A Gentleman in Moscow

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Book 2, Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “An Actress, an Apparition, an Apiary”

It is June 21, 1923, the one-year anniversary of the Count’s captivity. As he chooses the jacket he will wear for his dinner with Mishka, he contemplates that “men in the most trying of circumstances” (109) celebrate anniversaries because anniversaries “stand as proof of their indomitability” (110).

In the lobby, he sees a beautiful, “willowy” woman (110) at the desk. When her two hunting dogs are baited by the hotel cat, they escape her grasp and cause mayhem as they race across the lobby. The Count whistles to the dogs, who immediately go to him. He and the woman exchange curt conversation.

Later, at the Shalyapin, the Count sees the woman again; she is with “a round-faced fellow with a receding hairline” (113). Mishka arrives, uncharacteristically dressed up, and says he can’t stay for dinner. The two discuss the RAPP. Mishka has made friends with poet Katerina Litvinova; the Count instantly senses that the two are engaged in a romance. While he is happy for his friend, he thinks back to a time when he, not Mishka, was the man about town. As he prepares to go to dinner alone, Audrius, the bartender, gives him a note: the woman, actress Anna Urbanova, has asked that he join her in her suite for “a second chance at a first impression” (117).

In her suite, Anna serves the fish before the Count has a chance. The Count is impressed with her skill in filleting the fish. She tells him she grew up in a fishing village, and he talks about his childhood in Nizhny Novgorod, “the world capital of the apple” (121).

The Count is surprised when she rises from the table and kisses him. As she leads him to her bedroom, he ponders how, while he’s used to being “one step ahead” (122), with Anna, he is “a step behind” (122), a position that has “merits of its own” (122).

Anna dismisses him at one 1 a.m.; before he leaves, he hangs up her blouse to keep it safe from the dogs. As he heads back to his room, he can’t help but feel like “a ghost” (123). Back in the belfry, he discovers a ladder leading up to the roof; once on the roof, he encounters the hotel’s handyman, who invites him to his makeshift camp to enjoy coffee and bread with honey from bees he keeps in crates on the roof.

Book 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “Addendum”

Anna is infuriated by the Count’s act of having hung up her blouse. She wonders “[w]ho gave him permission to pick up a blouse and hang it on its hanger” (129) and fumes that “[i]t’s my clothing and I can treat it as I please!” (129). She thinks of it even as she returns home to St. Petersburg, and she grows angrier and angrier over time.

Anna begins dropping her clothing on her floor and instructing the servants not to touch it. Finally, a housemaid named Olga tells her she is being childish. In response, Anna throws her clothes out of the window. When Olga tells her the neighbors will be “entertained […] by this evidence of the famous actress’s petulance” (130), Anna ignores her. However, that night, she sneaks outside to collect her clothes.

Book 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “Anonymity”

In the year that follows, the Count feels invisible, for people do not seem to notice him. One day, he finds Nina studying prime numbers in the card room. She is not interested in joining him or in seeing a card trick. When the Count shares a math trick with her, she looks at him “in a manner acknowledging that she may have underestimated him” (134).

Mishka sends a note to cancel their dinner plans, explaining Katerina is ill. When the Count tries to thank Arkady for giving him the note, Arkady has “already turned his attention to another guest” (136).

The Count dines at the Boyarsky alone. While he waits for his table, he points out that Andrey has seated near each other two men who had come to blows a few days before. Andrey sends one of the men to another table, thanking the Count. The Count ponders how he used to be “a master of seating tables” (138) for his grandmother and how the families she used to entertain have gone the way of “Hector and Achilles” (139).

The Count is frustrated that the Bishop from the Piazza is his waiter at the Boyarsky. When the Bishop insists the Boyarsky only offers two wine choices, “red” or “white,” the Count asks to see Andrey, who suspects the Bishop had a friend who helped him achieve the promotion from Mr. Halecki. Andrey brings the Count to the Metropol’s wine cellar, where all the labels have been removed from the bottles. Andrey explains that after a complaint was filed with the Commissar of Food “that the existence of our wine list runs counter to the ideals of the Revolution” (142) because “it is a monument to the privilege of the nobility” (142), it was decided that all wine would be the same price and divided into red and white. Andrey suspects that the Bishop made the complaint; the Count remembers the Christmas when he’d intervened on the young couple’s date to recommend a different wine than the Bishop.

The Count then thinks of how each wine expresses “its home terrain” (143) and is “a poetic expression of individuality itself” (144). He understands that a way of life can be obliterated “in the comparative blink of an eye” (144) and that “the Bolsheviks […] would not rest until every last vestige of his Russia had been uprooted, shattered, or erased” (144). He finds, by its embossing on the glass, a bottle of the wine his family drinks to commemorate the anniversary of a death; he will save it for June 22, 1926, the tenth anniversary of Helena’s passing.

Book 2, Chapter 13 Summary: “Adieu”

On June 21, 1926, from inside his old suite, which he’s accessed using the passkey, the Count reflects how the course of events is influenced by the weather. Years ago, the dropping of a few degrees one night sparked a complex chain of events that led to his winning the attention of a princess celebrating her twenty-first birthday, thereby making an enemy of a young Hussar.

The Count seeks out Nina, now 13, and finds her in the ballroom with a boy named Boris. The two are conducting a science experiment in which they are dropping objects from the balcony to test how quickly they fall. He then eats dinner in the Boyarsky. Earlier that day, he had put his finances in order, sent a letter to Mishka, and laid a black suit on his bed in preparation for jumping from the hotel’s roof at midnight. He thinks of how times have changed; he no longer knows street names in the city, Nina is moving from the hotel with her father, and Mishka has followed Katerina to Kiev. The Count has been spending time on the roof with Abram the handyman, but Abram is aging, and his bees have left.

In the Shalyapin, a German tells a young Brit that Russia’s only accomplishment is vodka. At the German’s challenge that he’ll buy a glass of vodka for anyone who can name three more accomplishments, the Count explains how the three accomplishments are Chekhov and Tolstoy, the first scene in The Nutcracker, and caviar.

The Brit is surprised to hear that the Count, rather than flee the country, returned after the Revolution. The Count explains that in revenge for his humiliation, the Hussar soldier from the princess’s party wooed Helena, frequently taunting him about it. One day, the Count and Helena discovered him in a compromising position with Helena’s handmaiden; while Helena collapsed in a chair, the Hussar laughed and walked out. The Count retrieved two pistols and followed him; when the Hussar aimed his horsewhip at him, the Count shot him in the shoulder. His grandmother then sent him to live in Paris. Eight months later, the man died in battle. The Count regrets the “chain of events” (163) that meant that he was in Paris when, ten years ago tomorrow, his sister died of scarlet fever.

The Count goes to the roof, drinks a glass of the wine he’s saved for this anniversary, says goodbye to his city, and is about to jump when he is interrupted by Abram: the bees have returned. Abram shares some honey with him; it tastes of apples of Nizhny Novgorod, and Abram says the bees “must have been listening” (166) to their conversations. The Count goes back to his room. The following evening, he dines in the Boyarsky.

Book 2, Chapters 10-13 Analysis

The Count wrestles with the vulnerability of mankind, of his way of life, and ultimately of himself. In “Anonymity,” he struggles to find his place in a world in which he feels invisible. In “Adieu,” though accepting that time will go on without him, the Count, feeling incapable of adjusting to modern times, decides to end his life. The Count’s earnest attempts to remain positive and optimistic prove insufficient to sustain him, until a chance encounter shows him that the past and the future can in fact coexist.

In “An Actress, and Apparition, and an Apiary,” when the first anniversary of his house arrest does not go according to plan, the Count finds the unexpected simultaneously exciting and disconcerting. He dons his best jacket in honor of his anniversary, for anniversaries in captivity are “proof of […] indomitability” (110). When Anna takes the lead in their romantic encounter, the Count, though surprised, allows himself to be led, realizing “that being a step behind had merits of its own” (122). Though as he leaves Anna’s room that evening he believes “his anniversary had been a fiasco” (124), he is rejuvenated by his chance encounter with Abram the handyman, with whom he enjoys simple rustic pleasures like black bread and coffee, and with whom he watches as “the summer sun began to rise” (128), seemingly a sign of new and eye-opening experiences.

However, in his second year of captivity, the Count feels the passage of time more keenly as the world appears to move on without him. He begins feeling “that he was disappearing from view” (132)—people tend not to notice him, nearly knocking him over, and when Mishka cancels their dinner to stay with Katerina, Arkady turns away from the Count before he can even thank him for the note. Even Moscow itself seems to drift further from his grasp, for many street names now “were unfamiliar to the Count” (154).

The Count’s sense of being forgotten occurs simultaneously with the increasing irrelevance of his entire way of life. Ruefully observing the labels that had been removed from the Boyarsky’s wine collection, the Count thinks about how “the passage of an era […] can occur in the comparative blink of an eye” (144). Until this moment, the Count had believed that “aspects of his life were lingering somewhere on the periphery, waiting to be recalled” (144); like Robinson Crusoe, he had acclimated to his surroundings while watching the horizon for a sign he would be saved. However, his hope of reconciling the past with the present begins to fade, for “the Bolsheviks […] would not rest until every last vestige of his Russia had been uprooted, shattered, or erased” (144). He considers how the families who sat at his grandmother’s dinners—carefully-planned events that had felt so important at the time—had gone the way of “Hector and Achilles” (139). The Count, therefore, is like the wine bottles in the cellar—he, and others like him, have become indistinguishable, anonymous, and forgotten. His telling the British man at the Shalyapin that “[a]t one time, I was Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov” (159) reiterates his understanding of his own irrelevance. After years of allowing himself to adjust to changing times, the Count feels unable to cope, and he decides to “shed this mortal coil, once and for all” (145).

His dejection begins to dissipate when his attempt to die is interrupted by Abram, who excitedly tells him that his bees, which had appeared to have abandoned him, have suddenly returned. The Count had been lamenting the loss of his friends: Nina is moving from the hotel with her father, and Mishka visits less now that he is involved with Katerina. The disappearance of Abram’s bees, and Abram’s own growing older, offer more loss. The return of the bees is made more remarkable for the fact that their honey tastes of the apples of Novgorod Nizhny, and as the Count eats it, he is reminded of the past and of his home. Just at the moment when the Count has surrendered, feeling lost and without identity, his past rises to meet him, offering hope that one need not forget one’s past to move into the future. The very next day, the Count approaches Andrey; in the beginning of Book 3, we will discover he has taken steps toward an exciting self-reinvention.

The Bishop’s complaint to the Commissar of Food offers readers a glimpse into the psyche of this seemingly minor but ubiquitous character, who becomes a constant thorn in the Count’s side. Having been embarrassed by his ignorance of wine, he has ensured he will never feel inferior again. This scene further establishes how the ideology of the Bolsheviks, in which the individual is subverted for the whole, is in direct contrast with the Count, who feels each bottle of wine is a “poetic expression of individuality itself” (144).

In these chapters, Towles continues to employ small details to help readers understand the Count’s character. When the Count goes to dine in the Boyarsky, he is asked to wait a few minutes; we are told that “[w]ith the recent recognition of the USSR […] a wait of a few minutes had become increasingly common at the Boyarsky; but such was the price of being welcomed back into the sisterhood of nations and the brotherhood of trade” (136). This subtly humorous passage reflects the seriousness with which the Count takes his dining.

The Count’s somber reflections on how a slight temperature drop sparked a long chain of events that led to his absence when Helena died reflects the Count’s belief in the power of small details and chance encounters. Even the fact that the narrator continues to refer to him as “the Count” is revealing: it suggests he is still royalty at heart. Just as the Count places great significance on details—whether they be a few degrees of temperature, or a specific vintage of wine—Towles pays close attention to detail in order to paint his main character.