A Gentleman in Moscow

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Book 3, Chapters 24-26Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 3, Chapter 24 Summary: “1946”

On June 21, 1946, a man wearing a winter coat and dragging his right leg walks through Red Square; he does not draw attention because “in 1946, there were men limping about in borrowed clothes in every quarter of the capital” (274). He observes a long line of people waiting to look at the dead body of Lenin, who had died in 1924. Taking a look around the city and noting that “so many of the old facades [were] unspoiled” (275), he goes to the Metropol Hotel.

It is the five-year anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, or the German invasion of Russia. Moscow was overtaken by “lawlessness” (275) and grew “crowded with refugees and deserters who were sleeping in makeshift encampments and cooking looted food over open fires” (275). In expectation of the invasion, the government prepared to move to Kuybyshev, and bridges were “mined so that they could be demolished on a moment’s notice” (275). On October 30, members of the Politburo, the Communist Party government, gathered at the Mayakovsky Metro Station as Stalin announced he was staying in Moscow and that in November, “the annual commemoration of the Revolution would be celebrated on Red Square as usual” (276). That celebratory parade “bolstered their confidence and hardened their resolve” (276). Between military reinforcements and frigid temperatures, the Germans were unable to reach Moscow, and they retreated in 1942.

Book 3, Chapter 25 Summary: “Antics, Antitheses, an Accident”

The Bishop, now the manager of the Metropol, requests that the Count come to his office, where the paintings of the hunting scenes have been replaced by portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Marx. He asks the Count if he knows anything about an incident that morning in which geese ran about on the fourth floor. The Count is made livid by the Bishop’s suggestion that Sofia set the geese free. As he passes her in the lobby, he reflects that despite her playful streak and her habit of “seemingly transport[ing] herself from one end of the hotel to the other in the blink of an eye” (283), Sofia, now 13, is the picture of studiousness. He is flabbergasted when, upon his return to their room, she is already there.

Mishka, the man in the winter coat, asks for the Count as the Count speaks with the Triumvirate. The Count is disturbed by Mishka’s ragged, broken appearance. In Emile’s office, over bread and salt—“that ancient Russian symbol of hospitality” (287)—Mishka tells the Count he has been given a Minus Six and that he borrowed a passport to visit Moscow. Mishka describes his life as a zek, or someone who has been in the prison system. He dives into a long rant about how Russia “has proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created” (290). He also says he is working on a new secret project. He takes his leave after being fed by Andrey and Emile, telling the Count that when he was sentenced to house arrest, he became “the luckiest man in all of Russia” (292).

Disturbed, the Count goes to his monthly meeting with Osip, who has become fascinated by Hollywood movies. When the Count asks Osip if he believes Russians are “more brutish” (295) than others, Osip relates how when Russia put the past behind itself, its people became free. He concedes that their newfound success has come “[a]t the greatest cost” (297) but holds that no improvement is possible without cost and that unlike the Americans, they progress “in service of the common good” (298).

In the Shalyapin, the Count finds an American aide-de-camp. After introductions, the Count relates his conversations with Mishka and Osip. The captain, Richard Vanderwhile, suggests that “[w]e don’t know how a man or his achievements will be perceived three generations from now” (304).

Sofia falls and knocks herself unconscious playing her game when she tries to beat him to their room. Without thinking, the Count runs out of the hotel in order to take a taxi to the hospital, which he is surprised to find has been “left behind as some sort of clinic for veterans, the homeless, and the otherwise forsaken” (305). He is taken with Sofia to a room for surgery, but the doctor is incapable of treating her. Suddenly, a new doctor arrives and takes over.

Osip arrives and says he has arranged for Sofia’s care. The Count thanks him, and Osip tells him it is his “pleasure” to help after the Count has been at his “service for over fifteen years” (311). Osip convinces him to leave through a back door, where two men transport him back to the hotel.

In his room, the Count weeps. He notices a leather case on his desk and discovers it has been left there by Richard Vanderwhile. The case contains a phonograph and various records.

Book 3, Chapter 26 Summary: “Addendum”

On June 23, Andrey goes back to his small apartment after visiting Sofia at the hospital. He anticipates telling the Triumvirate that she is doing well and that she enjoyed Emile’s cookies. Andrey had brought her one of his son’s adventure books.

On the way home, he stops for cucumbers and potatoes to go with Emile’s pork. His wife, he knows, is waiting in line for milk at a new store in an unused church that offers a view of Christ and the Woman at the Well, by which the women secretly pray.

After he prepares the kitchen to cook for her when she returns, he goes down the hall to his son Ilya’s bedroom, left preserved since the day they found out he had been killed in the war mere months before it was over. Though they used to be comforted by the room, now he felt it “had begun to sustain rather than alleviate their grief” (316). However, he refrains from packing it up lest news travel of his son’s death and they be ordered to move “to an even smaller apartment or required to take in a stranger” (317).

Book 3, Chapters 24-26 Analysis

These chapters find the Count going outside the Metropol Hotel for the first time in over twenty years. He does it unthinkingly, and without question, in order to find help for Sofia, whom he now sees as his daughter. His instinct to run from the hotel for a taxi despite the repercussions to himself shows just how much of a father figure he has become, as does the fact that as the taxi brings them to the hospital, “the streets of the city raced past unregarded” (305), city streets he hasn’t seen in years.

The Count’s going outside for the first time is in congruence with his hearing so many diverse points of view. Now nearly 60 years old, the Count knows of the outside world only through what is told to him and what he reads each morning in the papers. In “Antics, Antitheses, and Accident,” the Count hears from Mishka about the treatment of the zeks; Mishka also theorizes that Russia “foster[s] a willingness in its people to destroy their own artworks, ravage their own cities, and kill their own progeny without compunction” (290). When the Count brings these ideas to Osip, Osip is aghast, conceding that Russia’s progress has come “[a]t the greatest cost” (297) but that even “the achievements of the Americans” (297) have come with great cost and that while America has “brush[ed] the past aside […] in service of their beloved individualism” (298), Russia does so “in service of the common good” (298).

These two contrasting visions of the new Russia—Mishka and the zeks, who are collateral damage along the path toward Russian greatness and perhaps would disagree with Osip’s willingness to accept this sacrifice—are melded together by American captain Richard Vanderwhile, who argues that “grand things persist” (302) despite the passage of time and that we have no way of knowing whom history will be kind to in the end. Vanderwhile’s less rigid, more spiritual vision of history is a demonstration of the Count’s theory that Americans have “a native spirit so irrepressible that even a Depression couldn’t squelch it” (299).

Mishka’s story seems a tangible example of Osip’s belief in the inevitability of casualties, one which reiterates that the revolution has exchanged one brand of oppression for another. Those who speak out against the regime are “[s]tripped of their names and family ties, of their professions and possessions, [and] herded together in hunger and hardship” (288); they are dehumanized until they are “indistinguishable from one another” (288). It’s a regime in which even the loyal are thrown upon the pyre: St. Anselm’s hospital, now a “clinic for veterans, the homeless, and the otherwise forsaken” (305), has fallen into disrepair with the building of newer hospitals, and Andrey, whose son is killed in the Battle of Berlin, fears his son’s death will result in the family being forced to move to a smaller apartment. The Bolshevik regime, like that which it has replaced, moves forward at all costs—sacrificing its people just, as Mishka notes, it burns its cities and art. Throughout A Gentleman in Moscow, the Count’s observations suggest that times, though they change, ultimately remain the same, and that all regimes ultimately become accustomed to their power. Embodied in Mishka, this concept becomes more personal, sobering the Count and the reader.

When Mishka leaves the Count to return to Yavas, he looks at Emile and Andrey, the Count’s dear friends, and tells the Count that his sentence so many years before made him “the luckiest man in all of Russia” (292). It is ironic that, confined inside the Metropol, the Count in fact has more freedom than those outside its walls. Inside the Metropol, the Count hears many points of view and meets many kinds of people, as evidenced even in the humorous kerfuffle with the geese, when Americans, Swiss, Russians, and Italians gather, giving the “impression […] of fifteen voices shouting in twenty languages” (279). While those outside the hotel, like Mishka and Nina, are sent away for exercising free speech, the Count remains worldly and open-minded, meditating deeply on political philosophy and looking at governments through a more objective eye.