Gregor von Rezzori, Zăpezile de altădată
Gregor von Rezzori, The Snows of Yesteryear

Summary/Abstract: Katharina Kilzer examines the life of Gregor von Rezzori (1914–1998), the writer born in Chernivtsi whose works preserve the memory of a vanished world: Habsburg Bukovina. Focusing on The Snows of Yesteryear, the article presents the figures who shaped his intellectual and emotional formation: his father, Hugo, an art historian who worked at Putna and Sucevița Monasteries; his nurse Cassandra, the source of the Oriental tales that nourished his imagination; and his governess Strausserl, his own pillar of Western culture. He achieved literary success with The Maghrebian Tales, creating Maghrebia—a fictional Balkan landscape in which literature becomes a means of understanding the “provisionality of life”. Although he lived much of his life as a stateless refugee, Rezzori found in literary reality the only bridge between past and present.

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