato alla descrizione del suo mondo d’origine, quello dell’est europeo, nel periodo tra le due guerre mondiali; e non si tratta di una semplice ambientazione nel passato ma – almeno per quanto posso giudicare da questa prima lettura – della vera e propria rievocazione di un mondo scomparso, condotta anche avvalendosi di una precisa scelta stilistica, cosicché risulta veramente difficile etichettare Rezzori come uno scrittore del secondo novecento. Questa difficoltà di classificazione – non fine a sé stessa, se si pensa quale immensa cesura rappresentò la seconda guerra mondiale per la cultura europea – è maggiore che nel caso di altri scrittori austriaci che condividono con Rezzori questo sguardo all’indietro, come, tra quelli che conosco, Alexander Lernet-Holenia o Heimito von Doderer, perché Rezzori è di una ventina d’anni più giovane di loro: ha solo quattro anni quando l’impero crolla e una trentina alla fine della seconda guerra. Per lui quindi il secondo dopoguerra non è una sorta di appendice più o meno lunga di una vicenda esistenziale e culturale essenzialmente immersa nella prima parte del secolo, ma il periodo in cui di fatto diviene scrittore (oltre che autore radiofonico, sceneggiatore e attore cinematografico): questo suo rivolgersi al passato, avendo quindi il sapore di una precisa scelta e non di un obbligo biografico, risulta a mio avviso un elemento estremamente significativo nel contesto della sua poetica, che lo differenzia sostanzialmente da molti autori a lui contemporanei.
Un ermellino a Cernopol, edito nel 1958, è uno dei romanzi più significativi dell’autore, e anche uno di quelli in cui si riscontrano appieno le problematicità di classificazione sopra accennate.
Protagonista assoluta del romanzo è la città di Cernopol, capoluogo della Teskovina, nomi immaginari ma nei quali è agevole riconoscere la città e la regione nelle quali Rezzori nacque e dove visse sino ai vent’anni.
Le vicende narrate si svolgono nel periodo dopo la prima guerra mondiale, quando la città è divenuta parte del regno di Romania: Cernopol è un crogiuolo di etnie: ucraini, galiziani, ruteni, lipoveni, tedeschi, ebrei e zingari convivono in una città di circa 100.000 abitanti, non senza tensioni ma con una leggerezza ed uno scetticismo di fondo che riescono a sublimare le differenze etniche e di classe con l’ironia e il sarcasmo, espressi esteriormente attraverso il riso: in una delle prime pagine del romanzo, dedicate a descrivere il paesaggio urbano e umano entro il quale si svolgeranno le vicende del romanzo, Rezzori ci dice che a Cernopol si rideva di tutto, che il riso era elevato ad arte, non era quasi mai liberatorio o fine a sé stesso, ma derivava dall’atteggiamento comune nei confronti della vita quotidiana della città.
Questo universo - come detto ad un tempo urbano ed umano - postbellico in cui tuttavia sopravvive, sempre più a stento, lo spirito multinazionale del defunto impero e prendono forma le prime avvisaglie delle tragedie che seguiranno, ci viene raccontato da un soggetto complesso: l’io narrante è infatti un uomo, figlio di una famiglia bene della città, che molti anni dopo rievoca la sua infanzia a Cernopol. L’elemento di complessità è dato dal fatto che egli, riferendosi a quel periodo, non usa quasi mai l’io, ma il noi, perché accanto a lui sono testimoni e interpreti delle vicende narrate anche i suoi fratelli, di cui tra l’altro mi pare non venga mai specificato il numero, e dei quali conosciamo solo la sorellina Tanja. La domanda che sorge spontanea è quale sia stato il motivo che ha spinto Rezzori ad immaginare un io narrante che assume la voce di alcuni bambini che anni prima hanno vissuto collettivamente le vicende del romanzo. La risposta, tutto sommato ovvia, è che l’autore abbia voluto in questo modo rimarcare come il romanzo sia da leggersi come una metafora della perdita dell’innocenza della città di Cernopol, che è ad un tempo estrema periferia d’Europa e centro simbolico di ciò che, agli occhi dell’autore, l’Europa è stata. La perdita collettiva dell’innocenza primigenia della città/società è espressa con forza dal fatto che degli avvenimenti non è testimone un singolo bambino, ma un soggetto collettivo, verrebbe da dire l’infanzia in quanto tale, e che quegli stessi avvenimenti determinano l’uscita per molti versi traumatica dall’infanzia di questi testimoni, analogamente a quanto succede alla città. Questo complesso meccanismo narrativo ha un indubbio fascino letterario, perché permette all’autore di far vedere al lettore gli avvenimenti con gli occhi dei bambini, salvo reinterpretarli e filtrarli come io narrante anziano quando la loro completa comprensione richiede l’intervento dell’adulto. Ma quali sono questi avvenimenti?
Va subito detto che il romanzo è pieno di personaggi, di digressioni e di storie diverse, tra le quali tuttavia ne emergono per importanza quantomeno due, che peraltro si incrociano in più punti: quella del maggiore Tildy e quella del vecchio Pasckano. Tildy è l’ermellino del titolo del romanzo: è un ussaro, già nell’esercito austroungarico ed ora in quello rumeno. Nessuno sa di dove sia originario, forse dell’Ungheria. Ha sposato Tamara, figlia di una principessa e del vecchio Pasckano, una donna non bella e che vive isolata a causa di misteriose malattie dalle quali si cura facendo uso di morfina. Il maggiore Tildy rappresenta uno dei pochi elementi di continuità tra il mondo austroungarico e quello postbellico, nel senso che il suo universo valoriale è legato al passato. Nella Cernopol come detto ormai disincantata e cinica, pettegola e volgare, ma proprio per questo viva, del primo dopoguerra Tildy, con la sua uniforme impeccabile, con l’inalterabile espressione inglese vive ancora seguendo i dogmi e i formalismi che costituivano l’essenza del vecchio ordine: sorta di novello Don Chisciotte, in un mondo in cui la cavalleria non esiste più non esita a sfidare a duello chi insinua dubbi sulla moralità della moglie e della cognata, compresi i suoi stessi superiori, figure simpaticamente volgari o cinicamente avide di potere che rappresentano i tempi nuovi. Pagherà le conseguenze dei valori che lo guidano e che pochi ormai riconoscono come tali, anche perché è inevitabile che nel mondo nuovo quei valori, il senso dell’onore e del dovere, non siano più tali ma si riducano ad un senso di superiorità etica e morale solo esteriore, stampato sulla faccia, quella stessa faccia che il maggiore Tildy perderà quando li abbandonerà per scendere sulla terra.
Il contraltare di Tildy è Sandrel Pasckano, selvaggio, astuto e spietato self-made-man che non ha mai avuto altro valore che quello dell’accumulazione di denaro. Commerciante di legname che non sa scrivere, ha accumulato sin dai tempi dell’impero una immensa fortuna attraverso speculazioni e truffe, giungendo a sposare una principessa Sturdza, che ha costretto a convivere a lungo con la sua amante contadina: alla morte quasi contemporanea delle due, ha eretto nei boschi nei pressi di Cernopol un mausoleo, riproduzione in piccolo del Taj Mahal.
Se Tildy è la personificazione dei valori formali su cui si basava la Kakania, la storia di Pasckano dimostra come questi valori fossero effettivamente solo formali, e che anche in quell’epoca i veri valori dominanti erano quelli legati al potere economico e alla capacità di arrampicarsi senza scrupoli lungo la scala sociale.
Accanto a queste due storie principali il romanzo ce ne narra molte altre, alcune delle quali molto divertenti, grazie alla prosa raffinata e allo stesso tempo scoppiettante di Rezzori, che ci restituiscono l’affresco di una città nella quale si riassume un mondo disfatto che sta cercando nuovi equilibri ma che cova in sé il germe delle ulteriori catastrofi cui andrà incontro dopo poco.
Particolarmente riuscite sono a mio avviso le figure del giovane signor Alexianu, precettore per un certo periodo dei ragazzi/narratori, e del suo mentore, il filosofo Nastase. La confusa filosofia di Nastase basata sulla rifondazione del cristianesimo su altre basi, che il giovane Alexianu espone alla signorina Iljutz, la sarta gobba della famiglia dei bambini, e le reazioni piene di doloroso buon senso di quest’ultima sono pagine splendide quanto a capacità di mettere alla berlina la vacuità di un certo mondo intellettuale.
Ma è con lo spirito tedesco, con la pretesa superiorità morale ed intellettuale, in realtà generatrice di tragedie, di quella cultura alla quale pure appartiene che Rezzori riserva le frecciate più feroci, senza risparmiare una pregnante critica al militarismo che ha sempre accompagnato la kultur.
La presentazione dei tre tipi rappresentativi dei tedeschi di Cernopol, l’antisemita professor Feuer, dalla straordinaria somiglianza con Strindberg, il giornalista Adamowski, che con una praticità tutta tedesca distrugge l’immagine quasi magica che i bambini si erano fatti della cancellata della loro villa, e il rozzo ed insensibile Romoald Kunzelmann, capace di atterrire i bambini con l’indifferenza crudele con cui tratta un cavallo morto, ci consegna in poche pagine, anche attraverso la loro caratterizzazione fisica quasi caricaturale, un efficacissimo ritratto di vizi dello spirito tedesco che ritroviamo in gran parte immutati ancora oggi.
In un altro capitolo, intitolato Metamorfosi dell’immagine della «bella» guerra, Rezzori si fa a mio avviso emulo di Karl Kraus, che non a caso è più oltre citato nel romanzo, fornendoci una immagine estremamente potente del militarismo tedesco: la rappresentazione dei generali tedeschi, in particolare Hindenburg e Ludendorff, e del loro rapporto con le truppe, la caratterizzazione seriale dei soldati tedeschi, con le facce tutte uguali (il tema della faccia è centrale nel romanzo) e soprattutto il passo nel quale esemplifica la parabola della guerra moderna come il passaggio da un ordine perfetto di truppe in marcia ad un temporaneo disordine durante la battaglia per pervenire ad un ordine di grado ancora superiore nelle file di croci bianche perfettamente allineate, se forse non hanno la lucidità analitica di molte delle considerazioni di Kraus sulla guerra posseggono una indubbia carica in grado di evocare l’essenza della concezione morale della guerra da parte delle élite tedesche.
Brevemente è necessario citare un altro personaggio chiave del romanzo, il prefetto Tarangolian, il rappresentante del nuovo potere che frequenta la casa dei bambini e commenta pacatamente e argutamente gli avvenimenti che si susseguono nel romanzo. Egli rappresenta di fatto l’illusione che il precario equilibrio che si è stabilito a Cernopol dopo la guerra, quel momento sospeso tra una catastrofe e l’altra, a cui vanno le maggiori simpatie di Rezzori, possa durare nel tempo. ”Io non ho mai voluto mutare nulla di Cernopol”, afferma in un lungo e rivelatore monologo nel momento in cui deve lasciare la città e saluta la famiglia dei bambini, significativamente subito dopo la malattia che sancisce la definitiva uscita dall’infanzia del narratore e dopo il primo pogrom che ha causato quaranta morti.
Questa simpatia per la Cernopol di mezzo, per un mondo che rappresenta sia un dopo sia un prima, pur con tutte le sue bassezze e le sue meschinità, anche se rappresenta a mio avviso il punto più debole del romanzo, figlio probabilmente di un miscuglio tra una buona dose di paternalismo aristocratico e nostalgia per la giovinezza perduta (ed ecco che forse si spiega così la scelta dell’autore di parlare del passato), la perdoniamo volentieri a Rezzori, che ci ha regalato con Un ermellino a Cernopol più di quattrocento pagine di una prosa densa, brillante e piena, di una storia carica di significati.
Se un appunto si può fare al romanzo è forse quello di essere troppo ambizioso, di voler mettere troppa carne al fuoco: alcuni personaggi e situazioni, delle moltissime che Rezzori presenta, si perdono nel nulla oppure sono solo abbozzati. Ma anche questo perdoniamo al romanzo, perché forse non vi era altra possibilità per trasmetterci il grande affresco di un mondo racchiuso in una remota, brutta città situata alla estrema periferia d’Europa, della quale grazie a queste pagine diventa l’emblema.
June 26, 2012
An Ermine in Czernopol is a fictional testimonial of what life was like in the capital of Bucovina between the two 20th century world wars. Gregor Von Rezzori published it in German in 1963; this English translation only first became available in 2011.
This is a dense book—and most people won’t like it, I suspect, particularly in our current society with its accelerating attention deficit disorder, impatient demands for satisfaction, and requirements of speedy and blatant gratification. It takes time and thought to appreciate this book—people tend to have too little of both these days. Who will like this novel? People intrigued by the multicultural swirl of central Europe following World War I, sophisticated cynics with both a sense of humor and a paradoxical nostalgia for romanticism, students of 20th century German literature, fans of the quirky yet cultivated bildungsroman.
As I read this work I marveled at the detailed descriptions, the vivid crystallization of moments of epiphany, pain, or absurdity—and as can sometimes be the case, the collision of all three. Von Rezzori is a fascinating fellow in and of himself, a talented and insightful person with an unusual biographical vantage to draw upon, but kudos as well must be given to Philip Boehm for the lyrical and deep vocabulary of the translation—no small feat, given the confluence of dialects, languages, and cultures the book conveys and evaluates.
A way of life and world are disappearing while our narrator comes of age in an upper middle class German-speaking home. He tells the tale with the voice of an experienced and astute adult remembering with clarity those vivid impressions and distinctive individuals that shaped and peopled the world of Czernopol. This is not a novel to turn to for gripping plot, but rather for a series of snippets of interaction, a succession of character studies with occasional interplay between the individuals described. What powers the novel is its tone, an illuminated sense of the bittersweet, the tragicomedy of human existence, as the innocence of youth gives way for the narrator to the darker days so undeniably being foreshadowed, as heroic figures of an older order, such as Major Tildy, encounter machine guns targeting them from the windmills they might tilt against in Quixotic fashion. (Not literal machine guns, not literal windmills—and mind you, I use the term “heroic” quite loosely here, too.) Dark humor is what sets the citizens of Czernopol apart—they can and do laugh at themselves—well the wiser ones do—even as tolerance gives way to nationalism and ethnic purging.
This is a dense book—and most people won’t like it, I suspect, particularly in our current society with its accelerating attention deficit disorder, impatient demands for satisfaction, and requirements of speedy and blatant gratification. It takes time and thought to appreciate this book—people tend to have too little of both these days. Who will like this novel? People intrigued by the multicultural swirl of central Europe following World War I, sophisticated cynics with both a sense of humor and a paradoxical nostalgia for romanticism, students of 20th century German literature, fans of the quirky yet cultivated bildungsroman.
As I read this work I marveled at the detailed descriptions, the vivid crystallization of moments of epiphany, pain, or absurdity—and as can sometimes be the case, the collision of all three. Von Rezzori is a fascinating fellow in and of himself, a talented and insightful person with an unusual biographical vantage to draw upon, but kudos as well must be given to Philip Boehm for the lyrical and deep vocabulary of the translation—no small feat, given the confluence of dialects, languages, and cultures the book conveys and evaluates.
A way of life and world are disappearing while our narrator comes of age in an upper middle class German-speaking home. He tells the tale with the voice of an experienced and astute adult remembering with clarity those vivid impressions and distinctive individuals that shaped and peopled the world of Czernopol. This is not a novel to turn to for gripping plot, but rather for a series of snippets of interaction, a succession of character studies with occasional interplay between the individuals described. What powers the novel is its tone, an illuminated sense of the bittersweet, the tragicomedy of human existence, as the innocence of youth gives way for the narrator to the darker days so undeniably being foreshadowed, as heroic figures of an older order, such as Major Tildy, encounter machine guns targeting them from the windmills they might tilt against in Quixotic fashion. (Not literal machine guns, not literal windmills—and mind you, I use the term “heroic” quite loosely here, too.) Dark humor is what sets the citizens of Czernopol apart—they can and do laugh at themselves—well the wiser ones do—even as tolerance gives way to nationalism and ethnic purging.
March 20, 2013
A very impressive mind and great attention to detail are on full display in Rezzori’s Ermine In Czernopol. This is no easy read - and it will not appeal to many - but if you love what Proust wrote - you'll probably find the same affection for Rezzori. Rezzori is an extremely intelligent writer whose philosophical understanding of the world is everywhere apparent. This can be troublesome for the reader not willing to forego plot for description. If you like complex prose, you'll be delighted. When Rezzori works more like Farrell, telling a great story while delving into the complexities of human thought and interaction, he's more enjoyable - to me at least. Towards the last third of the book Rezzori ties it all together with a clearer narrative that loses none of its verbal prowess and the pages turned more quickly in my hands. I can imagine with another read - one focused less on completion - my attention to detail would increase and I would find greater appreciation. It's somewhat embarrassing to admit I was working towards a finish here because it really does become laborious in parts. Still...this is worth your time if you're willing to put in the effort. I couldn't helping thinking about Ensor's Entry of Christ Into Brussels as multiple streams of maskers converge on a town square to collectively tout their selfishness in the face of mercy. The dehumanization of man in mask or uniform is a central theme in Ermine and one that Rezzori contemplates with amazing insight - how things are revealed and accepted is always central to this work. There's many great pieces of wisdom that justify Banville's claim that place this work alongside The Tin Drum and One Hundred Years of Solitude - but it's Rezzori's own depth of intelligence that will limit this sentiment to those willing to spend their time slowly here. I never see a time when this work reaches nearly the expansive audience of the books to which Banville has compared this with and selfishly - I'm fine with that. There is nothing here that will make this work generally popular or widely read - but no keen student of late 20th-C European fiction should leave this unread. His "message", if he has one, is somewhat similar to that of Albert Cossery - if you give into to your anger and pettiness - you have let your oppressors win - control yourself - seek joy and love and suffer less. Or, in Rezzori's words: "She couldn't dance because she didn't take herself lightly." If you're looking for something between Valles' the Child and Proust - you'll not waste your money on Rezzori.
Read
January 16, 2017It's typical Rezzori material, and if you've seen The Grand Budapest Hotel, to a certain degree, you know the drill -- a cast of eccentrics in a town on the fringe of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, it's probably the weakest Rezzori I've read. As much as I liked each character, each episode, it didn't seem to unite as a whole the way Memoirs of an Anti-Semite or The Snows of Yesteryear did. However, they remain wonderful, old-world stories as individual elements, and it's worth the read.
March 16, 2021
Rather dense and meandering, but very enjoyable. Rezzori can write, he can write scenes, and he's very clever.
September 30, 2017
"L'ermellino muore appena il suo candido vello si imbratta". Con questa citazione inizia il romanzo di Rezzori, un capolavoro poetico e geniale amato da Magris, alcuni personaggi si sfaldano quando perdono la loro pelle dochisciottesca ed entrano nel mondo che non avevano concepito.
October 6, 2019
An ermine in Czernopol is by far von Rezzori's most ambitious and complex novel. Defying many rules of storytelling, he gives us glimpses of dreamy, ethereal worlds. The kaleidoscope of images is ever-changing as a single character is analysed to his utmost, now seen through a child's naivety, now through an adult's perspective. Herr Tarangolian's character is one of the best crafted ones I have read in a long while.
In a world turned insane with the aftermath of the First world war, tenuous relationship between various ethnic groups, resentment and pettiness, Tildy in vain tries to maintain the old Austro-Hungarian ideals of chivalry. His accidental death while covered in a prostitute's white ermine coat stained with blood is extremely symbolic. Czernopol is a cesspool of old hatreds, a half-civilised people distinguished by their self-effacing laughter. A terrifying place to grow up as a child.
The long, meandering philosophical musings do get tiring after a while since the plot drags along. The last chapter though beautiful also felt slightly rushed. A fascinating portrayal of von Rezzori's inner life but certainly not his best. That honour in my opinion, belongs to The Snows of Yesteryear.
In a world turned insane with the aftermath of the First world war, tenuous relationship between various ethnic groups, resentment and pettiness, Tildy in vain tries to maintain the old Austro-Hungarian ideals of chivalry. His accidental death while covered in a prostitute's white ermine coat stained with blood is extremely symbolic. Czernopol is a cesspool of old hatreds, a half-civilised people distinguished by their self-effacing laughter. A terrifying place to grow up as a child.
The long, meandering philosophical musings do get tiring after a while since the plot drags along. The last chapter though beautiful also felt slightly rushed. A fascinating portrayal of von Rezzori's inner life but certainly not his best. That honour in my opinion, belongs to The Snows of Yesteryear.
May 4, 2022
When I could lock into the flow of the language, there were real moments of bliss. Much of the humor is lost on me sadly because I don’t speak 5 languages; but I enjoyed the bits I did comprehend.
My greatest challenge with this book was trying to hold all of its pieces in my head. There’s a baffling amount of characters (and they truly are characters) that appear more in vignettes than within the narrative, and then reappear briefly in the narrative and every time I scrambled to remember who they were or what they’re about/supposed to represent (if this can be read as an allegory, as I did read it at times pretty straightforwardly in a Midnight’s Children type storytelling).
Like Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude (and perhaps even more, because it doesn’t have the same familial connection through its sections) Ermine is a novel of the fictional city of Czernopol and less a narrative about the characters it introduces. They’re stand-ins for ideas and at times clearly meant to be caricatures in ways I can’t fully appreciate with my current level of understanding.
That makes it one of the more interesting reads structurally. MOST of the novel is composed of asides and anecdotes of characters. That this novel is presented as a story of Major Tildy defending his sister-in-laws tarnished honor, is dishonest. Tildy’s story is told in a total of maybe 40 pages out of the 380 page novel. The rest is a work of representing childhood, memory, and clowning about the constantly shifting allegiances, stereotypes, and power structures of the Eastern European cultures during the first half of the 20th century.
I kind of grew tired of Rezzori’s clowning and digressions but they do build to an incredible last 80 pages where everything he’s left tumbling around in your brain spills out and the horror of growing old enough to recognize the evil in the world reveals itself fully.
P.S. the quote from Fiokla Aritonovich about being well-bred and embarrassed being a good combo, being ill-bred and happy even better, but ill-bred and embarrassed unacceptable….hell yeah
My greatest challenge with this book was trying to hold all of its pieces in my head. There’s a baffling amount of characters (and they truly are characters) that appear more in vignettes than within the narrative, and then reappear briefly in the narrative and every time I scrambled to remember who they were or what they’re about/supposed to represent (if this can be read as an allegory, as I did read it at times pretty straightforwardly in a Midnight’s Children type storytelling).
Like Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude (and perhaps even more, because it doesn’t have the same familial connection through its sections) Ermine is a novel of the fictional city of Czernopol and less a narrative about the characters it introduces. They’re stand-ins for ideas and at times clearly meant to be caricatures in ways I can’t fully appreciate with my current level of understanding.
That makes it one of the more interesting reads structurally. MOST of the novel is composed of asides and anecdotes of characters. That this novel is presented as a story of Major Tildy defending his sister-in-laws tarnished honor, is dishonest. Tildy’s story is told in a total of maybe 40 pages out of the 380 page novel. The rest is a work of representing childhood, memory, and clowning about the constantly shifting allegiances, stereotypes, and power structures of the Eastern European cultures during the first half of the 20th century.
I kind of grew tired of Rezzori’s clowning and digressions but they do build to an incredible last 80 pages where everything he’s left tumbling around in your brain spills out and the horror of growing old enough to recognize the evil in the world reveals itself fully.
P.S. the quote from Fiokla Aritonovich about being well-bred and embarrassed being a good combo, being ill-bred and happy even better, but ill-bred and embarrassed unacceptable….hell yeah
August 4, 2012
This is really excellent, like basically all NYRB books. Only other thing of von Rezzori's I've read is "Death of My Brother Abel" (which is OP, and has a sequel that I don't think has ever been published), but now I'm stoked to read the other parts of this trilogy.
There's a lot to love in this novel--the humor, the almost manic way the plot is related, the underlying sense of impending doom that will be WWII--but my favorite favorite bit is how Major Tildy gets sent to the insane asylum for challenging everyone to a dual. Fantastic.
There's a lot to love in this novel--the humor, the almost manic way the plot is related, the underlying sense of impending doom that will be WWII--but my favorite favorite bit is how Major Tildy gets sent to the insane asylum for challenging everyone to a dual. Fantastic.
August 21, 2019
Here is another book where I can appreciate the writing but often found it quite inaccessible. Sentences run on and on and it's difficult to keep track of what's going on, particularly with the numerous, rambling philosophical monologues. The author does give great descriptions of people and place, too, creating a colourful picture of a city, but these were increasingly less frequent as the book goes on. I know that a different, more patient (more intelligent) reader would get more out of it, as it is clearly very well written, but I just didn't have the energy to commit to enjoy it fully.
January 22, 2024
A new all time favorite. Can't wait to talk about it on my podcast in a few weeks so keep an eye out for that in the near future!
https://open.spotify.com/show/1v8MoOb...
https://open.spotify.com/show/1v8MoOb...
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July 14, 2023DNF @ ~25%
Conceptually sound and evocatively written, but too rhetorically metaphysical for where I'm at at the moment. Will return to Rezzori on the strength of his prose alone.
Conceptually sound and evocatively written, but too rhetorically metaphysical for where I'm at at the moment. Will return to Rezzori on the strength of his prose alone.
November 23, 2022
Rezzori: Nostalgia and Language (Review of: Anecdotage, Oedipus at Stalingrad, The Hussar/An Ermine in Czernopol, Orient Express)
Anecdotage, its title punning on the writing memoir in old age, is a late work by Rezzori but has thematic continuities with his earliest novels, particularly The Hussar (also translated as An Ermine in Czernopol) and Oedipus at Stalingrad. Rezzori states that he is writing ‘against the shadow-play of the present’ (27), deploying in this his still keen weapons of scepticism, cynicism, irony and sarcasm - his unique voice. In Anecdotage Rezzori’s scepticism is focussed on his (negative) experiences at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in India, but from this the memoir moves back and forth between his witnessing the Anschluss in Vienna; post-war Berlin 1947-8 (where he worked for a time in radio broadcasting); and his reflections on the Romanian revolution of 1989: the past, or a personal idea of the past, is always present in Rezzori’s writing.
Rezzori describes himself as a ‘Nineteenth Century man of letters at the threshold of the Twenty-First Century’ (26), but his concern with what he calls the ‘metasizing’ (37) currents at play in European culture - arising from, principally, the mass-media - is very modern, perhaps, even, post-modern. Rezzori pits himself against mass society (something he has always done in his novels) arguing that he is a moralist because of his ‘melancholic disposition’ and having a choler that stems from his belief that the ‘demonic’ is always at work in, and may undermine, any culture, particularly mass culture. However, the demonic can be combatted by ‘laughter’ (115), irony and sarcasm. In confronting the demonic – be it fascism or the benighting populist trends of the mass-media - Rezzori counters with his own ‘private mythologies’: his love of the German language, and nostalgia for the landscape and culture of Czernopol/Bukovina (148).
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Anecdotage may be a late work, and consciously autobiographical, but it develops themes found in Rezzori’s early fiction. One example of this is his frustration with what he sees as the inherent inadequacy of written language. Rezzori is frustrated by writing because of its inability to catch the multivalency of our thoughts, reflections, and it thus baffles the writer’s urge to convey feelings and thoughts, meanings which seem to ricochet off obdurate words:
For years now I’ve been trying to recapture that crucial moment when the verbal thought and sensation linked to it become like the two rails of a train track and meaning detaches itself from the word and then disintegrates altogether: transformed into images that possess their own pictographic syntax and grammar – and I tumble down the dark hole… (80)
This theme is articulated by the narrator of Oedipus at Stalingrad when describing how the anti-hero, Baron Traugott, falteringly attempts to speak in defence of the ‘honour’ of the Vamp after a drunken bunch of habitues of Charley’s Bar sexually assault her at a party:
What we are dealing with here is nothing less than the ultimate failure of language. Surely, Locke should have written more than a single chapter on the inadequacy of words: all the exalted platitudes that have been uttered in the course of the past five thousand years should have convinced us by now that what is most profound cannot be articulated. (37-8)
It is interesting that Rezzori makes Traugott an advertising copywriter, which in the author’s critical view of the demons of the 20th century must damn him. But Traugott’s dubious baronetcy and ambition to join the ranks of the true aristos via his courtship of the ‘Thoroughbred’, makes him into a somewhat ridiculous (although always sympathetically so) throwback to the stilted mores of 19th century European society. As an advertising man, Traugott manipulates words for the advertorial work he does for the Gentleman’s Monthly but even in this kind of literary endeavour his writer’s block also relates to the problem of writing:
…visions drift, dreamlike and melodiously enticing, like Rhine maidens on an opera stage, while beneath them the words, melted into raw bell meal, are rolled about by slowly undulating, constantly groping and testing tentacles…114-5
*
In Rezzori’s very early novel, An Ermine in Czernopol, the inadequacy of writing is related to the way nostalgia echoes in so much of what we wish to articulate, to write about:
For years I wasn’t able to pick up a book or look at a picture that I had studied then without feeling the vague stimulus of a deeper recognition, an impact that strikes the core of our being, the sense of déjà vu mingled with nostalgia that comes when we reencounter motifs from our childhood and we regret having lost the power to experience the world in a way that brought us closer to the essence of things. 325
Rezzori often reflects on his early life in Czernopol and Bukovina – that area of eastern Europe which, in political terms, is nationally indistinct: tugged back and forth between Russia, Poland and Romania (or now, in 2022, between Ukraine and Russia). For Rezzori it is an example of how a particular place and time often serves to reflect on present experience, and in this acts as an antidote to the failure of writing . The hybridity, or at least juxtaposition, of cultures in Czernopol/Bukovina is critical, there was an ‘intermediate sphere of reality’ (157) - that ‘every language [there] was corrupted’ (224). Rezzori’s yearning for this intermediate realm of reality, is, however, not just of place and time but of signification, of a logogram:
It was as if I had captured its essence in a kind of logogram, an equation elevated to a mathematical formula, and perhaps it is due to this abbreviation and abstraction of memory that today I no longer know whether the city of Czernopol existed in reality, or merely in one of my dreams of drafts. 342
*
Despite the pervasive cynicism in Rezzori’s literary voice, either in fiction or memoir, it is generally a sympathetic voice, implicitly humanistic. It rejects the treacherous ideals of mass identities, nationalism, and the ersatz forms of identity pedalled by the mass media. The same voice is found in his late novel, Orient Express in which Aram, a millionaire businessman experiencing a life crisis (divorce etc.), derides the misappropriation of the past in the service of advertising represented by the Orient Express. Aram is described as having similar attitudes to those bluntly articulated by Rezzori in Anecdotage: cynicism (90), sarcasm (99) and is godless (‘anything smacking of religion filled him with repugnance’ 83).
The word Orient takes on wider metaphorical meanings – suggesting how western culture is disoriented, its late 20th century’ generation being rootless denizens ‘not able to live in their particular historical present’. Aram consoles himself with memories of being ‘at home’ – but in this novel Czernopol is replaced by other areas now in Romania, in Dobrudja and the resort Technirghiol. Like Czernopol, these places act, harking back to the metaphor in Anecdotage of how a perfect state of linguistic signification is like converging rails, as a critical point of reference to assess the present:
He was travelling on two parallel lines, so to speak, on this Disney-land choo choo, in two adjacent, separate, realities that took turns pursuing one another: the one ahead looking back, the other falling further behind with its eyes facing the front. The actual present lay somewhere between, like a kind of relay station, a field of awareness on which the questing contacts met. 125-6
Ideas of converging time and change are constantly at broached in this novel, marked early on when Aram loses his trusted Omega and ends up with a cheap digital watch, which he later throws into the English Channel. But in a kind of Proustian nod (but with a political edge) he argues that present time and feelings of nostalgia may be how different lines, of times, of writing, might meet:
Just as in dreams two separate conditions often flow together into one, each transparently contained in the other, so too consciousness of illusion was contained in the momentarily recaptured world of that time, its breath of life suddenly wafted back and, with it, the knowledge of how he’d breathed it then. 109
*
But Rezzori never provides a clear answer to the problem he felt in the inadequacy of writing, of being a writer. It is a problem that in one way or another a literary writer of any hue, realist or modernist, is always troubled by. Modern language philosophy, i.e. from Wittgenstein to Derrida, warns against the chimera of attaining perfect (or, Rezzori’s more limited quest, adequate) linguistic meaning. By its very nature producing the ideal word, sentence, writing, is inevitably influenced by the conjuncture of many different lines (‘or rails), not just one or two: by the time of the mind, of narrative time, of discursive time, the reader’s time and, not least, by the political legacies that have manipulated and then pervaded a mother tongue and its literature. In the end, Rezzori limited himself to a working solution by recourse to the time of his past experience, of writing mindful in that critical spirit.
Anecdotage, its title punning on the writing memoir in old age, is a late work by Rezzori but has thematic continuities with his earliest novels, particularly The Hussar (also translated as An Ermine in Czernopol) and Oedipus at Stalingrad. Rezzori states that he is writing ‘against the shadow-play of the present’ (27), deploying in this his still keen weapons of scepticism, cynicism, irony and sarcasm - his unique voice. In Anecdotage Rezzori’s scepticism is focussed on his (negative) experiences at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in India, but from this the memoir moves back and forth between his witnessing the Anschluss in Vienna; post-war Berlin 1947-8 (where he worked for a time in radio broadcasting); and his reflections on the Romanian revolution of 1989: the past, or a personal idea of the past, is always present in Rezzori’s writing.
Rezzori describes himself as a ‘Nineteenth Century man of letters at the threshold of the Twenty-First Century’ (26), but his concern with what he calls the ‘metasizing’ (37) currents at play in European culture - arising from, principally, the mass-media - is very modern, perhaps, even, post-modern. Rezzori pits himself against mass society (something he has always done in his novels) arguing that he is a moralist because of his ‘melancholic disposition’ and having a choler that stems from his belief that the ‘demonic’ is always at work in, and may undermine, any culture, particularly mass culture. However, the demonic can be combatted by ‘laughter’ (115), irony and sarcasm. In confronting the demonic – be it fascism or the benighting populist trends of the mass-media - Rezzori counters with his own ‘private mythologies’: his love of the German language, and nostalgia for the landscape and culture of Czernopol/Bukovina (148).
*
Anecdotage may be a late work, and consciously autobiographical, but it develops themes found in Rezzori’s early fiction. One example of this is his frustration with what he sees as the inherent inadequacy of written language. Rezzori is frustrated by writing because of its inability to catch the multivalency of our thoughts, reflections, and it thus baffles the writer’s urge to convey feelings and thoughts, meanings which seem to ricochet off obdurate words:
For years now I’ve been trying to recapture that crucial moment when the verbal thought and sensation linked to it become like the two rails of a train track and meaning detaches itself from the word and then disintegrates altogether: transformed into images that possess their own pictographic syntax and grammar – and I tumble down the dark hole… (80)
This theme is articulated by the narrator of Oedipus at Stalingrad when describing how the anti-hero, Baron Traugott, falteringly attempts to speak in defence of the ‘honour’ of the Vamp after a drunken bunch of habitues of Charley’s Bar sexually assault her at a party:
What we are dealing with here is nothing less than the ultimate failure of language. Surely, Locke should have written more than a single chapter on the inadequacy of words: all the exalted platitudes that have been uttered in the course of the past five thousand years should have convinced us by now that what is most profound cannot be articulated. (37-8)
It is interesting that Rezzori makes Traugott an advertising copywriter, which in the author’s critical view of the demons of the 20th century must damn him. But Traugott’s dubious baronetcy and ambition to join the ranks of the true aristos via his courtship of the ‘Thoroughbred’, makes him into a somewhat ridiculous (although always sympathetically so) throwback to the stilted mores of 19th century European society. As an advertising man, Traugott manipulates words for the advertorial work he does for the Gentleman’s Monthly but even in this kind of literary endeavour his writer’s block also relates to the problem of writing:
…visions drift, dreamlike and melodiously enticing, like Rhine maidens on an opera stage, while beneath them the words, melted into raw bell meal, are rolled about by slowly undulating, constantly groping and testing tentacles…114-5
*
In Rezzori’s very early novel, An Ermine in Czernopol, the inadequacy of writing is related to the way nostalgia echoes in so much of what we wish to articulate, to write about:
For years I wasn’t able to pick up a book or look at a picture that I had studied then without feeling the vague stimulus of a deeper recognition, an impact that strikes the core of our being, the sense of déjà vu mingled with nostalgia that comes when we reencounter motifs from our childhood and we regret having lost the power to experience the world in a way that brought us closer to the essence of things. 325
Rezzori often reflects on his early life in Czernopol and Bukovina – that area of eastern Europe which, in political terms, is nationally indistinct: tugged back and forth between Russia, Poland and Romania (or now, in 2022, between Ukraine and Russia). For Rezzori it is an example of how a particular place and time often serves to reflect on present experience, and in this acts as an antidote to the failure of writing . The hybridity, or at least juxtaposition, of cultures in Czernopol/Bukovina is critical, there was an ‘intermediate sphere of reality’ (157) - that ‘every language [there] was corrupted’ (224). Rezzori’s yearning for this intermediate realm of reality, is, however, not just of place and time but of signification, of a logogram:
It was as if I had captured its essence in a kind of logogram, an equation elevated to a mathematical formula, and perhaps it is due to this abbreviation and abstraction of memory that today I no longer know whether the city of Czernopol existed in reality, or merely in one of my dreams of drafts. 342
*
Despite the pervasive cynicism in Rezzori’s literary voice, either in fiction or memoir, it is generally a sympathetic voice, implicitly humanistic. It rejects the treacherous ideals of mass identities, nationalism, and the ersatz forms of identity pedalled by the mass media. The same voice is found in his late novel, Orient Express in which Aram, a millionaire businessman experiencing a life crisis (divorce etc.), derides the misappropriation of the past in the service of advertising represented by the Orient Express. Aram is described as having similar attitudes to those bluntly articulated by Rezzori in Anecdotage: cynicism (90), sarcasm (99) and is godless (‘anything smacking of religion filled him with repugnance’ 83).
The word Orient takes on wider metaphorical meanings – suggesting how western culture is disoriented, its late 20th century’ generation being rootless denizens ‘not able to live in their particular historical present’. Aram consoles himself with memories of being ‘at home’ – but in this novel Czernopol is replaced by other areas now in Romania, in Dobrudja and the resort Technirghiol. Like Czernopol, these places act, harking back to the metaphor in Anecdotage of how a perfect state of linguistic signification is like converging rails, as a critical point of reference to assess the present:
He was travelling on two parallel lines, so to speak, on this Disney-land choo choo, in two adjacent, separate, realities that took turns pursuing one another: the one ahead looking back, the other falling further behind with its eyes facing the front. The actual present lay somewhere between, like a kind of relay station, a field of awareness on which the questing contacts met. 125-6
Ideas of converging time and change are constantly at broached in this novel, marked early on when Aram loses his trusted Omega and ends up with a cheap digital watch, which he later throws into the English Channel. But in a kind of Proustian nod (but with a political edge) he argues that present time and feelings of nostalgia may be how different lines, of times, of writing, might meet:
Just as in dreams two separate conditions often flow together into one, each transparently contained in the other, so too consciousness of illusion was contained in the momentarily recaptured world of that time, its breath of life suddenly wafted back and, with it, the knowledge of how he’d breathed it then. 109
*
But Rezzori never provides a clear answer to the problem he felt in the inadequacy of writing, of being a writer. It is a problem that in one way or another a literary writer of any hue, realist or modernist, is always troubled by. Modern language philosophy, i.e. from Wittgenstein to Derrida, warns against the chimera of attaining perfect (or, Rezzori’s more limited quest, adequate) linguistic meaning. By its very nature producing the ideal word, sentence, writing, is inevitably influenced by the conjuncture of many different lines (‘or rails), not just one or two: by the time of the mind, of narrative time, of discursive time, the reader’s time and, not least, by the political legacies that have manipulated and then pervaded a mother tongue and its literature. In the end, Rezzori limited himself to a working solution by recourse to the time of his past experience, of writing mindful in that critical spirit.
June 16, 2016
This is a wonderful book written in an enchanting comic style with larger than life characters and techniques of exaggeration and estrangement that make Rezzori a worthy heir of Gogol and that prefigure the writing of Hunter Thompson and the movies of Wes Anderson. This is the story of eccentric people in an eccentric small city that is a melting pot of nationalities that bring a richness to the culture, but also a measure of strife. The eccentricities are emphasized and brought into focus by the narration from the child's point of view, which causes everything to been seen with a sense of wonder and novelty and an unwillingness to accept prosaic explanations. It is the story of a transitional moment in time between the wars, a curious world where remnants of the old survived, but the modern world with all of its wonders, crassness and horrors was not yet fully born, a weird transitional state that Rezzori neatly sums up in the final allegorical chapter.
Czernopol reminded me a bit of my home town of Lexington, Kentucky, another small city filled with eccentric characters where everyone knew everyone else's business and where the two ethnic groups -- black and white -- lived in close and mostly very friendly proximity that existed side by side with an undercurrent of racism and distrust.
Czernopol reminded me a bit of my home town of Lexington, Kentucky, another small city filled with eccentric characters where everyone knew everyone else's business and where the two ethnic groups -- black and white -- lived in close and mostly very friendly proximity that existed side by side with an undercurrent of racism and distrust.
March 24, 2021
I had really looked forward to reading this, but there were too many threads of disjointed narrative and too many philosophical interludes. When we finally hear the end of Tildy’s story, I don’t even care because I felt we hardly spent any time learning about him, even though this is who the book is supposedly about.
The author does do some great writing depicting the rise of nationalism and anti-semitism pre-WWII and I think a narrative exploring that would have been a much better read. As it is, there was just too much in this book and I really didn’t care.
The author does do some great writing depicting the rise of nationalism and anti-semitism pre-WWII and I think a narrative exploring that would have been a much better read. As it is, there was just too much in this book and I really didn’t care.
April 26, 2012
There were seven of us at the book discussion. Three (including myself) had finished it, and only one liked it. There was potential lurking in there, and I enjoyed the depictions of Solly Brill and Madame What's-Her-Name (see? I don't even remember her name and I don't care!) from the school. She had something in common with Madame Fidolia from Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes. But that and my fondness for Tanya is about it.
The rest was a tangential mess that left me unmoved.
The rest was a tangential mess that left me unmoved.
March 9, 2014
A complex, meandering story of a Ukrainian town, post WW1, populated by an eclectic cast of oddballs. Seen through the eyes of a child, the people of Czernopol, primarily Tildy-- an officer who challenges one person too many to a duel and gets sent to the asylum-- are sad, grotesque, and ultimately doomed. The prose is dense and smart and the whole thing culminates in a darkly funny scene of drunken rampage, prostitutes, and tragedy.
July 22, 2012
It is rambling.
It is long.
It is genius.
"And the remarks he casually tossed aside were downright brilliant, as for instance his appraisal of a sensually languid-not languidly sensual-woman: 'she snorrs vit de oygen'-she snores with her eyes."
It is long.
It is genius.
"And the remarks he casually tossed aside were downright brilliant, as for instance his appraisal of a sensually languid-not languidly sensual-woman: 'she snorrs vit de oygen'-she snores with her eyes."
October 27, 2022
Plot wasn’t great. Felt disjointed and unresolved. Lacked a uniting theme.
However, I would still recommend this book for its writing style, the way it expresses ideas. Oh my! Such lush descriptions, so intelligent with so much depth. At times, Gregor von Rezzori’s prose wanders prettily into a dense forest where abstract ideas are developed. Unfortunately, these were more difficult to comprehend. But there are other more accessible parts, striking and beautiful in its intricate portrayal of nature and especially in the chapter on the descriptions of war. The imagery and metaphors used were vivid, humorous and confronting. The writing reminded me a little of Thomas Mann, especially with the exploration of dense ideas, but Gregor von Rezzori is probably more poetic in style.
There were many interesting ideas and thoughts, including many wise words and maxims (?). I enjoyed them very much, and the way they made me think.
This is a book I would read for its ideas and prose, but not really its story.
Below are some quotes I found thought-provoking:
“Because even back then we sensed that nothing we might ever encounter, no matter how horrible, would frighten us more than what Herr Tangolian called the horror of the literary existence - the void that engulfs us when we have too little actual experience. “Bear in mind, my young friends,” the prefect once told us, “that most people only know life from hearsay.”
“But love doesnt make one blind, as people say - on the contrary. It concentrates all our attention on one object that we see with greatly increased focus, because it is we who discovered it. Our love is an expression of our having perceived things in that object that no one else sees. Its monomaniacal character might make us blind to the rest of the world for a while - but it only seems that way, because in fact we never do see more of the world than its surface, anyway.”
“A pride such as yours, does it not come from the fact that you despise yourself every moment you are not proving yourself?”
“Whoever does not wish to suffer as a prisoner must love his prison. Love the forms that hold us captive, the forms that lead us to surrender.”
However, I would still recommend this book for its writing style, the way it expresses ideas. Oh my! Such lush descriptions, so intelligent with so much depth. At times, Gregor von Rezzori’s prose wanders prettily into a dense forest where abstract ideas are developed. Unfortunately, these were more difficult to comprehend. But there are other more accessible parts, striking and beautiful in its intricate portrayal of nature and especially in the chapter on the descriptions of war. The imagery and metaphors used were vivid, humorous and confronting. The writing reminded me a little of Thomas Mann, especially with the exploration of dense ideas, but Gregor von Rezzori is probably more poetic in style.
There were many interesting ideas and thoughts, including many wise words and maxims (?). I enjoyed them very much, and the way they made me think.
This is a book I would read for its ideas and prose, but not really its story.
Below are some quotes I found thought-provoking:
“Because even back then we sensed that nothing we might ever encounter, no matter how horrible, would frighten us more than what Herr Tangolian called the horror of the literary existence - the void that engulfs us when we have too little actual experience. “Bear in mind, my young friends,” the prefect once told us, “that most people only know life from hearsay.”
“But love doesnt make one blind, as people say - on the contrary. It concentrates all our attention on one object that we see with greatly increased focus, because it is we who discovered it. Our love is an expression of our having perceived things in that object that no one else sees. Its monomaniacal character might make us blind to the rest of the world for a while - but it only seems that way, because in fact we never do see more of the world than its surface, anyway.”
“A pride such as yours, does it not come from the fact that you despise yourself every moment you are not proving yourself?”
“Whoever does not wish to suffer as a prisoner must love his prison. Love the forms that hold us captive, the forms that lead us to surrender.”
January 24, 2021
"La nostra infanzia è il mito di noi stessi, la saga dei tempi nei quali eravamo ancora un sesso intermedio e rubavamo agli dei la capacità di vedere dentro l'essenza delle cose. E' la nostra aurora magica, la sua penombra era piena di eventi mistici. Ogni rincontro con essa ha qualcosa di prodigioso e di divino." (p. 297)
"Tocca ai più stupidi e ai più saggi il privilegio di sentirsi il terreno sicuro sotto i piedi. Gli uni e gli altri vivono nella grazia della semplificazione." (p. 586)
"Tocca ai più stupidi e ai più saggi il privilegio di sentirsi il terreno sicuro sotto i piedi. Gli uni e gli altri vivono nella grazia della semplificazione." (p. 586)
April 20, 2023
5 -stars for literary quality; and, as others here have said, reminiscent of Proust (although the sentences weren't as lengthy). But, 1-star for sustaining my interest (my problem, not the author's - and probably because I've already read Proust and no longer care about the various lost pre-WWI European worlds). I just couldn't get interested. Although, to repeat, the descriptions and psychological insights about the characters are truly brilliant.
December 28, 2018
Such beautiful language, so much unnecessary rumination. A book that seems to bridge the period between the flowery language of the 19th Century and the modern emotional resonance of honest introspection. Could have done with a bit of editing in its original form, but a very interesting view into a place that is both universally familiar and quite foreign.
November 18, 2018
An amazing experience. Bruno Schultz written by a non-Jew ? The description of essentially a shtetl, with comic tales enshadowed by the coming Holocaust. Proustian digressions of memory. The roots of anti- Semitism ....wonderful, powerful
June 18, 2020
This wonderful book is set on the far Eastern border of the recently crumbled Austrian Hungarian empire. Nationalism takes hold as old Europe disintegrates. A wonderful portrayal of a lost world, eccentric characters and great insight.
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