Fall Into Chaos

By ROBERT HUGHES

THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

by Gregor von Rezzori

Knopf; 290 pages; $19.95

Nostalgia is what we like today: warm, a bit muzzy, with lots of generalizing dips back into a past full of evocative stage props and period business. Memory is another matter. Remembering truthfully is as difficult as inventing well -- indeed, more so; hence the paucity of good memoirs. "You must never undertake the search for time lost," warns the last sentence of Gregor von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear, "in the spirit of nostalgic tourism." The rest of the book shows how carefully he has obeyed this precept.

American readers know Rezzori mainly for two richly convoluted memory novels of Europe before and after World War II, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1981) and The Death of My Brother Abel (1985). The Snows of Yesteryear looks back before their time frame, to the childhood and, implicitly, the formation of a writer. It leads into a world now irretrievably lost, its values blown away by World War I and its fortunes wrecked by the inflationary '20s -- "For the class to which my parents belonged . . . a fall into chaos, into impotence and deprivation."

Rezzori was the son of a minor aristocratic family living on the outer fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire near Czernowitz in the Bukovina, which became part of Rumania in 1919 when Rezzori was five, and was later swallowed by the Soviet Union. Rezzori's tale is not a continuous narrative but a group of character studies of five people who presided over his childhood and youth -- pillars of the writer's adult imagination around whose base the boy's life was lived.

An extraordinary set they were. His Carpathian peasant nurse, Cassandra, part witch and part illiterate earth mother, was given to romping naked with the pack of family dogs -- "a Lady Godiva with a pitch-black mane," whose fierce nurturing exuberance was in utmost contrast to the coddling anxieties of a beautiful, irascible Viennese mother. Mama believed she had gone below < her station in the polyglot provinces of the Bukovina. Father was sexually unfaithful to her and volcanic in temper; an anti-Semite who despised Nazis as Untermenschen; a watercolorist, photographer and architectural historian whose diversions included dragging a dead wild boar through the hall and up the stairs in the course of a soiree. Above all, Baron von Rezzori was an obsessive hunter, whose profound and almost mystical relation with the woods and the etiquette of the chase would mark his son for life. Finally there were the beloved Other, his sister, dead at 21, and the Pomeranian governess, "Bunchy," who presided over the boy's home education as she had over his mother's.

Strong material, then; and Rezzori follows this family labyrinth back with a fine disdain for sentiment, a transparency of feeling, an acid sense of humor and a vigilant eye for nuances of love and indifference, language, landscape and class behavior. It is not a young man's (or a moralist's) book. But it is intensely moving and contains, in its winding and ironic cadences, not a slack sentence: a performance in a difficult key about the making of a near extinct kind of European.