A Gentleman in Moscow Summary: Amor Towles and Thirty Years Inside the Metropol
What it is about
A Gentleman in Moscow is Amor Towles' second novel, published in 2016, five years after his debut Rules of Civility. It opens in 1922 with Count Alexander Rostov standing before a Bolshevik tribunal, charged as a social parasite. The expected outcome is a guilty verdict and a bullet. The Count refuses to confess and argues his case with some style. A revolutionary poem attributed to him saves him, because certain senior Bolsheviks regard the author of that poem as one of the heroes of the struggle against the Tsarist regime.
So the sentence is changed. Instead of execution, the Count is placed under house arrest for life at the address where he already lives, the Hotel Metropol in central Moscow. A military guard walks him back. He is ordered out of his luxurious suite and moved up to a cramped room in the old servants' quarters on the sixth floor. From that point the novel stays inside one building while the country outside it changes beyond recognition, running from 1922 to 1954.
The confinement is the engine of the book. The Count cannot leave, so the world has to come to him, and it does. He builds a social circle out of friends from his youth and out of the residents, staff and customers of the hotel and its restaurants. Much of the action happens in the public rooms, above all the Metropol's main restaurant, the Boyarsky, which becomes the hub of his life. Meals, wine lists and the choosing of a bottle carry a surprising amount of the plot. Châteauneuf-du-Pape is especially important to the storyline.
The main characters
Count Alexander Rostov is a conversationalist by nature, and house arrest gives him time for reflection he would never otherwise have had. Across the novel he talks about evolution, philosophy, Impressionism, Russian writers and poetry, food, post-revolutionary Russian society and Russia's place in the world.
His most important early friendship is with Nina Kulikova, a nine-year-old girl living in the hotel, the daughter of a widowed Ukrainian bureaucrat. Nina is fascinated by the now-extinct world of Russian princesses and nobility. The Count is just as taken with her curiosity. She also gives him access to parts of the hotel he would never have seen, and through her he glimpses something of the new Russia being built outside the doors.
Around them sits a wide cast drawn from the hotel and its visitors: a seamstress, a Russian chef, a French maître d'hôtel who was once a circus juggler, a poet, an actress, an underemployed architect, an orchestra conductor, a prince, a former Red Army colonel, an aide-de-camp to an American general, and a one-eyed cat.
In 1938 the book turns. Nina returns, now a married woman. Her husband Leo has been arrested and sentenced to five years of forced labour in the Gulag, and she has decided to follow him to Sevvostlag in Kolyma, a remote region bounded by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean. She asks the Count to take temporary custody of her young daughter, Sofia, until arrangements can be made for the child to join her. It is the last time the Count sees Nina. At forty-nine he becomes a surrogate father.
Sofia is quiet and highly intelligent. As a small girl her gifts show in games of hide-and-seek and in her ability to cross the hotel at speed to startle her foster father. Later she begins piano lessons and, after only a few of them, plays a Chopin nocturne, Opus 9 number 2 in E-flat major. Teacher and Count both understand what they are hearing. She is a prodigy, and her artistry carries the book towards its climax.
The themes
Freedom is the obvious one, handled in an unobvious way. The Count's physical world shrinks to a few hundred square metres, and the novel asks what remains of a life once movement is taken away. Manners, attention, friendship and appetite turn out to be durable.
Identity and class run alongside it. Rostov is an aristocrat in a state built to erase aristocrats, and the question of who he is once the title means nothing is never quite settled. The novel is also about family made rather than inherited. Nina, then Sofia, then the hotel staff become the people he belongs to.
Then there is the quieter political thread. The Count watches the Soviet state act on the hotel and on the people in it, from the early revolutionary period through to the beginning of the Cold War. His view darkens notably through the experience of a childhood friend who is asked to censor one of Chekhov's letters, an episode that pulls the book's concerns about art, truth and the state into one place.
Why it still matters
The design is the reason it has lasted. Thirty-two years of Soviet history, told from inside one address, with a hotel staff standing in for a nation. It gives readers the sweep of historical fiction without the usual battlefield machinery, and it treats civility as a serious subject rather than a decorative one. For anyone who likes long novels about character, conversation, food and the passing of time, it is a natural place to start with Towles.
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