Gregor von Rezzori

Gregor von Rezzori (German pronunciation: [ʁɛˈtsoːʁi]; 13 May 1914 – 23 April 1998), born Gregor Arnulph Herbert Hilarius von Rezzori d'Arezzo, was an Austrian-born, Romanian, Bukovina-German German-language novelist, memoirist, screenwriter, and author of radio plays, as well as an actor, journalist, visual artist, art critic, and art collector.

[citation needed] Von Rezzori was a polyglot, fluent in German, Romanian, Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Yiddish, French, and English.

During his life, Von Rezzori was successively a citizen of Austria-Hungary, Romania, and the Soviet Union, before becoming a stateless person and acquiring Austrian citizenship.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Rezzori lived between Rome and Paris, with sojourns in the United States, eventually settling in Tuscany after his marriage in 1967.

[1] Rezzori began his career as a writer of light novels, but he first encountered success in 1953 with the Maghrebinian Tales, a suite of droll stories and anecdotes from an imaginary land called "Maghrebinia", which reunited in a grotesque and parodic key traits of his multicultural Bukovinian birthplace, of extinct Austria-Hungary and of Bucharest of his youth.

Over the years, Rezzori published further Maghrebinian Tales, which increased his reputation of language virtuosity and free spirit, writing with wit, insight and elegance.

"[12] Rezzori's controversial description of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as "the only convincing love story of our century" appeared on the cover of the second Vintage International edition of the novel.

[3] Besides writing and performing, Von Rezzori and his spouse Beatrice Monti della Corte were significant art collectors, and together founded the Santa Maddalena Retreat for Writers.

[1] In 2000, the Santa Maddalena Foundation was created as a place where established as well as emerging writers could undertake residencies in order to write.