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Anecdotage: A Summation
An account of the author's trip to the Bukovina and places throughout Germany and Italy in his eightieth year presents a portrait of a land still suffering the aftershocks of an uprising against corrupt Communism. By the author of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.
261 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
About the author
Gregor von Rezzori
40 books101 followersGregor von Rezzori was born in 1914 in Chernivtsi in the Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Ukraine. In an extraordinarily peripatetic life von Rezzori was succesively an Austro-Hungarian, Romanian and Soviet citizen and then, following a period of being stateless, an Austrian citizen.
The great theme of his work was the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual world in which he grew up and which the wars and ideologies of the twentieth century destroyed. His major works include The Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and his autobiographical masterpiece The Snows of Yesteryear.
He died in his home in Donnini, Italy in 1998.
The great theme of his work was the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual world in which he grew up and which the wars and ideologies of the twentieth century destroyed. His major works include The Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and his autobiographical masterpiece The Snows of Yesteryear.
He died in his home in Donnini, Italy in 1998.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 23, 2022
Rezzori: Nostalgia and Language (Review of: Anecdotage, Oedipus at Stalingrad, The Hussar/An Ermine in Czernopol, Orient Express)
Anecdotage, its title punning on the writing memoir in old age, is a late work by Rezzori but has thematic continuities with his earliest novels, particularly The Hussar (also translated as An Ermine in Czernopol) and Oedipus at Stalingrad. Rezzori states that he is writing ‘against the shadow-play of the present’ (27), deploying in this his still keen weapons of scepticism, cynicism, irony and sarcasm - his unique voice. In Anecdotage Rezzori’s scepticism is focussed on his (negative) experiences at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in India, but from this the memoir moves back and forth between his witnessing the Anschluss in Vienna; post-war Berlin 1947-8 (where he worked for a time in radio broadcasting); and his reflections on the Romanian revolution of 1989: the past, or a personal idea of the past, is always present in Rezzori’s writing.
Rezzori describes himself as a ‘Nineteenth Century man of letters at the threshold of the Twenty-First Century’ (26), but his concern with what he calls the ‘metasizing’ (37) currents at play in European culture - arising from, principally, the mass-media - is very modern, perhaps, even, post-modern. Rezzori pits himself against mass society (something he has always done in his novels) arguing that he is a moralist because of his ‘melancholic disposition’ and having a choler that stems from his belief that the ‘demonic’ is always at work in, and may undermine, any culture, particularly mass culture. However, the demonic can be combatted by ‘laughter’ (115), irony and sarcasm. In confronting the demonic – be it fascism or the benighting populist trends of the mass-media - Rezzori counters with his own ‘private mythologies’: his love of the German language, and nostalgia for the landscape and culture of Czernopol/Bukovina (148).
*
Anecdotage may be a late work, and consciously autobiographical, but it develops themes found in Rezzori’s early fiction. One example of this is his frustration with what he sees as the inherent inadequacy of written language. Rezzori is frustrated by writing because of its inability to catch the multivalency of our thoughts, reflections, and it thus baffles the writer’s urge to convey feelings and thoughts, meanings which seem to ricochet off obdurate words:
For years now I’ve been trying to recapture that crucial moment when the verbal thought and sensation linked to it become like the two rails of a train track and meaning detaches itself from the word and then disintegrates altogether: transformed into images that possess their own pictographic syntax and grammar – and I tumble down the dark hole… (80)
This theme is articulated by the narrator of Oedipus at Stalingrad when describing how the anti-hero, Baron Traugott, falteringly attempts to speak in defence of the ‘honour’ of the Vamp after a drunken bunch of habitues of Charley’s Bar sexually assault her at a party:
What we are dealing with here is nothing less than the ultimate failure of language. Surely, Locke should have written more than a single chapter on the inadequacy of words: all the exalted platitudes that have been uttered in the course of the past five thousand years should have convinced us by now that what is most profound cannot be articulated. (37-8)
It is interesting that Rezzori makes Traugott an advertising copywriter, which in the author’s critical view of the demons of the 20th century must damn him. But Traugott’s dubious baronetcy and ambition to join the ranks of the true aristos via his courtship of the ‘Thoroughbred’, makes him into a somewhat ridiculous (although always sympathetically so) throwback to the stilted mores of 19th century European society. As an advertising man, Traugott manipulates words for the advertorial work he does for the Gentleman’s Monthly but even in this kind of literary endeavour his writer’s block also relates to the problem of writing:
…visions drift, dreamlike and melodiously enticing, like Rhine maidens on an opera stage, while beneath them the words, melted into raw bell meal, are rolled about by slowly undulating, constantly groping and testing tentacles…114-5
*
In Rezzori’s very early novel, An Ermine in Czernopol, the inadequacy of writing is related to the way nostalgia echoes in so much of what we wish to articulate, to write about:
For years I wasn’t able to pick up a book or look at a picture that I had studied then without feeling the vague stimulus of a deeper recognition, an impact that strikes the core of our being, the sense of déjà vu mingled with nostalgia that comes when we reencounter motifs from our childhood and we regret having lost the power to experience the world in a way that brought us closer to the essence of things. 325
Rezzori often reflects on his early life in Czernopol and Bukovina – that area of eastern Europe which, in political terms, is nationally indistinct: tugged back and forth between Russia, Poland and Romania (or now, in 2022, between Ukraine and Russia). For Rezzori it is an example of how a particular place and time often serves to reflect on present experience, and in this acts as an antidote to the failure of writing . The hybridity, or at least juxtaposition, of cultures in Czernopol/Bukovina is critical, there was an ‘intermediate sphere of reality’ (157) - that ‘every language [there] was corrupted’ (224). Rezzori’s yearning for this intermediate realm of reality, is, however, not just of place and time but of signification, of a logogram:
It was as if I had captured its essence in a kind of logogram, an equation elevated to a mathematical formula, and perhaps it is due to this abbreviation and abstraction of memory that today I no longer know whether the city of Czernopol existed in reality, or merely in one of my dreams of drafts. 342
*
Despite the pervasive cynicism in Rezzori’s literary voice, either in fiction or memoir, it is generally a sympathetic voice, implicitly humanistic. It rejects the treacherous ideals of mass identities, nationalism, and the ersatz forms of identity pedalled by the mass media. The same voice is found in his late novel, Orient Express in which Aram, a millionaire businessman experiencing a life crisis (divorce etc.), derides the misappropriation of the past in the service of advertising represented by the Orient Express. Aram is described as having similar attitudes to those bluntly articulated by Rezzori in Anecdotage: cynicism (90), sarcasm (99) and is godless (‘anything smacking of religion filled him with repugnance’ 83).
The word Orient takes on wider metaphorical meanings – suggesting how western culture is disoriented, its late 20th century’ generation being rootless denizens ‘not able to live in their particular historical present’. Aram consoles himself with memories of being ‘at home’ – but in this novel Czernopol is replaced by other areas now in Romania, in Dobrudja and the resort Technirghiol. Like Czernopol, these places act, harking back to the metaphor in Anecdotage of how a perfect state of linguistic signification is like converging rails, as a critical point of reference to assess the present:
He was travelling on two parallel lines, so to speak, on this Disney-land choo choo, in two adjacent, separate, realities that took turns pursuing one another: the one ahead looking back, the other falling further behind with its eyes facing the front. The actual present lay somewhere between, like a kind of relay station, a field of awareness on which the questing contacts met. 125-6
Ideas of converging time and change are constantly at broached in this novel, marked early on when Aram loses his trusted Omega and ends up with a cheap digital watch, which he later throws into the English Channel. But in a kind of Proustian nod (but with a political edge) he argues that present time and feelings of nostalgia may be how different lines, of times, of writing, might meet:
Just as in dreams two separate conditions often flow together into one, each transparently contained in the other, so too consciousness of illusion was contained in the momentarily recaptured world of that time, its breath of life suddenly wafted back and, with it, the knowledge of how he’d breathed it then. 109
*
But Rezzori never provides a clear answer to the problem he felt in the inadequacy of writing, of being a writer. It is a problem that in one way or another a literary writer of any hue, realist or modernist, is always troubled by. Modern language philosophy, i.e. from Wittgenstein to Derrida, warns against the chimera of attaining perfect (or, Rezzori’s more limited quest, adequate) linguistic meaning. By its very nature producing the ideal word, sentence, writing, is inevitably influenced by the conjuncture of many different lines (‘or rails), not just one or two: by the time of the mind, of narrative time, of discursive time, the reader’s time and, not least, by the political legacies that have manipulated and then pervaded a mother tongue and its literature. In the end, Rezzori limited himself to a working solution by recourse to the time of his past experience, of writing mindful in that critical spirit.
Anecdotage, its title punning on the writing memoir in old age, is a late work by Rezzori but has thematic continuities with his earliest novels, particularly The Hussar (also translated as An Ermine in Czernopol) and Oedipus at Stalingrad. Rezzori states that he is writing ‘against the shadow-play of the present’ (27), deploying in this his still keen weapons of scepticism, cynicism, irony and sarcasm - his unique voice. In Anecdotage Rezzori’s scepticism is focussed on his (negative) experiences at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in India, but from this the memoir moves back and forth between his witnessing the Anschluss in Vienna; post-war Berlin 1947-8 (where he worked for a time in radio broadcasting); and his reflections on the Romanian revolution of 1989: the past, or a personal idea of the past, is always present in Rezzori’s writing.
Rezzori describes himself as a ‘Nineteenth Century man of letters at the threshold of the Twenty-First Century’ (26), but his concern with what he calls the ‘metasizing’ (37) currents at play in European culture - arising from, principally, the mass-media - is very modern, perhaps, even, post-modern. Rezzori pits himself against mass society (something he has always done in his novels) arguing that he is a moralist because of his ‘melancholic disposition’ and having a choler that stems from his belief that the ‘demonic’ is always at work in, and may undermine, any culture, particularly mass culture. However, the demonic can be combatted by ‘laughter’ (115), irony and sarcasm. In confronting the demonic – be it fascism or the benighting populist trends of the mass-media - Rezzori counters with his own ‘private mythologies’: his love of the German language, and nostalgia for the landscape and culture of Czernopol/Bukovina (148).
*
Anecdotage may be a late work, and consciously autobiographical, but it develops themes found in Rezzori’s early fiction. One example of this is his frustration with what he sees as the inherent inadequacy of written language. Rezzori is frustrated by writing because of its inability to catch the multivalency of our thoughts, reflections, and it thus baffles the writer’s urge to convey feelings and thoughts, meanings which seem to ricochet off obdurate words:
For years now I’ve been trying to recapture that crucial moment when the verbal thought and sensation linked to it become like the two rails of a train track and meaning detaches itself from the word and then disintegrates altogether: transformed into images that possess their own pictographic syntax and grammar – and I tumble down the dark hole… (80)
This theme is articulated by the narrator of Oedipus at Stalingrad when describing how the anti-hero, Baron Traugott, falteringly attempts to speak in defence of the ‘honour’ of the Vamp after a drunken bunch of habitues of Charley’s Bar sexually assault her at a party:
What we are dealing with here is nothing less than the ultimate failure of language. Surely, Locke should have written more than a single chapter on the inadequacy of words: all the exalted platitudes that have been uttered in the course of the past five thousand years should have convinced us by now that what is most profound cannot be articulated. (37-8)
It is interesting that Rezzori makes Traugott an advertising copywriter, which in the author’s critical view of the demons of the 20th century must damn him. But Traugott’s dubious baronetcy and ambition to join the ranks of the true aristos via his courtship of the ‘Thoroughbred’, makes him into a somewhat ridiculous (although always sympathetically so) throwback to the stilted mores of 19th century European society. As an advertising man, Traugott manipulates words for the advertorial work he does for the Gentleman’s Monthly but even in this kind of literary endeavour his writer’s block also relates to the problem of writing:
…visions drift, dreamlike and melodiously enticing, like Rhine maidens on an opera stage, while beneath them the words, melted into raw bell meal, are rolled about by slowly undulating, constantly groping and testing tentacles…114-5
*
In Rezzori’s very early novel, An Ermine in Czernopol, the inadequacy of writing is related to the way nostalgia echoes in so much of what we wish to articulate, to write about:
For years I wasn’t able to pick up a book or look at a picture that I had studied then without feeling the vague stimulus of a deeper recognition, an impact that strikes the core of our being, the sense of déjà vu mingled with nostalgia that comes when we reencounter motifs from our childhood and we regret having lost the power to experience the world in a way that brought us closer to the essence of things. 325
Rezzori often reflects on his early life in Czernopol and Bukovina – that area of eastern Europe which, in political terms, is nationally indistinct: tugged back and forth between Russia, Poland and Romania (or now, in 2022, between Ukraine and Russia). For Rezzori it is an example of how a particular place and time often serves to reflect on present experience, and in this acts as an antidote to the failure of writing . The hybridity, or at least juxtaposition, of cultures in Czernopol/Bukovina is critical, there was an ‘intermediate sphere of reality’ (157) - that ‘every language [there] was corrupted’ (224). Rezzori’s yearning for this intermediate realm of reality, is, however, not just of place and time but of signification, of a logogram:
It was as if I had captured its essence in a kind of logogram, an equation elevated to a mathematical formula, and perhaps it is due to this abbreviation and abstraction of memory that today I no longer know whether the city of Czernopol existed in reality, or merely in one of my dreams of drafts. 342
*
Despite the pervasive cynicism in Rezzori’s literary voice, either in fiction or memoir, it is generally a sympathetic voice, implicitly humanistic. It rejects the treacherous ideals of mass identities, nationalism, and the ersatz forms of identity pedalled by the mass media. The same voice is found in his late novel, Orient Express in which Aram, a millionaire businessman experiencing a life crisis (divorce etc.), derides the misappropriation of the past in the service of advertising represented by the Orient Express. Aram is described as having similar attitudes to those bluntly articulated by Rezzori in Anecdotage: cynicism (90), sarcasm (99) and is godless (‘anything smacking of religion filled him with repugnance’ 83).
The word Orient takes on wider metaphorical meanings – suggesting how western culture is disoriented, its late 20th century’ generation being rootless denizens ‘not able to live in their particular historical present’. Aram consoles himself with memories of being ‘at home’ – but in this novel Czernopol is replaced by other areas now in Romania, in Dobrudja and the resort Technirghiol. Like Czernopol, these places act, harking back to the metaphor in Anecdotage of how a perfect state of linguistic signification is like converging rails, as a critical point of reference to assess the present:
He was travelling on two parallel lines, so to speak, on this Disney-land choo choo, in two adjacent, separate, realities that took turns pursuing one another: the one ahead looking back, the other falling further behind with its eyes facing the front. The actual present lay somewhere between, like a kind of relay station, a field of awareness on which the questing contacts met. 125-6
Ideas of converging time and change are constantly at broached in this novel, marked early on when Aram loses his trusted Omega and ends up with a cheap digital watch, which he later throws into the English Channel. But in a kind of Proustian nod (but with a political edge) he argues that present time and feelings of nostalgia may be how different lines, of times, of writing, might meet:
Just as in dreams two separate conditions often flow together into one, each transparently contained in the other, so too consciousness of illusion was contained in the momentarily recaptured world of that time, its breath of life suddenly wafted back and, with it, the knowledge of how he’d breathed it then. 109
*
But Rezzori never provides a clear answer to the problem he felt in the inadequacy of writing, of being a writer. It is a problem that in one way or another a literary writer of any hue, realist or modernist, is always troubled by. Modern language philosophy, i.e. from Wittgenstein to Derrida, warns against the chimera of attaining perfect (or, Rezzori’s more limited quest, adequate) linguistic meaning. By its very nature producing the ideal word, sentence, writing, is inevitably influenced by the conjuncture of many different lines (‘or rails), not just one or two: by the time of the mind, of narrative time, of discursive time, the reader’s time and, not least, by the political legacies that have manipulated and then pervaded a mother tongue and its literature. In the end, Rezzori limited himself to a working solution by recourse to the time of his past experience, of writing mindful in that critical spirit.
October 2, 2017
"Quanto innata e connaturata è in noi la volontà di non vedere la verità." (p. 59)
"La più bella delle finzioni che opponiamo alla bestialità del mondo è l’amore." (p. 251)
"La più bella delle finzioni che opponiamo alla bestialità del mondo è l’amore." (p. 251)
July 17, 2025
Problems of writing and connection give way to problems of understanding.
June 24, 2013
Von Rezzori is one of the most insightful critics of 20th century Europe. He is outstanding.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews