Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

I often thought that his all-consuming passion for hunting was in reality an escape to and a shelter from the reminder of a truer and unrealized vocation. This seemed plausible when I observed the passivity with which he let venery overrun his entire existence untrammeled. One had the impression that, fundamentally, he had no thoughts other than those related to hunting, that he hardly spoke of anything else, and that it determined all his moods. Without any doubt, his decision to forsake a more rewarding career in the civil service in favor of remaining in the Bukovina and entering the service of the Romanian Orthodox Church had been influenced by the outstanding hunting possibilities of that region. Venery, taking full possession of his many-faceted being, pervaded all his other interests and hobbies. Ever more frequently, the scenes he would draw and paint were of wildlife, though he lacked talent for drawing; his mathematical knowledge served only his understanding of ballistics, and his chemical skills were used only in the mixing of various gunpowders. He was untiring in his correspondence with renowned hunters and writers on hunting, with zoologists and ornithologists, as well as with botanists on questions of game feeding. He wrote articles on game for specialized journals like Wild und Hund (Game and Hound), Der deutsche Jäger (The German Hunter) and Chasse et pêche (Hunting and Fishing) in Luxembourg, and he hardly wore anything but hunting clothes. By nature cyclical and determined by seasonal changes, and by tradition severely ritualized in form, hunting became for him a cult to which he dedicated himself with an almost religious fervor. One was led to think that at some point he realized that the diversity of his talents would lead to a frittering away unless they were made to serve one overriding creative impulse, so he decided to bundle them all together in a single passionate avocation. A gesture of defiance stood at the very origin of his fixation — indeed, obstinate defiance was the determining trait in his character.

This defiance runs like a red thread through what little I know of his childhood, adolescence and young manhood (and how little we know generally of those who have helped make us what we are!). One of my aunts, his younger, undauntingly cheerful and courageous sister, Bettina, told me something typical from their shared youth: she and he, together with his other sister, Sophie, were enrolled in a dancing school in Graz, where my grandparents lived before the turn of the century. The two girls were very beautiful and spoiled by their mother. For the dancing lessons, which were held in winter, the girls were given pretty overcoats trimmed with mink, while he, as the son for whom such luxury would be in poor taste, was measured for something of sober military cut. He hated his coat so much that in protest he behaved badly during the dancing lessons, so badly that he was sent home. He never again danced a single step and all his life avoided balls and other functions involving dancing. That his bride would indulge in the lifelong illusion that her fate had been decided on the dance floor he would have considered a very poor joke of destiny indeed, had he ever learned of it.

His obstinacy destroyed his relationship with his mother. He responded to her strict commands and punishments with an intractability that drove her to even more draconian pedagogic measures. She also thwarted his chemical studies. Because of her he sought a professional field in the vast expanse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy that on the one hand would not be too close to the Ministry of the Interior, where his father labored, and on the other was as far removed as possible from her vicinity. When she died, he was in far-off Bosnia. He shed no tears for her, nor did he ever mention her — not so much as a single word — to me or my sister, though he liked telling us about his father.

Of my paternal great-great-grandfather I own a miniature and of his son, my great-grandfather, a daguerreotype, but of my grandfather I have only a single photographic portrait, which I cut out of a magazine from the turn of the century, where it appeared on the occasion of the opening of a building he had designed. In the correctness of his frock coat he shows an almost fraternal resemblance with my maternal grandfather; although lacking the latter’s short-trimmed beard and overbearing self-importance, he shares the same manly solemnity, stiffened by ascot and starched shirt as if by armor, typical of the period and of Western Europe’s last empires, both Victorian and Habsburg. The amused shrewdness in the corners of his eyes — a roguish hint? — is barely cloaked by the discipline of the functionary; he managed to climb the hierarchic ladder from government architect, by way of privy councillor and department head, all the way to ministerial councillor.

My grandfather hoped for a similar or even more glittering career for his son, but my father’s rebellious disposition ran counter to such hopes. Some of his youthful pranks (painting a moustache on himself with silver nitrate, which took months to wash off) seem to express the fashion of the time rather than individual singularity: the turn of the century has a whole literature testifying to the likes of it. More serious were the conflicts that developed between father and son in my father’s last years as a student.

In accordance with his rank and position, my grandfather was unconditionally loyal to Emperor Francis Joseph I. This was not in contradiction to the Italian origins of the family, which he proudly acknowledged, but rather was strengthened by these ultramontane traditions. The Rezzori name derives from a fief in Sicily which, until the Bourbons, had belonged to the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations. Thus, Rezzoris had always been loyal subjects of the Habsburg monarchy. After an offspring of the family by the name of Ambrogio, as ambitious as he was poor, migrated to Vienna in 1750 by way of Lombardy (an Austrian possession at the time), the Austrianization of the family proceeded with all due speed: Ambrogio’s son still was called Giovanni Battista, but his son bore the name Johann Nepomuk. And Johann Nepomuk’s son was none other than my grandfather Wilhelm. Though he liked being called Guglielmo and spent every moment he could spare from his official duties on the Adriatic, he was a Habsburg subject through and through. Quite in contrast to my father, Hugo, who was swept along by the Sturm und Drang zest of the Greater Germany movement.

This was a secondhand Storm and Stress, fomented by the murkiest impulses of the time. When in later years my father, having become at least as conservative in spirit as his progenitor, ranted against the calamitous consequences of the French Revolution, he overlooked the fact that one freakish revolutionary offshoot was surely the Napoleonic Wars, which in turn helped to produce the disastrous German nationalism to which he had fallen prey so blindly in his youth (including its raging anti-Semitism). The strange reciprocity between spirituality and daimon inherent in any enthusiasm — enthusiasm that often deteriorates into fanaticism and corrupts the original purity of great ideas (and, inversely, filters pure intentions and aspirations from what is foul, placing them in the service of the devil) — seems to emerge quite regularly with each new generation. And nothing seems more difficult for the young than to elude the currents of their time. My grandfather’s cast-iron monarchical loyalty had no argument strong enough to muster against the collective folly of youth; on the contrary, it served only to inflame his son’s pigheaded stubbornness.

This led to unpleasant scenes. That he was sent from the family dinner table because, with an irony anticipating that of Musil’s, he asserted in the presence of guests that the Emperor Francis Joseph I was certainly not the model for all of Austro-Hungary’s full-bearded janitors but, rather, that it was he, first servant of the state, who assiduously emulated the janitors, this is to be counted among the more harmless conflicts. Much worse was that he adhered to the Break with Rome movement and left the Catholic Church. A final rupture became unavoidable when he participated in the Badeni riots. Count Badeni, minister of the Interior at that time, provoked the German nationalists by favoring the Czechs in a school reform. The students took to the streets, my father was arrested and, as an ardent admirer of Georg von Schönerer, challenged a high police official to a duel in which shots were exchanged. As a result, he was stripped of his newly acquired commission as an officer in the reserves, which meant the end of the many hopes his father had entertained for his future.