A Gentleman In Moscow

Amor Towles, “A Gentleman In Moscow,” Viking, 2016, 462 pp.

This book was chosen for our March 2019 book club meeting.  I’m constantly amazed at how this book club’s selections have taken me out of my normal reading, yet I have enjoyed almost all of them.  This book is another of that sort.

In June of 1922, the Count Alexander Rostov is summoned before the Russian Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and accused of writing a counter-revolutionary poem.  For his offense, he is informed: ”It is the opinion of this committee that you should be returned to the hotel of which you are so fond.  But make no mistake: should you ever set foot outside of the Metropol (hotel) again, you will be shot.  Next matter.”  (Pg. 5).  With these words, Count Alexander Rostov — recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt — is declared a "Former Person." Russia's new Soviet masters have sentenced him, improbably enough, to house arrest in Moscow's luxurious Metropol hotel, where he is sentenced to live out his days in Stalinist Russia.  The only reason he wasn’t immediately shot for being an aristocrat is that he had written a previous poem in 1913 which seemed in sympathy with revolutionary sentiments at the time.  A poem we later learn he did not in fact write. So, the Russians are the first people to learn to exile a person in their own country.

I believe my notes below capture important concepts of the book but I have few notes on the most important two people in the book: nine-year-old Nina and later, her five-year-old daughter Sofia.  You have to read the book to appreciate them.  Anyway, thus confined in this hotel, Count Rostov passes the decades making a whole world out of a hotel and the people in it — a precocious 9-year-old, a moody chef, the French maître d', and so on.  The count is consigned to a tiny room on the top floor, crammed with a few pieces of his fine furniture and a set of porcelain plates.  Purposefully, one of the tables the Count saves has hollow legs filled with gold coins.

There are many moments to remember, such as: When a sinister hotel waiter, nicknamed the Bishop, suggests the wrong wine to accompany Latvian stew, the Count thinks, "The Rioja? Now there was a wine that would clash with the stew as Achilles clashed with Hector. It would slay the dish with a blow to the head and drag it behind its chariot until it tested the fortitude of every man in Troy ..." and so on.

“The Count had restricted himself to two pieces of parental advice,” Towles tells us. “The first was that if one did not master one’s circumstances, one was bound to be mastered by them; and the second was Montaigne’s maxim that the surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness.”  The Gentleman of Moscow” is a reminder of the graciousness of real class. It has nothing to do with money; it’s predicated on the kind of moral discipline that never goes out of style.

My Notes:

Pg. 13:  When the Count was just seven, he was defeated so soundly by a neighboring boy in a game of draughts that, apparently, a tear was shed, a curse was uttered, and the game pieces were scattered across the floor.  This lack of sportsmanship led to a stiff reprimand from the Count’s father and a trip to bed without supper.  But as the young Count was gripping his blanket in misery, he was visited by his grandmother.  Taking a seat at the foot of the bed, the Countess expressed a measure of sympathy.  “There is nothing pleasant to be said about losing’ she began, ‘but, Sasha, my dear, why on earth would you give him the satisfaction?”

Pg. 35:  The Count, shortly after being confined to the hotel for life, goes to the barber for his regular weekly 12 o’clock appointment.  Another man is waiting but the Count is called immediately to get in the chair as he had a standing appointment for 12 o'clock.  The enraged man waiting, gets up and grabs a scissors and severed the right wing of the Count’s mustache with a single snip.  (I spent the rest of the book waiting for more to develop pertaining to this incident.)

Pg. 46:  By 1900 dueling had tiptoed down the stairs of reason, until they were being fought over the tilt of a hat, the duration of a glance, or the placement of a comma. 

Pg. 56:  After being confined to the hotel for four years, the Count meets nine-year-old Nina. Nina taught him what a novice he was concerning all the secrets of the hotel.  Nina’s father had been ‘temporarily’ assigned to Moscow so Nina has not been enrolled in school.  Nina’s nanny reads books and seldom watches what Nina is up to.  Nina and the Count become best friends and explore locked rooms in the hotel using the mysterious master-key Nina has.

Pg. 122:  The Count meets the famous actress Anna Urbanova and a romance that lasts decades begins.

Pg. 141:  The Count confronts the waiter, called ‘The Bishop,’ over a wine selection.  It turns out later, in revenge, the Bishop has all the labels torn off thousands of wine in inventory.  From now on wine selections will be limited to Red or White.  The Bishop and the Count remain enemies throughout the book.

Pg. 196:  When one experiences a profound setback in the course of an enviable life, one has a variety of options.  One option is to simply join the Confederacy of the Humbled.  Like the Freemasons, the Confederacy of the Humbled, is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings but who know each other at a glance.  They greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile.  Anna and the Count are members.

Pg. 292:  The Count’s old friend Mishka after a visit with the Count says:” Who would have imagined when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.”

Pg. 297:  Otis, a high ranking Soviet whom the Count is tutoring in French and English states: “we and the Americans will lead the rest of this century because we are the only nations who have learned to brush the past aside instead of bowing before it.  But where they have done so in service of their beloved individualism, we are attempting to do so in service of the common good.”

Pg. 330:  Thus was born the golden age of the prefabricated, cement-walled, five-story apartment building—and the four-hundred-square-foot living spaces with access to communal bathrooms boasting four-foot tubs (after all, who has time to lie down in a bath when your neighbors are knocking at the door.)  So ingenious were the designs, they could be built from a single page of specifications—regardless of which way the page was oriented.  And so systematic was their realization, you could mistakenly enter any apartment on your block and feel immediately at home.

Pg. 352:  …The Count, looking at a magazine, asks: “What is an automatic garage door?”  Anna answered, “It is a garage door that opens and closes itself on your behalf.  What do you think of that?”  The Count answered, “I think if I were a garage door, I should rather miss the old days.”  “I’ll tell you what is convenient: to sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray.  To cancel an appointment at the very last minute.  To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another.  To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether.  These are the greatest of conveniences and I had them all.  But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

Pg. 368:  The Count tells Katerina: It was Mishka who wrote that poem, in the front parlor at Idlehour…In the summer of 1913…”  The Count elaborated, “What with the revolt of 1905 and the repressions that followed when we graduated it was still a dangerous time for writing poems of political impatience.  Given Mishka’s background, the Okhrana would have swept him up with a broom.  So one night we decided to publish the poem under my name.  What were they going to do to a Count?”  (This is the poem that saved the Count’s life).  Then as Mishka’s girlfriend, Katerina walks away, the Count asks her where she is going: “Does it matter? She replies.  Only if you read the book will the despair in this statement be evident).

*Casablanca, the movie:  The Count insists that Otis watch this movie and the last words of Otis in the novel are “round up the usual suspects.”  So apparently Otis now understands what the Count is telling him.)