Chaos and the old order

If Gregor von Rezzori is known to English language readers, it is likely to be through his tense, disturbing novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (partly written in English), and/or his ravishing memoir Snows of Yesteryear. Rezzori was born in 1914 in Czernowitz in Bukovina, when it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the first world war he became a citizen of Romania, from where, as a so-called ethnic German, he was ‘repatriated’ to Germany during the second world war.

From the 1960s he lived in Italy, at Santa Maddalena, the home that he shared with his second wife near Florence, which she has since set up as a writers’ retreat. In the garden there is a porphyry pyramid, a monument to the deceased writer on which is inscribed ‘citizen of Czernopol’. Although clearly modelled on Czernowitz (which is now in the Ukraine), Czernopol is a fictitious place. The inscription suggests that the world Rezzori came from is now so obscure that it survives only as myth.