I want to talk to you this morning about an intricate novel by Amor Towles, entitled A Gentleman in Moscow. I’m tempted to call it a historical novel, but I’m certain the novelist does not consider himself an historian. He is however, a man fascinated with Russian culture, especially the literary works of Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.
The story is of a Russian Count who a Bolshevik tribunal determines to be an unrepentant aristocrat, but unlike many who are simply killed or sent to prison, Count Rostov is placed under house arrest for life. He returns from Paris after the Russian Revolution although he could have remained in exile. He would have seen it as cowardice not to accept the fate of his family and countrymen after the fall of Czarist Russia. As we learn from the novel there is a long tradition in Russia of house arrest. Count Rostov is staying at the famous hotel Metropol, directly across the street from the Kremlin when he is arrested and brought to trial, so that is the ‘house’ he is confined to after the tribunal.
In 1922, Rostov is thirty years old, very well educated and traveled, and somewhat famous as a poet (which may account for the house arrest instead of a firing squad). Confined to an attic room in the great hotel, he is at first stunned by his greatly reduced circumstances. How is this cosmopolitan man to live with such restrictions. Much of the early part of the novel focusses on the first few days of his incarceration, but as the decades of tumult unfold in Russia, Towles revisits Rostov at yearly intervals, and then begins to double the time frame: two years, four years, eight years and in the final section retains the eight year intervals.
Instead of languishing away, idle and bored, Rostov becomes more and more a part of the hotel, especially the kitchen. It is the many guests who pass through the hotel who provide him with news of the world. As in his debut novel, Rules of Civility, Towles displays an emotional intelligence that I find rare in male authors, so that this second novel is as much a psychological study as it is an historical one.
Eventually, an old friend who turns to Rostov for help when he is in desperate political trouble; begs Rostov to look after his young daughter while he is serving a prison term. When what is supposed at first to be an arrangement of a week or two, at most a month or two, becomes permanent, Rostov has a bright and very curious accomplice in his investigation of the vast hotel and its many famous guests. Nina is soon regarded as his adopted daughter, and she roams the hotel and learns of its secrets even more thoroughly than Rostov. While this twist of fate somewhat tests the credulity of readers, Towles manages to make it seem quite natural for the lives of these two to be combined, and certainly the novel is much richer for this addition of a second set of eyes and investigative curiosity.
Via his intimate knowledge of the hotel staff and some of the guests who return each season, Rostov manages to live a varied and interesting life. So much so, that at one point his old friend Mishka 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.”
In the course of this longish novel, Towles speculates about why the German offensive aimed at the taking of Moscow fails in spite of the very rapid advances in the early weeks and months of that campaign, and speculates as well about the tendency of Russians to destroy and dismantle, name and rename, only to rebuild on the ashes of what has been torn down. St. Petersburg becomes Leningrad only to become St. Petersburg again as leaders rise and fall.
The novel is meticulously crafted, and displays quite an in-depth understanding of Russian history and what the author calls the psychology of Russia. While it is occasionally obvious that the author did much of his research after writing a first draft of the novel, the narrative is seamless and the historical asides do not seem intrusive; instead they add depth to the story.
Towles is now a full time writer, and I think we can expect further fascinating and well researched tales to follow his first two novels.
