A Gentleman in Moscow

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Book 1, Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “An Assembly”

Nina convinces the Count to go to the ballroom balcony to spy on a Bolshevik assembly, despite the Count’s objections—his height makes their hiding uncomfortable, and the last time he did it, he split the seat of his pants. The Count also is reluctant to watch another Bolshevik assembly, “not because he found the ideological leanings of the attendees distasteful” (66), but rather because he “found political discourse of any persuasion to be tedious” (66).

The Count splits his pants again as he and Nina crouch in the balcony. He ponders how, though there are superficial changes, the goings-on in the ballroom are no different now than they had been before the war: young Bolsheviks show deference for an “old revolutionary” (67) who sits in the Grand Duchess’s chair, and attendees flit about the room attempting to impress their peers.

Railroad union members discuss altering a word in their charter. The conversation sparks heated argument, finally culminating in a raucous confrontation. The Count decides that “political discourse wasn’t always so dull, after all” (69).

Once outside, the Count is about to relate to Nina his findings on the similarities between the past and present and on the “Shakespearean” (70) nature of the assembly when Nina comments how “astounding” (70) it is to consider all that must happen for them to travel by railroad. The Count realizes he had never thought about it before.

The Count visits Marina, the hotel seamstress, to have his pants mended. After, he is summoned to the office of the hotel manager, Mr. Halecki, who apologetically suggests that, because “the times have changed” (75), he must ask his staff to stop addressing the Count as “Your Excellency.” The Count agrees, adding that “it is the business of a gentleman to change with” the times (75).

When Mr. Halecki is called outside, the Count thinks about how there was a time when titles like “Your Excellency” showed “that one was in a civilized country” (75). Considering that this change “is probably for the best” (75), he studies three paintings on the wall that portray a foxhound hunt and realizes the extravagant objects depicted, though “expressive of beauty and tradition” (76), are not “essential to the modern world” (76). As the times have changed, the paintings have “outlived their usefulness” (76).

While Mr. Halecki is occupied outside, the Count presses a panel between the paintings, “revealing a hidden cabinet” (76). Inside, he finds, “just as the Grand Duke had described” (76), a box. Opening the box, he finds two items “perfectly crafted and peacefully at rest” (76); they are presumably the pistols he had told Nina about.

Book 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “Archeologies”

On September 21, Arkady, the desk captain, tells the Count that the resident of his old suite, Tarakovsky, complained that a man barged into his suite demanding to see the Count. At Tarakovsky’s assertion that he is a senior member of the Party, the man said that he, too, is a member of the Party. The man, who is now pacing in the lobby, is Mikhail Mindich, or Mishka, and he is “like a brother” (79) to the Count. The Count and Mishka met at the Imperial University in St. Petersburg in 1907. Though they were of opposite background and personality, they became fast friends because Mishka’s tendency to “throw himself into a scrape at the slightest difference of opinion” (80) complemented the Count’s tendency “to leap to the defense of an outnumbered man regardless of how ill conceived his cause” (80). The two lived together above a cobbler’s shop, Mishka preferring to read in their rooms as the Count regaled him with tales of the salons. Mishka frequently paced across the apartment as he offered diatribes about books.

The Count takes Mishka to his room, where Mishka produces a special bottle of wine. The Count, “deeply moved” (81), leads him to his secret study. Mishka looks at the objects in the room, which “had been culled from the halls of Idlehour as reminders of Elysian days” (81). He thinks these days “belonged in the past […] when a lucky few dined on cutlets of veal and the majority endured in ignorance” (83).

Mishka picks up a photograph of the Grand Duke, who was “special envoy from the court of the Tsar” (84). He and the Count toast to the Grand Duke: Mishka has brought the wine on this day, the ten-year anniversary of the Grand Duke’s death, because drinking this wine on the ten-year anniversary of a loved one’s death is a Rostov tradition.

Mishka tells Rostov of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. He is excited that poets can now discuss a new kind of poetry that abandons “quatrains and dactyls and elaborate tropes” in order to become “an art of action” (86). The Count listens to Mishka “with joy” (86), for while Mishka, for so long, had been “out of step with his times” (86), the new “fashions and attitudes [are] in perfect sympathy with his deepest sentiments” (87). The two men toast to the Grand Duke, Helena, the Countess, Idlehour, and poetry.

Book 1, Chapter 9 Summary: “Advent”

In December, the Count is reminded of how, on Christmas Eve, he and Helena drove in a sleigh to visit neighbors and listened to bells ringing from churches across the land. He recalls how in 1918, as he was returning from Paris, he encountered Cossacks—military horsemen loyal to the tsar—removing the bells and killing an abbot who protested. He considers how the bells must have been repossessed by the Bolsheviks for artillery and how “the fate of iron ore” (90) is to transform from bells to weapons and back again.

In the Piazza, he and Nina share ice cream before Nina and her father leave for the holiday. Nina is sad that on her return she will have to attend school. When the Count says it will broaden her horizons, Nina argues that traveling would be more efficient education than sitting in a school because one could see “an actual horizon” (93). Pronouncing his gratitude for her friendship, the Count gives her his grandmother’s mother-of-pearl and brass opera glasses. She gives him a large box wrapped in yellow, which he is not to open until midnight.

The Count diverts his attention to a young couple next to him; they are two college students on their first date. The Count silently roots for the young man who, at first overwhelmed by his date’s intellect, woos her with honesty and sensitivity. He is frustrated when the Bishop arrives at an inopportune moment. When the Bishop suggests a wine that fits neither the meal nor the man’s budget, the Count intervenes and is pleased that his recommendation is appreciated. Before leaving, he orders a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

He spots among a group of musicians Prince Nikolai Petrov, whom the Count hasn’t seen in years. The two make plans to meet the following Saturday. A note explains that Petrov will not keep this promise, for when officers from the Cheka—the Bolshevik police force—discover a portrait of the tsar in his grammar book, they issue a Minus Six, which banishes him from Russia’s six largest cities.

In his room, the Count sets down the bowl of melted ice cream for the cat and reads A Christmas Carol until midnight, when he discovers Nina has given him the hotel passkey. He falls asleep “with a great sense of well-being” as he thinks about the “modern young couple proceeding toward romance in the age-old fashion,” and “the utterly unanticipated blessing of Nina’s friendship” (104), as well as his chat with Petrov “who, despite his heritage, seemed to be finding a place for himself in the new Russia” (104). The narrator indicates that four years later, this sense of well-being would be gone, and the Count would be preparing to jump off the roof of the hotel.

Book 1, Chapters 7-9 Analysis

The Count, at times, longs for the days before the Revolution—“Elysian days” (83), according to Mishka, that “belonged in the past” (83) along with “waistcoats and corsets, with quadrilles and bezique”(83). The seriousness with which he takes wine, for example—he likens the drinking of Rioja with stew to the clashing between Achilles and Hector—shows the importance he places on formality and finery.

These chapters center the past and explore its relationship with the future. The Count frequently finds himself wrestling with how to retain his past in quickly-changing times. As Christmas approaches, he finds himself remembering his sister, Helena, with whom he used to listen to church bells before the bells were removed by the Cossacks. The removal of the bells represents the end of an era, or of a new turn of the cycle: the Count considers how “the fate of iron ore” (90) is to be forged “[f]rom bells to cannons and back again from now until the end of time” (90). Just as the Metropol will once again be filled with flowers, the political and social landscape will, like a pendulum, oscillate over time. Though the Count thinks of these times wistfully, he seems to accept that in time, the pendulum will swing back.

As the pendulum swings, the Count shows himself willing to accept that “it is the business of gentlemen to change with the times” (75). When Mr. Halecki informs him that he will no longer be called “Your Excellency” by his staff, after contemplation, the Count concludes “[i]t is probably for the best” (75). He concedes that the extravagant objects depicted in the hunting scene paintings are examples of how “carefully crafted things […] have outlived their usefulness” (76). Even his decision to stay in the Piazza for dinner, rather than move to the more formal Boyarsky as he’d originally planned, so he can listen to the conversation of young students at the next table, suggests a move toward the modern.

Part of the Count’s willingness to change with the times can, perhaps, be attributed to his observation that, as the pendulum swings, times change less than they appear. Listening in on the assembly of railroad workers, he notices that the Bolsheviks discuss “the world’s oldest problems in its newest nomenclature” (66). In fact, the assembly operates much as it would have before the revolution: a Bolshevik elder accepts gestures of respect as he sits in the Grand Duchess Anapova’s chair, and young men put in an appearance before slipping out early, just as they did in the days of the Tsar. Even the Bolsheviks’ “workaday caps” (67) are no different from “the bicorne and shako before them” (67).

That nothing truly changes is further demonstrated by the Count’s intervention in the young couple’s dinner. Unable to bear the incompetence of “the Bishop” as he recommends a poor wine pairing for the couple’s stew, he puts his extensive knowledge to good use by making his own recommendation, the perfection of which inspires the couple to offer “a toast of gratitude and kinship” (98). The experience of a “modern young couple proceeding toward romance in the age-old fashion” (104)—in addition to his unexpected conversation with an old friend Prince Nikolai, “who, despite his heritage seemed to be finding a place for himself in the new Russia” (104)—inspires feelings of comfort and hopefulness in the Count, who falls asleep that night “with a great sense of well-being” (104).

However, the Count will come to find the reconciliation between the past and the future more elusive than it seems. He has no way of knowing that, upon his return home that night, Prince Nikolai is arrested by the Bolsheviks and banished from the city. A sense of unrest is further established by the narrator’s foreshadowing that in four short years, the Count himself will be ready to jump from the roof of the hotel. That change is, in fact, dramatic and permanent is also foreshadowed by Nina, whose obsession with princesses, according to Marina, is a temporary stage of childhood. Even Nina’s complaint that people choose to watch Scheherazade rather than actually go to Arabia—her desire to literally explore horizons, rather than do so figuratively in school—suggests that the world is expanding. The inevitable growth of Nina, whose interest in the Count for his old-world knowledge is tinged with rebellion, represents the inevitable progression of time. For now, however, the Count is sustained by his friendships, old and new. As he and Mishka, of different backgrounds and beliefs, toast cheerfully together, the Count is able to remain confident that the past and the present can coexist.

Incidents in these chapters illustrate that, for all his depth and perception, the Count is in other ways naïve. His lack of interest in politics—his belief that “political discourse of any persuasion” (66) is “tedious” (66)—arguably stems from the fact that political issues largely have not affected him. The entertainment he finds in the railroad union’s dramatic, “Shakespearean” argument, while indicative of his wit and good humor, suggests a disconnect with issues of importance; indeed, he had never considered, upon riding the railroad, “how the tracks came to be there in the first place” (70). In this way, though he is imprisoned within the walls of the Metropol, he learns more about life than he ever had before.