A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles (Viking Penguin, 2016)

“It is not the business of gentlemen to have occupations.” Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt, must surely be considered a gentleman. But in 1922, in Moscow, all such honorifics are definitely considered surplus to requirements. A committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs has sentenced the count to the most internal of all possible exiles, the Metropol Hotel just a few city blocks from the Kremlin itself. He’s been living there for four years, since his return from Paris. What brought him back? “I missed the climate,” he quips to the committee, which is not amused.

If you have to be confined to one building for the rest of your life, you could do worse than the Metropol, a legendarily cosmopolitan hotel in the center of Moscow, cheek by jowl with the Bolshoi Theater and the Kremlin. There’s a barbershop on the premises, as well as a coffee shop, a bar, and two restaurants, one of them extremely fine. At the outset, though, the Count feels the walls closing in on him. The prospect of endless days reading the paper in the lobby, where the revolving door taunts him with the unattainable out-of-doors, looks like soul-crushing ennui.

All the more so since he’s left his long-term lodging, a suite on the third floor. His status as a non-person affords him only an attic room once used by valets who accompanied well-to-do guests. Happily, though, he makes the acquaintance of Nina Kulikova, age nine. He’s not a man with much use for children, as a rule, but the two become fast friends, and she shows him backstage and below-stairs dimensions of the Metropol that it had never occurred to him to be curious about. “In the time that Nina had been in the hotel, the walls had not grown inward, they had grown outward, expanding in scope and intricacy. In her first weeks, the building had grown to encompass half of Moscow.” Under Nina’s tutelage, Count Alexander is capable of the kind of attentiveness that will let him experience the same thing.

His gift for friendship will be an abiding asset over time, as will his acute social sense: he’s just the man you’d want to place the diners at a party for forty, having consulted for his grandmother as a youth. It’s a talent he brings to the Boyarski, the five-star restaurant on the second floor of the hotel, where he joins the staff assisting his friends, Andrey, the maitre d’; and Emile, the redoubtable chef. He’ll have need of all his friends when Nina reappears as a young woman, only to hand off her little girl and disappear again.

As time passes, we see Russia and the Soviet Union mostly at an ironic distance: “Let us concede that the early thirties in Russia were unkind.” Various congresses and committee meetings are held in the hotel, and there’s one terribly dislikeable employee who rises through the ranks by virtue of his utility as a government stooge. But if the hotel is a prison, it’s also a refuge, where good conversation can be had over good food and drink.

I hear that a miniseries of this book is airing on Showtime this spring. I’m leaning toward giving it a miss, though. As with Towles’s other books, which I recently reviewed, the writing itself is a great part of the pleasure. In my mind’s eye, Count Alexander Ilyich should have been a role for Claude Raines, complete with a quiet courtesy, a certain twinkle in the eye, and a great capacity for watchfully awaiting developments. Maybe I’ll just read it again.

 

 

 

published by email, May 2024