A Gentleman in Moscow

Fourth Tuesday of Easter

So you think you're home isolated. Wait till you meet Count Rostov, the protagonist in Amor Towles prize winning A Gentleman in Moscow. The Count was a wealthy Russian aristocrat during pre-World War I, pre-Communist Revolution Russia. He is living in Paris during the war but returns to Moscow in 1922. His nobility in czarist times makes him an enemy of the Revolution in the thinking of the Communist government. He is arrested, tried, and convicted. He is spared a death sentence because he had written a poem years earlier that was understood as an inspiration for the Russian Revolution.

He is sentenced not to prison but to house arrest at the Metropole Hotel, which had been a luxury hotel before the Revolution.

The Count spends the next 30 years confined to the hotel. The story is basically the Count's coping with communist circumstances while retaining his noble identity, fine tastes in music, literature, philosophy and food. The Count's character and personality can be read in more than one way. Brilliantly sophisticated, he also seems terribly naive about his circumstances. But it is a studied naivete. In one sense he is constantly in denial. In another sense he cleverly adapting to his changing circumstances. In another sense still, he is adapting his circumstances to himself. Initially he is ensconced in a finest hotel suite, but soon he is moved to an attic room. Somehow he adapts his room into the mental trappings of a suite. 

He dines everyday in the hotel's superior restaurant. He knows the restaurant's superb chef from pre-Revolution days. As time goes on and Russia grows poorer, he chef is supplied with lower and lower quality food. Instead of lamenting the restaurant's decline, Count Rostov admires the chef's genius in making fine dishes out of miserable ingredients. The Count always finds the best in even the worst circumstances. He is imminently adaptable without being changeable. He is ever, always the sophisticated aristocrat. 

For me the most amusing of the many life vignettes that fill the book concerns the restaurant's wine cellar. It's a superior wine cellar containing everything from the commonplace to the Grand Premiere Growth Bordeaux and the finest Chateau Neuf-de-Papes. The Count's well trained palate is indulged nightly with the treasures of the hotel's wine list--until one night. One night he asks for a wine. The waiter says,  "red or white?" The chef has to clarify the Count's confusion. The Communist government has declared that all the wine labels be removed and that, in good Communist fashion, all wines have to be treated equally. All have one of two labels--red or white.

The Count will meet a pre-teen girl staying with parents in the hotel for some time. He and she, Nina, become oddly good friends. She eventually leaves. Decades later she reappears with her daughter Sofia. Nina disappears, the government's doing, and the Count at age 49 become Sofia's guardian.  

The book is a fascinating character study of a very complex man. As I told a friend, "The plot, like the Count, goes nowhere for the first 323 pages." Then suddenly a whole new action escape drama begins. I won't tell you the rest.

Thanks to my friends, Nelson and Becky Green, for recommending this one. Becky read it once, then as soon as she finished it, started back on page 1 and reread it. It's definitely worth your reading too, at least once.

Faithfully, 

Christian