A Gentleman in Moscow

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Book 3, Chapters 21-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 3, Chapter 21 Summary: “Adjustments”

The Count is unnerved by Sofia’s quietness and her habit of watching him. Though he prides himself on his ability to make conversation, he realizes his usual tack—asking one about oneself—would make her sad. He asks Sofia about her doll’s name; learning the doll doesn’t have one, he insists Sofia name her. The Count asks if she wants to hear about princesses. Sofia responds, “The age of the nobility has given way to the age of the common man” (239).

As the Count washes up for the day, he reflects how someone so small could take up so much space. He also realizes that, at age 48, he has finally settled into routine: in his youth, he “would never have been inconvenienced by a fellow soul” (241), hadn’t cared about possessions, and welcomed the interruptions of friends. When he returns, Sofia gives him an envelope that had been slipped under the door. As the Count expects, it’s empty, but offers the words “Three o’clock?” on the outside. Sofia is interested in how his clock only chimes twice a day.

The Count takes her to the Piazza for lunch, telling the new waiter, Martyn, that Sofia is his niece. Sofia is awed by the luxurious grandeur of the Piazza and “seemed to understand instinctively that such a setting deserved an elevated standard of behavior” (244).

The Count launches into a story about the origins of his twice-tolling. Martyn returns with their meals and notices that Sofia is unsure of what to do. He asks if he should cut her meat; the Count, realizing his mistake, does it himself, cutting it first into eight pieces and then, after thinking, into sixteen.

In response to his story about the clock, Sofia barrages the Count with “a cavalcade of Whys” (246), and the Count is delighted to find that she is enraptured by his recollections of Idlehour. He is surprised when she declines dessert until Martyn discreetly comments that he believes Sofia needs to visit the ladies’ room. The Count quickly brings her, berating himself for not noticing she’d needed to go, for not cutting her meat, and for not realizing she was wearing the same clothes as the day before. When Sofia emerges, she tentatively asks if they can still have dessert, to which the Count replies, “Without a doubt, my dear. Without a doubt” (247).

Book 3, Chapter 22 Summary: “Ascending, Alighting”

Marina agrees to watch Sofia during the Count’s meeting with Emile and Andrey. He borders on asking Marina to take Sofia to live with her, but Marina encourages him to find the instinct to care for her himself.

After the meeting, the Count races to Anna’s room, where he tells her he can’t stay and asks to borrow her luggage. He runs up and down the stairs, using her suitcases to transport supplies for Sofia. He also uses a second mattress to build a bunkbed.

In Marina’s office, he finds that Sofia’s doll now has a dress. Marina informs him she can watch Sofia while he works that night but that in the future he should pay a chambermaid. She also gives him a thimble for him to hide in a game with Sofia. Back in his room, the Count has Sofia count in the bedroom while he hides the thimble in the study. As they play, he realizes he has “underestimated his adversary” (254). When he is unable to find the thimble she hid, he humbly bows to her.

On every third Saturday since 1930, the Count and Osip, now friends, have been meeting to discuss the French, the British, and the Americans. When the Count reveals that his routine has been interrupted by Sofia, Osip, remembering when his own children were young, suggests he leave early.

The Count encounters Mishka, who tells him about a confrontation he had with his editor, Shalamov. Mishka was indignant that Shalamov asked him to remove some lines from his edition of Chekhov’s letters: in the lines, Chekhov, who is visiting Germany, states that “[p]eople who have never been abroad don’t know how good bread can be” (264).

When he reaches Marina’s just before midnight, the Count finds that Sofia has waited up for him. She leads him by the hand upstairs and sits in his chair to wait for his clock to chime midnight, at which point she goes to sleep.

Though this day has been “one of the longest in memory” (267), the Count lies awake, worrying that Mishka’s troubles over Chekhov are not over. He also worries over Nina’s safety and that “some bureaucrat” (268) will take Nina from him.

The next day, Mishka bursts into the editor’s office and rants about the silencing of poets under Stalin; in March 1939, he is sent to “Siberia and the realm of second thoughts” (270). Nina never returns, and the Count is unable to obtain news of her.

Administrators discover that Sofia is staying with the Count and prepare to remove her to an orphanage. However, when they realize his connection to Anna Urbanova and that Anna is in a romantic relationship with a Commissar—the round-faced man with the receding hairline—they deduce that Sofia is the Commissar’s illegitimate child and destroy information found during the investigation.

That night the Count falls asleep counting staircases, not sheep.

Book 3, Chapter 23 Summary: “Addendum”

In the middle of the night, after the Count has finally fallen asleep, Sofia wakes him because she has left Dolly in Aunt Marina’s room. The Count’s response—“Ah, yes” (273)—suggests he goes up and down the stairs one more time.

Book 3, Chapters 21-23 Analysis

For the first time, the Count is presented with a task at which he is subpar, and for which he is unprepared. Throughout A Gentleman in Moscow, the Count has demonstrated almost infallible competence and confidence, for everything from choosing the perfect wine to exhibiting the perfect etiquette. He has a wide body of knowledge, and he is adept at reading people and knowing just what a social situation demands. In Sofia, however, the Count has met a challenge in which he does not have the upper hand. He chides himself for not thinking to cut her meat, change her clothes, or take her to the ladies’ room—it takes delicate hints from the waiter, Martyn, for him to realize his mistakes. In a moment of rare self-doubt, he even hints to Marina that perhaps she would be better equipped to take care of Sofia.

The rules he has followed before do not work with Sofia; whereas he would usually, in an awkward social situation, ask his conversation partner about him or herself, he realizes this line of questioning would upset Sofia, and he asks her about her doll instead. His being bested by her in their thimble-hiding game—he elegantly, though begrudgingly, concedes, and is appalled to discover she has hidden the thimble in his own pocket and contrived a theater of diversions to prevent him from guessing her hiding spot—demonstrates his realization that his previous ways of thinking, and his classic, extensive training, has limits. He must now think along a whole new set of rules—i.e., like a father. His bowing to her at the end of the game, in respect of her childlike genius, is a sign of his willingness to do so.

The Count falls into the role of father more quickly than he anticipates, as evidenced by his running up and down the stairs ad nauseam throughout “Ascending, Alighting.” Throughout the day, the Count goes up and down the stairs to collect linens for Sofia, wrestles with an extra mattress, and collects tomato cans with which to build a bunkbed—activities that make him perpetually late for all his obligations. Though presented in a humorous light—over the course of the day, as he traverses the steps, the Count grumbles about the weight of suitcases and his banged-up knees, and he is forced to take yet another trip up the stairs when Sofia forgets her doll—the fact that the Count never questions the necessity for it suggests that parenting for him is instinctive. By the end of the day, he is exhausted, and instead of counting sheep to fall asleep, counts trips up the stairs, falling asleep only after a tumultuous bout of anxiety. The suggestion in “Addendum” that he rises in the middle of the night to fetch Sofia’s doll from Marina’s reinforces that the Count understands the irresistible compulsion to care for one’s child. His canceling his plans with Anna so he can watch Sofia further illustrates the self-sacrifice of a parent. Just as Osip smiles upon remembering his own children’s youth, a time “[w]hen books went unread, letters unanswered, and every train of thought left incomplete” (262), readers with children may smile knowingly as the Count learns “to anticipate Sofia’s relentless inquiries before she had the time to phrase them” (272).

The humor in the descriptions of the chaotic joys and tribulations of adjusting to life with a child are sobered by revelations about Mishka, who, after a furious rant in his editor’s office, is sent off to Siberia, and about Nina, who despite her promise to return within two months is never heard from again. Presumably, their arrests and subsequent disappearances are the result of their having “their faith in the Party tested by what they witnessed” (227), whether it be the squashing of freedom of speech, as in Mishka’s case, or the “man-made disaster” (228) of the starving Ukrainian peasants, as in Nina’s case. We are reminded of the dangerous world outside the Count’s confined existence in the Metropol. As he feared it would in his first years of house arrest, life has gone on without the Count, who is now approaching fifty; his assertion that life must catch up with Nina now seems idealistic and naive, for life has caught up with her in ways he had never imagined.