![]() ![]() For this is a tale of privilege that outlived its age, an idyllic childhood that descended into the hell of the continent's mid-century charnel-house.īorn in 1895, Wilhelm grew up on an island off the Croatian coast, where his family owned a house set amid pine-woods, citrons and oranges. But because he is a sensitive writer, with a novelist's feel for language, he makes of it something more, a wry parable about the ironies of history and mutability of identities in today's Europe. Snyder turns his unhappy, unfulfilled life into a story of suspense, a political romance teetering on the edge of tragicomedy. When he died in Soviet hands in the summer of 1948, the Habsburg dynasty was a footnote in history, and Wilhelm - the third son of a cadet branch of the family - was a footnote to the footnote. Today no one remembers the Archduke Wilhelm, except perhaps the dwindling band of elderly Ukrainian émigrés who knew him better as "Vasily the Embroidered" - from the national costume he wore under his cloak. ![]() There are few historians who possess Timothy Snyder's winning combination of languages, stylish story-telling and analytic insight in The Red Prince, he has produced a gem. ![]()
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