A Gentleman in Moscow

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Book 1, Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “An Acquaintanceship”

The Count eats lunch in the second, less formal restaurant in the Metropol, which he calls the Piazza because it attracts “Russians cut from every cloth” (38) like “an extension of the city” (38).

The restaurant is empty, as it often is after the war, and a new, inexperienced waiter serves him. The waiter, whom the Count mentally nicknames “the Bishop” for his “narrow head” and “superior demeanor” (39), fails to appear when he places his menu down and offers the wrong kind of wine. The Count politely orders a bottle of the wine he’d prefer.

The Count is approached by a 9-year-old girl he has seen in the hotel many times. The little girl, who has “a penchant for yellow” (39), is “the daughter of a widowed Ukrainian bureaucrat” (40). She surprises him by asking what happened to his mustache. Sitting across from him, she asks if it’s true he’s a Count and whether he knows any princesses. When she suggests she’d like some of his lunch, the Count puts half his meal on a plate for her. The Bishop takes his soup before he is finished and fails to bring his wine.

The Count is taken aback when the little girl indicates that her father believes “princesses personify the decadence of a vanquished era” (42). She asks the Count whether he’s ever danced at a ball and whether he ever lived in a castle. The Count dutifully answers her questions. When she asks if he’s ever been a duel, he says he has “been in a duel of sorts” (43). He explains his godfather was a second in a duel which “sprang from a dispute that occurred in this hotel” (43), and that the hotel manager “kept a pair of pistols hidden behind a panel in his office” (44). Before leaving, she tells him she prefers him without his facial hair because its “absence improves [his]…countenance” (44).

The Count goes to the hotel bar—which he calls the Shalyapin after an opera singer who frequented the bar before the war—for his usual before-dinner drink. However, he treats himself to too many drinks and becomes intoxicated. Halfway up the stairs to his room, he sits down to ponder why “our nation above all others embraced the duel so wholeheartedly” (46). He believes the answer lies in Russian gentlemen’s “passion for the glorious and the grandiose” (46). Over the years, people have challenged each other to duels over increasingly petty complaints, “until they were being fought over the tilt of a hat, the duration of a glance, or the placement of a comma” (46).

Book 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Anyway…”

At her invitation, the Count meets the little girl, Nina, at the hotel coffeehouse five days later and holds out her chair for her when she arrives. Nina, once again wearing a yellow dress, asks him to describe “some of the rules of being a princess” (49). The Count talks about “the study of liberal arts” (49) and “refinement of manners” (49); at his mention of firm posture, Nina sits straighter.

The Count says that a princess would “show respect for her elders” (50). At her respectful nod, he notes that he himself is quite young and that he means “the gray haired […] of every class” (50), including “milkmaids, blacksmiths and peasants” (50). At Nina’s skepticism, he explains that elderly people of every class have contributed to the nation’s advancement and therefore younger people should respect “their effort, however humble” (50). He offers an example in which a princess missed a ball in order to drive an old woman to visit her son, a blacksmith, after which she accepted the old woman’s offer of tea. Nina is surprised when the story does not have a fairy tale ending, such as the princess marrying the blacksmith’s son.

Noting that Nina does not thank him when he offers her the plate of tea cakes, he adds that a princess would also say “please” and “thank you” when offered something. Nina engages him in a quick back-and-forth, in which she challenges this rule, holding that she should not have to say “thank you” unless she asked for the cake, for she would merely “be obliging someone by accepting what they’ve offered” (52). When he begins to cite his life experience, she interrupts him, reminding him he had said he is young. She concedes she should work on her posture but rejects the notion that she should say “thank you” for something she never asked for.

Book 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Around and About”

On July 12, Nina, hiding behind a potted plant, spots the Count and invites him to sneak up to his old suite.

A flashback then explains that after the night he’d grown intoxicated and mused on duels, the Count had begun to feel “a sense of ennui” (55). Then, one day, Nina confided in him that she sneaks around exploring the inner workings of the hotel. Her father is positioned in Moscow, but she does not go to school and “had made the most of her situation” (56). As if on a steamship, she’s explored “those lower levels that teem with life and make the passage possible” (57). In this way, “the walls had not grown inward, they had grown outward” (57). In the basement, Nina showed him the boiler room, claiming it would be the perfect place to destroy “illicit love letters” (57). At her inquiry as to whether he receives illicit love letters, the Count replied, “Most certainly” (57). She also showed him the corner of the basement where objects left behind by guests are kept. The Count found some of the items he’d left in his suite. The two then came across a locked room, which Nina unlocked with a key on her pendant. The room holds the hotel’s silver and dishes. Nina and the Count discussed the treasures inside; Nina was awed by the many extravagant items, and the Count explained their use. The Count realized the Bolsheviks have not sent it off because they, too, will have banquets one day.

On July 12—the day in question—Nina brings the Count to his old suite. That night, the Count is haunted by a tea service that had rested on the table because it reminds him of “a moment in the daily life of a gentleman at liberty” (62). Then he remembers that the hotel contains “rooms behind rooms, and doors behind doors” (62). He discovers that the back of his closet is nothing more than a partition that leads into another room like his. He splits the partition, empties the second room of the items stored there, and pulls his grandmother’s coffee table and high-back chairs into the room. He then goes to the basement for the items of his he’d found there. After nailing the doorway shut so the only access is through his closet, he hangs up his sister Helena’s portrait and sits in his new study, contemplating that a secret room, “regardless of its dimensions, seem as vast as one cares to imagine” (64).

Book 1, Chapters 4-6 Analysis

The days “before the war” (38) are a theme in these chapters, in which the Count patronizes the Piazza restaurant and the Shalyapin bar, both of which have lost business since the Revolution of 1918. The days before the revolution are seen as lush, prosperous, and pleasantly extravagant, whereas postwar days are sparse and without flourish. The Count, with his belief in decorum, his contained horror over the Piazza waiter’s faux pas, and his disapproval of Nina’s boldness, exemplifies aristocratic etiquette of a bygone era.

The Count’s attachment to the luxury of the past is illustrated in the basement of the Metropol when he and Nina come across a storage room containing the hotel’s silver and place settings. When Nina examines a complicated contraption that maneuvers blades when a lever is pushed, the Count informs her it’s an asparagus server. When Nina asks, “Does a banquet really need an asparagus server?” (58), the Count replies, “Does an orchestra need a bassoon?” (58). Both, he suggests, are unnecessary flourishes, but their lack of practical use does not make their existence unjustified. In this way, he admits to the aristocracy’s extravagance while expressing his identification with it.

Though Nina is impressed with the Count’s knowledge of nobility, she represents a more modern era in which these workings are criticized and rejected. She is not intimidated by the Count, taking it upon herself to sit at his table and even commenting that she “prefer[s] [him] without [his] moustaches” (44). At the Count’s instruction that a princess would say “thank you” after being offered a plate of tea cakes, Nina argues sharply with him, points to holes in his logic, and even “cut[s] him off with a wave of a finger” (52). Even the subject of her disagreement itself suggests a move from the formality of the past: Nina rejects what she sees as excessive deference and politeness, refusing to say “thank you” for something she did not ask for. Though Nina is interested in princesses, she brazenly rejects their rules, seeming to echo her father, who, she notes to the Count, believes “that princesses personify the decadence of a vanquished era” (42).

The Count’s eagerness to embark on a “course of study” (57) with Nina indicates that despite his attachment to the past, he is not unwilling to shed formality. Upon learning of her secret adventures throughout the hotel, he without hesitation sneaks around with her through the hotel’s “lower levels” (57), visiting the “laundries” and “pantries” (56) where workers make possible the extravagances he enjoys. As was evident in his desire for a clean shave, his flexibility is indicated in his breaking the rules, his allowing Nina to lead him, and his appreciation for parts of the hotel he might previously have found beneath him.

The most important lesson the Count learns from Nina is how to make the best of his present situation. Nina, who suffers from “her own version of confinement” (56) in the hotel, makes “the most of her situation by personally investigating the hotel until she knew every room, its purpose, and how it might be put to better use” (56). The Count’s following her on her adventures inspires him to make the most of his own circumstances. Pondering the freedom of the new occupant of his suite and lamenting the smallness of his own room, he remembers that “in the Metropol there were rooms behind rooms, and doors behind doors” (62) and breaks a slit in the wall of his closet, which leads to the creation of his secret study. Just as the Metropol’s walls had “grown outward” (57) for Nina, the Count’s new secret room seems “vast […] regardless of its dimensions” (46). In his new imprisoned state, for the first time under others’ control, breaking the rules is freeing and is able to lift his spirits.

The Count’s ability to master his circumstances is not unexpected. In these early chapters, he has been established as witty, personable, and full of good humor. Though exasperated by the Piazza waiter’s mistakes, he is gentle and polite, even humorous: when the Bishop takes away his unfinished soup, the Count thanks him with “his spoon still in hand” (41). Though he’s mildly put off by Nina’s presumptuousness, he gladly converses with her, even relenting to sharing his lunch. Later, when the two chat over tea, he makes her feel important, affecting caring expressions and leaning back “to give his hostess’s inquiry a more appropriate consideration” (49). Despite his belief in formality, the Count proves reasonable, uncomplaining, and human, and his ability to find humor in the crumbling of his beloved past is yet one more way he manages to maintain control over his circumstances.

The Count’s observation that the Bolsheviks have not sent off the Metropol’s silver because “they would be having banquets soon enough” (59) foreshadows the Bolshevik Party being no less oppressive and power-hungry than they profess the Tsarist regime to have been. Though the Bolsheviks dismantle “the privileged classes on behalf of the Proletariat” (59), they, too, will enjoy luxury, for pomp, which “humbly bows its head as the emperor is dragged down the steps and tossed in the street” (59), gradually reappears, inspiring the “newly appointed leader” (59) to desire a taller chair that is “more fitting for a man with such responsibilities” (59). Cycles thus turn, and history repeats itself, the only difference being who sits at the top of the hierarchy.