A Gentleman in Moscow

When the Count goes to the Shalyapin that evening, he hears “the sound of gay abandon” (213) as people talk over a jazz band. Jazz, which for a time had been resisted by the Bolsheviks, is back in fashion. A group of foreign journalists sit at the bar. Once a week, the three hostesses report any news they overhear of international importance. Rather than become more tight-lipped, the journalists take bets on who can be requested at the Commissariat of Internal Affairs and fabricate stories that will result in their being summoned. The Count surprises Audrius by asking not for his usual after-dinner brandy and instead for absinthe. 

The Count, Emile, and Andrey—the “Triumvirate”—have been planning for three years to make a dish that requires fifteen ingredients, nine of which are difficult to obtain. Several times they have almost had them all, only to be disappointed, until tonight. The Count takes the absinthe toward the Boyarsky but is intercepted by the Bishop, who has been promoted to assistant manager of the hotel and inquires where he is going. Hiding the absinthe in his back pocket, the Count says he forgot his pen in the Boyarsky. In the kitchen, the three men assemble as Emile cooks. The Bishop enters suddenly but is chased off by Emile.

The three men sit at a table in the kitchen for bouillabaisse. Savoring the ingredients, the Count is “transported to the port of Marseille” (222). They stay up late, eating, drinking, and talking. Andrey reveals that before working at the Boyarsky, he juggled for the traveling circus. He proves it by juggling oranges and then knives. Emile allows him to use his signature blade, “feeling that at this moment, this hour, this universe could not be improved upon” (224).

Back in his room, the Count, now drunk, tells Helen’s portrait that just as Death visits “the unwitting” (224), so does Life. He believes “[l]ife will pay Nina a visit too” (225), for she is “too alert and too vibrant for Life to let her shake a hand and walk off alone” (225).

The next morning, the Count looks for Mishka’s letter but cannot find it: it has fallen between the wall and the bookcase. Though the Count had thought Mishka’s midnight walk had been in memory of Katerina, in fact it had been prompted by the death by suicide of Vladimir Mayakovsky, “the poet laureate of the Revolution” (226).

As the Count is looking for Mishka’s letter, Nina and the other three young Bolsheviks take the train to Ivanovo, “full of energy, excitement, and a clear sense of purpose” (227).

With the First Five-Year Plan in 1928—a plan under Stalin to collectivize farmland and to industrialize—many Bolsheviks have been in cities building mills and manufacturing plants, and this effort requires more output from farmers. As many kulaks—“those profiteers and enemies of the common good, who also happened to be the regions’ most capable farmers” (227)—have been exiled and the peasants “viewed newly introduced approaches to agriculture with resentment and suspicion” (227), the region suffers “a collapse of agriculture output” (226), which then leads to “increased quotas and requisitions enforced at gunpoint” (226). News of the starvation of millions of peasants never reaches the West.

Nina is unaware of this impending “man-made disaster” (227) and arrives in Ivanovo with “the sense that her life had just begun” (227).

In the early 1930s, famine drove peasants to the cities, which resulted in overcrowding. Stalin sees a photo of three Bolshevik women and worries that, “in the context of the Western press” (229), it appears that “Russian girls still lived like peasants” (229). The Party decides “to encourage a little more glamour, a little more luxury, a little more laughter” (230). Expensive shops that had been reserved for Party officials are now open to everyone and, though the people cannot afford to buy anything, the Party’s narrative dictates that people window-shop not with “resentment” but with “wide-eyed wonder” (230).

One day, just before summer, the Count is surprised when Nina, whom he has not seen in years, approaches him in the lobby. She tells him her husband was arrested in Moscow and is in prison; he is being sent by train to Sevvostlag for five years of labor, and she intends to follow him. She asks the Count to care for her young daughter, Sofia, while she finds a job and a place to live. She places her hand on his arm and tells him she has no one else to ask, begging, “Please” (233).

Sofia exhibits “Nina’s rugged practicality” (233);her doll does not have a dress. Nina kneels before her daughter and, with tenderness the Count has never heard in her voice before, explains that Uncle Sasha, the one who gave her the binoculars, is going to look after her until they go to meet Papa. Sofia agrees yet cannot withhold her tears. She and Nina share a long moment as Nina helps her regain control. Nina gives the Count a backpack with Sofia’s things and a photograph of her and her husband before walking out of the hotel “at the pace of one who hopes to leave herself no room for second thoughts” (234). Looking at the photograph, the Count sees that Nina has married the friend who, years ago, had brought Nina her jacket in the lobby.

The Count thinks of how ill-suited he is to care for Sofia; however, given his friendship with Nina and her difficulty asking for help, he would not dream of refusing. He takes Sofia upstairs. Noticing her interest in the elevator, he foregoes the stairs. At the base of the belfry, she lifts her arms to be picked up. He leaves her while he retrieves a blanket to make a bed for her on the floor, but by the time he returns, she is asleep in his bed.