Gregor von Rezzori - The Snows of Yesteryear

I was saved by an angel in the person of one of the local dwellers. No, no, I was quite right, these additional houses had not been there, only the ancient one in the middle, and all the rest had been added in the 1950s, a time of dire poverty in which more substantial constructions were out of the question. And yes, the horrible industrial installation had also been built then, and in great haste. And yes, indeed, the house had once had a glassed-in porch, and over there, where now there are those pre-fab row houses, that’s where the stables had been, and the floors there were still always moist. Yes, over there, there indeed had been also some large cherry trees. And wouldn’t I want to come into the house and see for myself that the premises still were the same, even though now they were occupied by three families?

The stone that fell from my heart sank heavily into my soul. What I had remembered from my boyhood had not been all phantasmagorical illusion or pure imagination. It was a great relief to be reassured on this account. But I had to pay a price. No longer could I ever think of that house of my mother’s without its being superseded by the present ugly reality. The real house of my childhood had been spared this fate but instead had turned into irreality, haunted by a mythic quality that made me fear that I could never again believe in my own reality. So be it! It was indeed in the realm of the unbelievable and fabulous that my own Czernopol, the imagined counterpart of the factual Czernowitz, was located. The reality I had found in Chernovtsy threatened to destroy even this. I had to leave as quickly as possible. You must never undertake the search for time lost in the spirit of nostalgic tourism.

GREGOR VON REZZORI (1914–1998) was born in Czernowitz (now Chernovtsy, Ukraine), Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He later described his childhood in a family of declining fortunes as one “spent among slightly mad and dislocated personalities in a period that also was mad and dislocated and filled with unrest.” After studying at the University of Vienna, Rezzori moved to Bucharest and enlisted in the Romanian army. During World War II, he lived in Berlin, where he worked as a radio broadcaster and published his first novel. In West Germany after the war, he wrote for both radio and film and began publishing books at a rapid rate, including the four-volume Idiot’s Guide to German Society and Ein Hermelin in Tschernopol (to be published by NYRB Classics as Ermine). From the late 1950s on, Rezzori had parts in several French and West German films, including one directed by his friend Louis Malle. In 1967, after spending years classified as a stateless person, Rezzori settled in a fifteenth-century farmhouse outside of Florence with his wife, gallery owner Beatrice Monti. There he produced some of his best-known works, among them Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (published by NYRB Classics), and the memoir The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography.

JOHN BANVILLE was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of many novels, including The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, and Eclipse. Banville’s novel The Sea was awarded the 2005 Man Booker Prize. On occasion he writes under the pen name Benjamin Black.