Resumen:
The Last Mazurka. The shot Count Hieronim Tarnowski fired on his wedding night in 1914, on the eve of the First World War, was like a tocsin that sounded the doom of his ancient Polish family. When in August 1939, on the eve of another war, his daughter Sophie saw blood pouring down the side of her train, she felt a terrible foreboding and knew her idyllic world would be swept away. Thirty years later, when Count Hieronim's British grandson Andrew learned of the death of his mother - the beautiful, fragile, and abused Chouquette - his sense of a lost identity deepened and he set out to rediscover the world from which he came. These moments punctuate an extraordinary tale of the downfall of a once-powerful family, which in turn mirrors the twentieth-century fate of a nation ravaged by invasions and crushed by tyranny. |