An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori
An Ermine in Czernopol by Gregor von Rezzori (Trans. from the German by Philip Boehm). New York Review Books Classics (2011).
Having read Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, I knew I was in for a treat when I bought An Ermine in Czernopol. Like his other books, this one too is largely autobiographical, though it is written as if it were a novel. No doubt, for the sophisticated Rezzori, the current distinctions between “memoir” and “fiction” would have been laughable. In fact, in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the narrator states that he doesn’t differentiate between reality and fiction, and often mixes things from other people’s lives with his own. The unspecified genre of An Ermine in Czernopol is part of its originality, and not simply because it mixes memoir and fiction, but because of the way it does so: written in an apparently shapeless way, the narrative seems to be nothing more than the writer’s random memories. For example, when he introduces a character and sketches the role (s)he will play in the story, he also tells us how that character will end. He is not concerned at all with what passes for one of the main rules of storytelling, suspense. At a closer look, however, it becomes clear that the each chapter is centered on a specific character. The shapelessness is only an illusion created by the author, who instead of unspooling a single thread has constructed his story in many layers.
Like Rezzori’s other books, An Ermine in Czernopol is set in his native province of Bucovina. Bucovina had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 (a few years after Rezzori’s birth) when it was added to Romania, and it now belongs to Ukraine. The portraits Rezzori draws of the particular species of individuals living in the province of Bucovina in the 1920s are the best representation of his genius. Having lived in Romania—albeit at a very different historical time—I can testify that this species, for which wit was at the top of hierarchical values and “lowliness was never a fault,” is not simply a fantastical creation of a writer with great imagination: it does exist. However, the amazing world of Czernopol—with its mixture of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Gypsies, Romanians, and other ethnicities that are now extinguished, such as the Ruthens (most of them peasants who lived in a very traditional way)—has disappeared. Czernopol is a barely veiled version of Cernautzi (its Romanian name—Cernivtsi in Ukrainian, Chernovtsy in Russian and Czernowitz in German and Yiddish). In fact, in one instance the writer slips and calls the city by its real name. The city is brought to life with a descriptive power unequaled in anything else I’ve read.
The main character here being the city itself, the “plot” of the “story” is almost irrelevant. But there is a plot, which is narrated in the voice of a child (presumably, young Rezzori), though the voice doesn’t have the “innocence” one usually associates with childhood, but rather the wisdom and knowledge of adulthood. The child gains this knowledge in a series of narrations by other characters with whom he comes in contact. The pronoun used by Rezzori is “we”—a curious choice, which sometimes includes the narrator’s sister, Tanya, but at other times is hard to explain. Who is “we”? Its usage is reminiscent of the French impersonal pronoun on, which often appears in Proust (with whom Rezzori has much in common). Like Proust, Rezzori often starts a sentence by describing the feeling of his protagonist, and then turns it into a generalization about human beings. The grammatical shift (to “we” or on) allows the story to move from the particular to the universal, and thus to acquire the power of myth.
What could be called the book’s plot is what the child hears and patches together from the adults around him. Tildy, a major of Hungarian (and possibly German) origin, who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army and is now enlisted in the nationalist Romanian army, is the main character. He is the symbol of the now defunct Empire, but also of a system of values that are absent in Czernopol: honor and a high sense of justice. He also happens to be the ideal physical representation of what today we would call a role model for the child-narrator. A handsome, mysterious hussar, Tildy always acts in accordance with an aristocratic code of values for which the city of Czernopol, which only values wit and laughter, has no use.
The underlying social and historical context may be difficult for an American reader to understand because of the complicated ethnic relations in the Bucovina of that era. To oversimplify, Tildy is to a large extent the victim of Romanian nationalism. But, like all heroes, he is also the victim of something that belongs only to him (call it “greatness”) and sets him apart from the society in which he lives. Married to Tamara, a woman just as enigmatic as he, and who suffers, apparently, from a combination of depression and drug abuse, he challenges to a duel a series of Romanians who have insulted both his wife and sister-in-law. The latter is another fascinating character, a beautiful woman who, in spite of being married, is extremely “generous” to all the males in town. For defending the honor of these women, to the people of Czernopol Major Tildy is a fool without a sense of humor. To the narrator Tildy is a character from a vanished world who, in a town like Czernopol, can only meet a tragic end.
The final chapter, “Love and Death of the Ermine,” is masterly in the way it shows Tildy’s demise not as heroic but as pure grotesque. In a city in which the conflict between the hero and the others is a conflict between two systems of a different nature (justice, an ethical value, and wit, an esthetic value), the result can only be grotesque. And the only way the tragic could manifest itself in an amoral city (that is, a city that opposes to the idea of justice the idea of wit) is through the grotesque.
The chapter takes place in a cheap dive with the pretentious and ridiculous name “Etablissement Mon Repos.” Here, Major Tildy and his brother-in-law (a former Professor of Latin who is an alcoholic) drown their sorrows in the company of a young prostitute, Mititika (“the Little One”). The description of this prostitute, the mixture of cheapness and vulgarity but also of beauty and innocence, and of her interaction with Tildy is extraordinary. They fall in love, but this love is as grotesque as its setting. In the morning, as they walk together with the drunken brother-in-law who keeps quoting Latin authors, Tildy saves him from an oncoming streetcar with broken brakes and Tildy is killed. The novel ends, symbolically, with the scene of his body covered by the prostitute’s ermine coat, whose whiteness is soon soaked in blood.
Gregor von Rezzori may be the greatest writer you’ve never heard of.
Having read Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and The Snows of Yesteryear, I knew I was in for a treat when I bought An Ermine in Czernopol. Like his other books, this one too is largely autobiographical, though it is written as if it were a novel. No doubt, for the sophisticated Rezzori, the current distinctions between “memoir” and “fiction” would have been laughable. In fact, in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, the narrator states that he doesn’t differentiate between reality and fiction, and often mixes things from other people’s lives with his own. The unspecified genre of An Ermine in Czernopol is part of its originality, and not simply because it mixes memoir and fiction, but because of the way it does so: written in an apparently shapeless way, the narrative seems to be nothing more than the writer’s random memories. For example, when he introduces a character and sketches the role (s)he will play in the story, he also tells us how that character will end. He is not concerned at all with what passes for one of the main rules of storytelling, suspense. At a closer look, however, it becomes clear that the each chapter is centered on a specific character. The shapelessness is only an illusion created by the author, who instead of unspooling a single thread has constructed his story in many layers.
Like Rezzori’s other books, An Ermine in Czernopol is set in his native province of Bucovina. Bucovina had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918 (a few years after Rezzori’s birth) when it was added to Romania, and it now belongs to Ukraine. The portraits Rezzori draws of the particular species of individuals living in the province of Bucovina in the 1920s are the best representation of his genius. Having lived in Romania—albeit at a very different historical time—I can testify that this species, for which wit was at the top of hierarchical values and “lowliness was never a fault,” is not simply a fantastical creation of a writer with great imagination: it does exist. However, the amazing world of Czernopol—with its mixture of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, Austrians, Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Gypsies, Romanians, and other ethnicities that are now extinguished, such as the Ruthens (most of them peasants who lived in a very traditional way)—has disappeared. Czernopol is a barely veiled version of Cernautzi (its Romanian name—Cernivtsi in Ukrainian, Chernovtsy in Russian and Czernowitz in German and Yiddish). In fact, in one instance the writer slips and calls the city by its real name. The city is brought to life with a descriptive power unequaled in anything else I’ve read.
The main character here being the city itself, the “plot” of the “story” is almost irrelevant. But there is a plot, which is narrated in the voice of a child (presumably, young Rezzori), though the voice doesn’t have the “innocence” one usually associates with childhood, but rather the wisdom and knowledge of adulthood. The child gains this knowledge in a series of narrations by other characters with whom he comes in contact. The pronoun used by Rezzori is “we”—a curious choice, which sometimes includes the narrator’s sister, Tanya, but at other times is hard to explain. Who is “we”? Its usage is reminiscent of the French impersonal pronoun on, which often appears in Proust (with whom Rezzori has much in common). Like Proust, Rezzori often starts a sentence by describing the feeling of his protagonist, and then turns it into a generalization about human beings. The grammatical shift (to “we” or on) allows the story to move from the particular to the universal, and thus to acquire the power of myth.
What could be called the book’s plot is what the child hears and patches together from the adults around him. Tildy, a major of Hungarian (and possibly German) origin, who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army and is now enlisted in the nationalist Romanian army, is the main character. He is the symbol of the now defunct Empire, but also of a system of values that are absent in Czernopol: honor and a high sense of justice. He also happens to be the ideal physical representation of what today we would call a role model for the child-narrator. A handsome, mysterious hussar, Tildy always acts in accordance with an aristocratic code of values for which the city of Czernopol, which only values wit and laughter, has no use.
The underlying social and historical context may be difficult for an American reader to understand because of the complicated ethnic relations in the Bucovina of that era. To oversimplify, Tildy is to a large extent the victim of Romanian nationalism. But, like all heroes, he is also the victim of something that belongs only to him (call it “greatness”) and sets him apart from the society in which he lives. Married to Tamara, a woman just as enigmatic as he, and who suffers, apparently, from a combination of depression and drug abuse, he challenges to a duel a series of Romanians who have insulted both his wife and sister-in-law. The latter is another fascinating character, a beautiful woman who, in spite of being married, is extremely “generous” to all the males in town. For defending the honor of these women, to the people of Czernopol Major Tildy is a fool without a sense of humor. To the narrator Tildy is a character from a vanished world who, in a town like Czernopol, can only meet a tragic end.
The final chapter, “Love and Death of the Ermine,” is masterly in the way it shows Tildy’s demise not as heroic but as pure grotesque. In a city in which the conflict between the hero and the others is a conflict between two systems of a different nature (justice, an ethical value, and wit, an esthetic value), the result can only be grotesque. And the only way the tragic could manifest itself in an amoral city (that is, a city that opposes to the idea of justice the idea of wit) is through the grotesque.
The chapter takes place in a cheap dive with the pretentious and ridiculous name “Etablissement Mon Repos.” Here, Major Tildy and his brother-in-law (a former Professor of Latin who is an alcoholic) drown their sorrows in the company of a young prostitute, Mititika (“the Little One”). The description of this prostitute, the mixture of cheapness and vulgarity but also of beauty and innocence, and of her interaction with Tildy is extraordinary. They fall in love, but this love is as grotesque as its setting. In the morning, as they walk together with the drunken brother-in-law who keeps quoting Latin authors, Tildy saves him from an oncoming streetcar with broken brakes and Tildy is killed. The novel ends, symbolically, with the scene of his body covered by the prostitute’s ermine coat, whose whiteness is soon soaked in blood.
Gregor von Rezzori may be the greatest writer you’ve never heard of.
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