Background

Gregor von Rezzori was born on May 13, 1914 in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi, 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.’’

Education

Gregor von Rezzori studied in colleges in Braşov, Fürstenfeld and Vienna. Then he began studying mining at the University of Leoben, then architecture and medicine at the University of Vienna, where he eventually graduated in arts.

Career

In mid-1930 Gregor von Rezzori moved to Bucharest, took up military service in the Romanian Army, and made a living as an artist. In 1938 he moved to Berlin, where he became active as a novelist, journalist, writer in radio broadcasting, and film production. Until the mid-1950s, he worked as an author at the broadcasting company Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk. Beginning in the early 1960s, Rezzori lived between Rome and Paris, with sojourns in the United States, eventually settling in Tuscany.

Rezzori’s literary work mainly dealt with the changes that took place in central Europe after two world wars and the disappearance of a culture that resulted. He wrote both autobiographical works and fiction, several pieces of which touched on anti-Semitism, whether his own feelings or those of his father. Much of Rezzori’s life was revealed in The Snows of Yesteryear: Portraits for an Autobiography, a volume of reminiscences. The stories in it described Rezzori’s parents as estranged and harsh and his only sibling — an older sister — as an unrelenting instigator who taunted him continually.

Rezzori wrote more than twenty books, most in German. One book published in English in 1981 was Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, which drew much attention. The book was sold as a novel but some reviewers suggested the five stories were really a fictionalized version of Rezzori’s life as the son of aristocratic parents of Italian origin. The book received generally good reviews for its stark portrayal of a Europe that no longer existed.

The Death of My Brother Abel, translated into English in the mid-1980s, describes the protagonist’s aborted attempts to write a novel about his pre- and post-World War II experiences, an important topic to Rezzori. The wars had so influenced him that he spent more than twenty years as a stateless person before finally declaring himself an Austrian citizen. He died in Santa Maddalena, part of Florence's Donnini frazione.

Achievements

• Post-war literary Germany celebrated Rezzori primarily for his Tales of Maghrebinia, in which the author revived the lost world of Central Europe. Gregor von Rezzori's Tales of Maghrebinia had been on the bestseller lists for years by then. Critics were also celebrating his most recent novel, An Ermine in Czernopol.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Abel and Cain

    (Appearing together in English for the first time, two mas...)

    1976
  • Oedipus at Stalingrad

    (A new translation of a renowned, hilarious, and cautionar...)

    1994
  • The Orient-Express

    (Abruptly leaving his American wife, job, and home, a Euro...)

    1992
  • Anecdotage: A Summation

    (An account of the author's trip to the Bukovina and place...)

    1996
  • Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories

    (The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex...)

    1969
  • Tales of Maghrebinia-Being Madcap Adventures and Misadventures in a Not Too Mythical Country

    (It is not correct, by the way, to assert, as some people ...)

    1962
  • The Death of My Brother Abel

    (A writer, working in a Paris hotel, tries to create a nov...)

    1985
  • Mir auf der Spur 1997
  • Greisengemurmel: Ein Rechenschaftsbericht 1994
  • An Ermine in Czernopol 1958
  • The Snows of Yesteryear 1989

• essay

  • Ein Fremder in Lolitaland 1993

Views

Sarcastically and elaborately, Gregor von Rezzori exposed malevolence not among great villains as much as in the everyday, envious and fear-driven dullness of the Central European bourgeoisie. Whether writing autobiography or fiction, Mr. Von Rezzori kept dissecting himself, mining his experience with an unadorned and unsympathetic memory.

Quotations: “Dealing with people, my friends, is really nothing more than a question of the price that one is willing to pay. The better you understand life, the more capital you build.”

“To recognize what is absurd and to accept it need not dim the eye for the tragic side of existence; quite on the contrary, in the end it may perhaps help in gaining a more tolerant view of the world.”

“In an instant it became clear to us that the nearly — but not quite — perfect uniformity of the advancing columns, dissolving chaotically in the clash of the fronts, reformed itself after he battle in a far more perfect form: as the utterly precise, utterly indistinguishable rows of crosses in the heroes' cemeteries, where the lines spread out into a broad perspective, moving in its spare monotony, cut at right angles and chopped in blocks, so that an absolute order was finally achieved.”

Personality

Mr. von Rezzori once described himself as ''a living anachronism,'' and ''a man dreaming of a lost homeland.'' He cherished friendship, maintaining it was the central ingredient to any happiness, ''vastly superior to romance, family, children, sexual love.'' By all accounts he was good at it. Gregor von Rezzori had a gift for aphorisms and pithy wit. He was fluent in German, Romanian, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, French, and English.

Physical Characteristics: Gregor von Rezzori had his left eyebrow quizzically raised, casually holding a cigarette between his fingers.

Connections

Gregor von Rezzori was married to Beatrice Monti della Corte.

Spouse:

Beatrice Monti della Corte

ex-spouse:

Hanna Axmann

ex-spouse:

Priska von Tiedemann

editor:

Elisabeth Sifton

Friend:

Louis Malle

Friend:

Bruce Chatwin