skopia
Rezzori rebuilds vanished Czernowitz, the eastern edge of the Habsburg world, through the five people who filled his childhood. His father hunts, his mother panics, and his nursemaid teaches him about death.
Franz Ferdinand Trotta drinks through the last spring of peace, then loses the war, his money and his wife. On the night Hitler annexes Austria he walks to the emperors' crypt.
Josef Svejk, a Prague dealer in stolen dogs officially certified an idiot, is swept into the Austro-Hungarian army and obeys every order so eagerly that the whole war machine looks ridiculous.
A lieutenant knocks Emperor Franz Joseph off his horse at Solferino and saves his life. Three generations of Trottas ride that accident down into 1914, and the Habsburg empire dissolves around them.