This is a true story although its main protagonist was a romantic novelist. He was Krasnov, an exiled (and retired) Russian general who starred in a piece of murderous play-acting sponsored by Nazi Germany in its last year of power. Under its auspices he led a group of exiles (Cossacks and other refugees from Bolshevik Russia) into victimising the a region of North-Eastern Italy. Magris illuminates a forgotten corner of World War Two, telling his story in a way that preserves all the ambiguities of real life, suggesting that history books are the real fiction, with their neat categories and judgements...


Above all it is a story of tangled motives. The displaced Cossacks were themselves historical victims creating more victims under their elderly novelist-general, a natural leader and perhaps naturally honourable man who served a dishonourable cause.


As an ‘Austro-Hungarian’ Italian Magris is sympathetic to the displaced, the people who must wander, the forsaken creatures of dead empires.This short set piece of a book is an excellent example of how to look at conflicts and wars for the tangled webs of history that lie behind them.

‘That broken sabre, that bladeless hilt surfacing from the broken grave, brings to mind a sight I haven’t seen for years now, not since my legs became too weak to take me up into the woods on Monte Nevoso, where the old eastern border of Italy once ran, and where the boundary now lies between Slovenia and Croatia. If you climb up through the trees toward a hollow called Tri Kalici, beneath the summit, at a certain point you will reach — or used to reach, but it’s sure to be there still — the trunk of a felled tree; the tree had been dead a long time and was already withered and decayed into the ground, though not completely. I climbed up to Tri Kalici many times, year after year, and that tree was always there, every year more decomposed and close to dissolving into the earth, but still itself, with its own form, or the memory of its form. As I passed by, I would greet it like a brother and, watching it unmake itself while preserving its individuality, I could accept its fate — feeling it was my fate too, which every passing year brings closer — without fear, almost reverently, affectionately.’ p83