The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography (Penguin Modern Classics)

leondumoulin.nl: The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography ( ) The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography (Penguin Modern Classics) Publisher: London: Penguin Books ,
Table of contents

Dec 02, Pages. Aug 15, Pages. Gregor von Rezzori was born in Czernowitz, a onetime provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that was later to be absorbed successively into Romania, the USSR, and the Ukraine—a town that was everywhere and nowhere, with a population of astonishing diversity. Growing up after World War I and the collapse of the empire, Rezzori lived in a twilit world suspended between the formalities of the old nineteenth-century order which had shaped his aristocratic parents and the innovations, uncertainties, and raw terror of the new century.

The haunted atmosphere of this dying world is beautifully rendered in the pages of The Snows of Yesteryear. Telling their stories, Rezzori tells his own, holding his early life to the light like a crystal until it shines for us with a prismatic brilliance. But it is intensely moving and contains, in its winding and ironic cadences, not a slack sentence.

Top Authors

Above all they offered marvelous character-portraits in prose. The author's mother could never, ever measure up, and his dad was awarded too many excuses for his behavior. However, asided from the family dynamics as viewed by the author, he rewarded the reader with great insight into what it must've been like, living in the middle lands between Russia and Europe, what with the map lines being re-drawn every so many years and conflicts ad nauseum.

Surely he wrote his remembrances as he felt them, but he took as fact his own reasoning for each family member's unhappiness and shortcomings, when he could never have known what he decided had made mom, dad, sis, the way they really were or what the intimate dynamics could've been. The author's discriptions, praised by reviewers, were just not enough to keep me going. I came to see him as Spoiled Kid, destined to live in many of the same attitudes and wars that did so much to shape, harm and disappoint his parents and his governesses, and thusly, himself. Two different aspects of the book make it of special interest.

Gregor von Rezzori was born in in Czernowitz, then the capital of the Bukovina, which in turn was one of the autonomous former crown lands of the House of Habsburg and, as such, part of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. Thus, his formative years coincided with what he calls the "truce between two phases of the European suicide" i. Rezzori's account of that milieu and those years is among the richer and more rewarding that I have read. The other noteworthy aspect of the book consists of the family figures around whom he structures his memoir: Each of them - at least as portrayed by Rezzori - is a memorable figure.

Even works of fiction rarely feature a quintet of such distinctive characters.

The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography (Penguin Modern Classics) Book

To my mind the most memorable though it is a close call is Rezzori's father, who regarded himself as a Habsburg aristocrat through and through the Rezzori family came from Sicily, at a time when it still belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. By profession, he was an architect and art historian, whose work responsibilities involved overseeing the monasteries of the Bukovina as a civil servant.

Biography & Autobiography Modern Paperback Books

By avocation, he was a hunter, and some of Rezzori's anecdotes are set in the dense forests of the Carpathians, hunting with his father. Although Rezzori elder was a strident anti-Semite and a social conservative, he was not a supporter of Hitler.

Editorial Reviews

But have a look at this fellow: I wouldn't hire him as a stable boy! Russians, Poles and Ruthenians were mere colonial populations. He saw himself as a leftover functionary of a liquidated empire. Rezzori gives her name as Lina Strauss and he writes that in the s she had been the "lady companion" of Mark Twain during his years in Florence at a time long before the death of Twain's beloved wife, Livy.

Curiously, in neither my Mark Twain library which, admittedly, is hardly comprehensive nor on the Internet can I find any reference to a Lina Strauss as a companion of Twain or a member of the Twain household. If anyone has information to support the association, I would appreciate learning of it either by a comment or by e-mail. The book closes with a touching epilogue, dealing with Rezzori's visit in to Czernowitz by then re-named Chernovtsy and within the borders of the Ukraine for the first time in 53 years. After so much effort trying to reconstruct and re-inhabit the past, his visit to the city of his birth and boyhood proved to be another bittersweet exemplification of Thomas Wolfe's adage that you can't go home again.

Rezzori published this memoir in He died in Nonetheless, at times it dragged, even for me. The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro. They Were Counted Miklos Banffy. Going Solo Roald Dahl.

The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography - Gregor Rezzori - Google Книги

A Letter from Paris Louisa Deasey. Land's Edge Tim Winton. Walden Henry David Thoreau. Island Home Tim Winton. Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov. Surprised by Joy C. The Cost of Living Deborah Levy. The Terrible Yrsa Daley-Ward. The World of Yesterday Stefan Zweig. Glass Castle Jeannette Walls. The Tree John Fowles.


  • Результатов: 5.
  • Bobby Isaac: NASCARs First Modern Champion?
  • Fate and Consequences.

Letters To Milena Franz Kafka. Smoking Diaries Vol 2 Simon Gray.

The Snows of Yesteryear

Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion. Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert. Country Girl Edna O'Brien. Poets in Their Youth Eileen Simpson.