"A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles.
Above: "A Gentleman in Moscow." Amor Towles. 462 Pages.
Returning to Russia was not exactly a safe move by the Count... after all, Tsar Alexander and his family had been executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918, only three years before.
I completed reading this novel today.
I read it on TIMDT's recommendation. I was intrigued with the book as the setting is mostly inter-war Moscow. I had just completed reading another "inter-war" book of non fiction, "Hitlerland," by Andrew Nagorski, so the idea of staying with the inter-war period, but in Moscow, not Berlin, intrigued me.
This is the story, told in the third person by a narrator, of a Russian aristocrat who lives comfortably in a suite at Moscow's "grande dame" Metropole Hotel as the Bolsheviks consolidate their power over Russia. "The Count," the principal character of the book, had, in, in his young thirties, in 1922, returned to Moscow, from his safe haven in Paris, to deal with family matters.
Returning to Russia was not exactly a safe move by the Count... after all, Tsar Alexander and his family had been executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918, only three years before.
Early during the Count's residency at the Metropole, as might have been expected, the Count was called before a Bolshevik review board. The board functionaries noted that ordinarily the Count would have been executed along with other White Russians or anyone tied to the Tsarist regime, but, they would spare the Count's life due to a poem attributed to him which a high level Bolshevik (unnamed) felt aided and motivated the revolutionary effort.
The Count was sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life at the Metropole.
The Count was not able to return to his nice suite at the Metropole... he was led upstairs to a crimped attic space... a space where he would live out his next thirty years. The Count was told if he were ever seen outside of the hotel he would be shot forthwith.
The novel charts the Count's experiences and friendships during his residency at the Metropole. Despite the Count's house arrest, we find, ironically, that he lives a much better life than most Russians during the years of the forced Stalin famines and the Stalin government purges, and through the horrific privations of WWII.
I stayed at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow in August 1965 for a couple of nights. I was travelling with four other college friends. We had just completed a year of college at American University in Cairo and were pursuing an overland trip that embraced much of the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Russia.
Metropole. Think Plaza in New York City or Claridges in London. And yes, as the novel points out, as much around Russia changed in terms of declining "haute" European traditions of luxury, the Communists insisted that the Metropole be held to international standards throughout the grim period of Soviet rule.
I remember the standards of the Metropole, in 1965, to be very much consistent with top international hotels anywhere. When I stayed there, there was a female concierge on each floor, seated at a desk near the elevator. As we were quick to surmise, "concierge" was a pseudonym for KGB employee there to keep and eye on comings and goings.
Our Count, with a secreted source of gold cached in a place only known to him, became a Metropole fixture.
The Count became close friends with an upper level, committed Bolshevik, Osip (wasn't Stalin) who was smart enough to realize that the Count could teach him savoir faire, a necessary attribute for a diplomat in the world of high level international engagement. Thirty years later, Osip, then at the highest levels of the KBG, would smilingly turn a blind eye to the Count's efforts to "change his living circumstances."
The Count had a decades long, off and on, affair with a Soviet movie star, Anna. Towles writes with deep insight as he describes the actress morphing from haughty, arrogant, narcissistic, elitist, to a wily, wise, woman who learned the skills of up scale survival under ruthless Communism.
Early in the novel, Anna took a role in a movie that one communist functionary deemed to be a bit too bourgeois. Suddenly, after taking that role, Anna, an otherwise popular and beautiful star, could get no new roles. She became impoverished. With the Count's aid, she finally found a director who would give her a secondary role in a movie about production in a factory. She performed this back up role splendidly and rose again to the top... but, now she was humble and chary...she only performed roles sure to please "The State."
The Count became the headwaiter in the hotel... and with pals Maitre'D and the head chef, formed a triumvirate responsible for delivery of world class dining in Moscow. There are many fun exchanges in the novel between this merry three. Amusing is how the three conspired to organize seatings for Bolshevik dinners. Seating the right guy in the wrong place could have dire consequence!
Early during his "house arrest" the Count became friends with a nine year old girl, Nina, daughter of an important business man, and left to roam the hotel by a lazy governess. The precocious girl and the count explored the off limits areas of the hotel using a hotel pass key purloined by the girl.
Nina left the hotel when she became a teenager... and gave the Count her hotel pass key as a parting gift. Nina returned to the Metropole several years later to a Communist Youth Organization conference. She sought out her old friend, the Count, but by then she had lost her youthful elan and curiosity and substituted for them the stern demeanor of a Communist Party hard liner.
Years later, Nina returned with her daughter, Sophie, a five year old, and told the Count that her husband had been sentenced to one of the Gulags and she had to go set up an existence there. Could the Count take care of Sophia for just a month or so, until she could return to fetch her and take her to her new home?
Of course, the Count never saw Nina again. Sophie grew up as the Count's daughter and became a top concert pianist.
Once "daughter" Sophie had a serious fall in the hotel. The Count, leaving the hotel for the first time in 25 years, rushed Sophie to the hospital in a taxi.
On arrival at the hospital, the Count and Sophie received bad, bureaucratic treatment. Sophie's life was at risk. Until....Moscow's top physician and two aides rushed in to take over. Now top KGB operative Osip had gotten word of Sophie's plight and ordered in Moscow's best.
Later, at the hospital, in the early morning hours, once Sophie was out of danger, Osip surprised the Count by visiting the hospital. Osip had a car out back to quickly return the Count to the hotel before dawn so as to avoid any "talk" about the Count's violation of his house arrest.
There are many more wonderful interchanges in the book between the very unlikely friends, top KGB operative, Osip, and the Count.
There is the hotel seamstress, the barber, the nosy bureaucrat hotel manager, jealous of the Count's popularity with all. And, the American diplomat bar friend who would play a key role in the novel's denouement.
The Count's friend from the old days, Misha, got a job working for the Soviet archive office. We learn that Misha was the author of the poem that saved the Count's life. That remained a shared secret between the Count and Misha.
When Misha refused, on the order of a Bolshevik functionary, to air brush something benign, but complementary to Germany, out of the Checkov archive, he was banished to a Gulag.
The occasion when Misha sneaks into Moscow and entrusts his friend, the Count, with the correct Checkov quote, hopefully to be preserved and revived at a more propitious time, is moving.
Here, the Count, and we the readers, get a glimpse into the repressiveness of the Soviet regime.
Ordinarily, one would relegate this heinous assault on free speech to a system now failed. Yet, we see people in today's "free" America trying to airbrush speech they don't particularly like. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Free people need to always be on guard.
The novel's denouement, post WWII, is brilliant... and has to do with Sophie's trip to Paris to play in a concert.
As the ending unfolds, Towles cleverly leads the reader in one direction but takes him/her on another, unexpected, tack... so much so that (switching case) I'm smiling, crying and laughing aloud as I complete the final pages.
For my fiction reading, I'm really enjoying this process of switching from time worn thrillers to good literature as recommended by TIMDT!