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‘Here you can find a dozen of the most disparate nationalities and at least half a dozen bitterly feuding faiths — all living in the most cynical harmony that is built on mutual aversion and common business dealings,’ says Herr Tarangolian, the sophisticated prefect of Czernopol. It is a teeming, contradictory city, a place of irony, laughter, tastelessness and ‘extraordinary intelligence’, portrayed through the shifting lens of a child’s view recalled at an unspecified later date.
The narrative turns on the behaviour of Major Tildy, a former hussar in the Austro-Hungarian army. Fearless and totally humourless, he embodies the codes of chivalry and honour that characterised the old order, and he wishes to impose them on the chaos he sees around him. When an impertinent scribbler insults his sister-in-law’s virtue in public, Tildy challenges him to a duel. In an attempt to sort out the mess, the colonel explains to Tildy that while his action was understandable, even commendable, it was nevertheless misplaced, since ‘every rascal off the street knows she’s a harlot, and can prove it.’
Tildy predictably challenges him to a duel. The divisional commander tries to smooth things out, but his concluding remark, ‘It would be a very strange place indeed to keep your honour hidden, Major Tildy — between the legs of your sister-in-law’, elicits the same response from the absurd Tildy, and the latter is confined to a lunatic asylum.
These comic events take place against a cast of gorgeously described characters through whom Rezzori examines German, Jewish and other identities. The novel is a sensuous celebration of the variety and detail of life, and of the distinctive perceptions of childhood, which readers will be inclined to compare with Proust. It is a profound reflection on a period that generated the anti-Semitic pogroms which culminated in the Nazis, though it does not in any way feel dated.
While New York Review of Books should be congratulated for publishing Philip Boehm’s magnificent new translation, it is negligent of them to say nothing of this stunning book’s publishing history. Nowhere do we learn that it was first published in German in 1958, and that it was in fact published in English in 1960 under the title The Hussar, in a poor translation which the author abhorred. It is time that it now tookits rightful place among the classics of 20th-century literature.
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