Gregor von Rezzori

Gregor von Rezzori was born in Czernowitz, Bukovina, part of Austria-Hungary at the time (1914). He originated from an Italian aristocratic family from the Province of Ragusa who had settled in Vienna by the mid-18th century. His father was an Austrian civil servant based in Czernowitz. The family remained in the region after it became part of the Romanian Kingdom in 1919, and the young Gregor von Rezzori became a Romanian citizen.

After World War I von Rezzori studied in colleges in Braşov, Fürstenfeld and Vienna. He began studying mining at the University of Leoben, then architecture and medicine at the University of Vienna, where he eventually graduated in arts.

In mid-1930 he 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. Given his Romanian citizenship, von Rezzori was not drafted into the Wehrmacht during World War II.

Until the mid-1950s, he worked as an author at the broadcasting company Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk. He regularly published novels and stories, as well as working in film production as a screenplay author and actor (starring alongside actors such as Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Anna Karina, Marcello Mastroianni or Charles Aznavour). Beginning in the early 1960s, Rezzori lived between Rome and Paris, with sojourns in the United States, eventually settling in Tuscany.

Besides writing and performing, he and his spouse Beatrice Monti della Corte were significant art collectors, and together founded the Santa Maddalena Retreat for Writers. He died in Santa Maddalena, part of Florence's Donnini frazione.

Rezzori began his career as a writer of light novels, but he first encountered success in 1953 with the Maghrebinian Tales, a suite of droll stories and anecdotes from an imaginary land called "Maghrebinia", which reunited in a grotesque and parodic key traits of his multicultural Bukovinian birthplace, of extinct Austria-Hungary and of Bucharest of his youth. Over the years, Rezzori published further Maghrebinian Tales, which increased his reputation of language virtuosity and free spirit, writing with wit, insight and elegance.[1]

Other books, such as The Death of My Brother Abel, Oedipus at Stalingrad, or The Snows of Yesteryear, recording the fading world at the time of the World Wars, have been celebrated for their powerful descriptive prose, nuance and style.[2]

Rezzori first came to the attention of English-speaking readers with the 1969 publication of the story "Memoirs of an Anti-Semite" in The New Yorker, On this occasion, Elie Wiesel, who was born in Bukovina's neighboring Maramureş, wrote:

"Rezzori addresses the major problems of our time, and his voice echoes with the disturbing and wonderful magic of a true storyteller."[3]

The novel-length version of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite was published in Germany in 1979, with the English translation following in 1981. It received enthusiastic reviews from Christopher Lehmann-Haupt[4] and Stanley Kaufmann[5] when originally published. It was reissued by New York Review Books in 2007,[6] and Christopher Hitchens wrote in a retrospective review, "Gregor von Rezzori could claim the peculiar distinction of being one of the few survivors to treat this ultimate catastrophe in the mild language of understatement. This is what still gives his novel the power to shock."[7]

Reissues of The Snows of Yesteryear and An Ermine in Czernopol followed in 2008 and 2012,[8][9] respectively. In 2019 NYRB published The Death of My Brother Abel and its sequel Cain as a single volume.[10] Elie Wiesel wrote of The Death of My Brother Abel, "If a great novel can be recognized by its obsessions, its characters and, above all, its tone, then The Death of My Brother Abel is unquestionably great. Rezzori addresses the major problems of our time, and his voice echoes with the disturbing and wonderful magic of the true storyteller."[11]

Rezzori's controversial description of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as "the only convincing love story of our century" appeared on the cover of the second Vintage International edition of the novel.[12] It was attributed simply to "Vanity Fair", the magazine which published Rezzori's original review of the book, and Rezzori was not often heralded as the man behind the quote.

In his Guide for Idiots through German Society, von Rezzori also used his noted taste for satire. Although he was not unanimously perceived as a major author in the German-speaking area, his posthumous reception has arguably confirmed him among the most important modern German-language authors.[2]

• Premio Gregor von Rezzori

• Valentina Glajar: After Empire: 'Postcolonial' Bukovina in Gregor von Rezzori's 'Blumen im Schnee' (1989) . In: The German Legacy in East Central Europe as Recorded in Recent German-Language Literature. Columbia, SC: Camden House. 2004. ISBN 1-57113-256-2
• Katarzyna Jaśtal, Erzählte Zeiträume. Kindheitserinnerungen aus den Randgebieten der Habsburgermonarchie von Manès Sperber, Elias Canetti und Gregor von Rezzori, Aureus, Kraków, 1998
• Gerhard Köpf, Vor-Bilder. Tübinger Poetik-Vorlesung, Konkursbuchverlag, Tübingen, 1999
• Jacques Lajarrige, Gregor von Rezzori. Etudes réunies, Université de Rouen, Centre d'Études et de Recherches Autrichiennes, Mont-Saint-Aignan, 2003
• Gilbert Ravy, "Rezzori et la France", in Austriaca, No. 54 (2002), p. 41-58
• Tetyana Basnyak. The mythologeme of East European culture in Gregor von Rezzori’s creative work. – Manuscript. Thesis for а scientific degree of Candidate of Philology. Speciality 10.01.04 – Literature of Foreign Countries. – T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. – Kiev, 2010.
• Мусієнко І. В. Витоки особливостей ментальності Грегора фон Реццорі (за книгою "Квіти в снігу") / І. В. Мусієнко // Питання літературознавства : наук. зб. – Чернівці : Чернівецький нац. ун-т, 2000. – Вип. 6 (63). – С. 121–133.

• "Gregor von Rezzori at Institute as writer-in-residence; will speak Nov. 21", in MIT Tech Talk, Vol 41, Nr 12, November 20, 1996
• W. Killy (ed.), Literaturlexikon, vol. 9, Lexikon Verlag, 2001
• Th. Kraft (ed.), Lexikon der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur seit 1945, Nymphenburger, Munich, 2003

• Gregor von Rezzori at IMDb
• Santa Maddalena Foundation
• Review of Orient-Express
• Review of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite