A Gentleman in Moscow

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Book 5, Chapters 35-38Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Book 5, Chapter 35 Summary: “Anecdotes”

The night before Sofia leaves for Paris, the Count “sat her down and explained exactly what it was that she must do” (416). She tearfully asks why he only mentions it now; he tells her he was afraid she “would object” (416). The Count asks Sofia to trust him.

The night she leaves, she is prepared to go when she rushes in to inform him the venue of her performance has been changed. The Count goes to the basement for the second Paris guidebook, then removes the map and draws a red line, just as he did in the first book.

In the study, the Count has prepared for a formal dinner, including okroshka, so Sofia can recall this “simple, heartwarming soup from home” (417) if she is homesick. Emile and Andrey are there to serve them. The Count tells Sofia family anecdotes, having reserved the serious subject of “parental advice” (419) for the previous evening, for he wants her last night to be happy so she can remember it.

The Count, uncharacteristically blushing, asks if she would like a picture of him, and he gives her the picture of him and Mishka in their youth that Mishka had left him in his book. Sofia laughs over his mustaches, which inspires the Count to tell her the story of how they had been cut off by a man in the barber shop and how it is due to that man that he met Nina. When Sofia asks if he wishes he had stayed out of Russia, he tells her he “would not accept the Tsarship of all the Russias in exchange” (421) for having been in the Metropol lobby when Nina gave him her daughter.

They play one last game of Zut, and Marina comes to collect Sofia. Downstairs, Arkady, Vasily, Audrius, Andrey, and Emile join the Count in saying goodbye. Back in his room, the Count notices the silence. He writes five letters and puts them in his desk. He then goes to sleep, pondering how “this is an empty nest” (422) and “a sad state of affairs” (422).

Book 5, Chapter 36 Summary: “An Association”

Osip and the Count have seen each other less and less frequently over the years, but they see each other again that June. As they watch Casablanca, scenes of Paris flitting before them, the Count cannot concentrate; he thinks of Sofia arriving in Paris. He is amused, as always, by Osip’s enthusiasm while watching the film.

Book 5, Chapter 37 Summary: “Antagonists at Arms (And an Absolution)”

The Count serves a couple at the Boyarsky. Upon finding out they are Finnish, he inquires their room number. The Count has known he would need a Scandinavian man’s passport and that obtaining it at just the right time would be difficult. With only a day left, he feels fortunate to have this opportunity. That night, he removes his shoes outside their room, then successfully takes the passport without waking the couple, only to find his shoes have been taken for shining. Figuring the man will return them to the front desk, the Count goes upstairs to his room, where he finds the Bishop sitting at his open desk with a sheet of paper in hand. The Count is not worried about the letters, which merely show “fondness and fellowship” (429) for his colleagues; however, he sees that the Bishop is holding the first map of Paris. The Count tells him he has been reading Proust and mapping out the city. The Bishop calmly leaves. When the Bishop returns to his office, the Count is behind his desk holding a pistol.

Up in his room, the Count had stood frozen for mere seconds before heading off the Bishop via the grand staircase, just as Sofia had done as a girl. When he’d arrived at the Bishop’s office, he unlocked the door with Nina’s key and went to the panels in the wall for the two antique pistols. The Count insists the Bishop sit. When the Bishop makes to call for help, the Count shoots the portrait of Stalin between the eyes, and the Bishop sits. The Count plans to stay in the office with the Bishop until 2:30 a.m., when the hotel will be deserted. The Bishop sneers that the Count and his “sort” have “had [their] time” (433), and that they will be held to accountable.

The Count coerces the Bishop to give him his keys. He opens the filing cabinet and withdraws six thick files for himself and his friends—files containing “a careful accounting of human flaws” (435). At 2:30 a.m., the Count makes the frightened Bishop carry the files down to the basement. The Count has the Bishop throw the files in the furnace, fetch him a tour guide of Finland from the bookshelf, and step into the storeroom of treasures. The Bishop is horrified that the Count intends to leave him in there; when he asks when the Count will return, the Count says, “I am never coming back” (436). He says the Bishop, who sits in on their daily meetings, should recall that there is an event on Tuesday and that he will be found then. Then he locks him inside “that room where pomp bides its time” (436).

On his way back up to his room, shoeless and holding his stolen items, the Count sees the ghost of the Metropol’s one-eyed cat, who leaves him “without the slightest expression of disappointment” (437).

Book 5, Chapter 38 Summary: “Apotheoses”

The next day, June 21, 1954, the Count passes the day like any other. He exercises, has his coffee, reads his newspaper in the lobby, has a drink in the Shalyapin, and then has dinner in the Boyarsky. He also swipes from the coatroom an American journalist’s raincoat and fedora.

In his room, he packs his rucksack, which he’d used in 1918 to travel from Paris to Idlehour. He packs lightly, including only some clothes, his toothbrush, Mishka’s book, and a bottle of the special wine he will drink on the tenth anniversary of Mishka’s death. The Count says goodbye to his study, “the smallest room that he had occupied in his life” (438). He then “tip[s] his hat to Helena’s portrait” (438) and leaves.

In Paris, Sofia finishes her performance and locks herself in the bathroom. She changes into the slacks and oxford the Count had taken from the Italian guests’ closet. She cuts off her hair and dyes the white streak with the Fountain of Youth hair dye, then discards her dress and shoes. Putting the cap on her head and her backpack on her back, she leaves the concert hall and winds through Paris, following the Count’s map until she reaches the embassy.

Richard Vanderwhile and his wife are preparing for bed when he receives word a refugee is asking for him. When Sofia enters, Richard recognizes her: her father had told her she was coming (presumably via letter sent with Pudgy Webster), but not how or when. Sofia unwraps a package Richard had been holding for her: it’s Montaigne’s Essays with the pages cut out, the depression inside now housing the Count’s gold coins. Sofia gives her bag to Richard; the Count had wanted Richard to cut off the straps. Underneath is “a tightly rolled piece of paper” (444) detailing the seating chart from the dinner with the Council of Ministers and Presidium. The Count also relates the sensitive political maneuvers he had observed that night. Richard smiles, believing “he could use a hundred men like Alexander Rostov” (445-46).

Along with these notes, the Count left Richard detailed instructions of how to alert him to the fact that Sofia arrived safely. As the Count waits in the lobby of the Metropol, every phone rings at once, flustering guests and staff alike. The Count rises, puts on the journalist’s coat and hat, and leaves the hotel.

Book 5, Chapters 35-38 Analysis

The Count’s years under house arrest at the Metropol end in a culmination of his many experiences there. The night before Sofia leaves for Paris, the Count retells the story of how the encounter with an angry man in the barber shop led to his meeting her mother. Even the manner of his leaving brings him full circle: when the Bishop leaves his room after discovering the map of Paris, the Count beats him to his office by running “down the main staircase, just as Sofia had at the age of thirteen” (431). Later that night, the Count takes the Bishop down to the basement he’d explored with Nina so many years before and uses Nina’s passkey to open the storeroom and lock the Bishop inside. His escape from the Bishop is facilitated by the knowledge he’s gained from his “daughters.” That he triumphs over the Bishop and escapes repercussion by playing the games he’d played in his role as a father illustrates the importance his role of father has played in his life.

In fact, his relinquishing of his fatherly role when Sofia leaves Moscow for Paris is the catalyst for his leaving the Metropol after all these years. On her last night, Sofia asks him if he “ever regret[s] coming back to Russia” (420) after the revolution, to which the Count responds, “Well, since the day I was born, Sofia, there was only one time when Life needed me to be in a particular place at a particular time, and that was when your mother brought you to the lobby of the Metropol” (421). The Count thus casts his caring for Sofia as his reason for being, the ultimate purpose of his life; when that purpose moves on, he writes goodbye letters to his friends and prepares to leave, too.

Much of A Gentleman in Moscow suggests the power of a moment: how a chance meeting or circumstance changes the course of one’s life. As the Count sits in the lobby waiting for the sign that Sofia is safely with Richard Vanderwhile, watching the people pass by and listening to the sounds of human interaction, he feels “that no one was out of place; that every little thing happening was part of some master plan; and that within the context of that plan, he was meant to sit in the chair between the potted palms and wait” (446). Just as Nina gifted him the passkey that would save him from the Bishop, just as he was in the lobby at the moment life needed him, his escape from the Metropol seems almost destined, determined by a series of events and a colliding of characters that leads to the perfect conclusion. Even his confrontation with the Bishop suggests a certain poetic justice.

In sending Sofia to America with Richard, he ensures that Sofia follows in her mother’s footsteps, that she sees actual horizons rather than broaden them only figuratively. In “1954: Applause and Acclaim,” the Count had told Sofia that he has done her “a great disservice” by making “the hotel seem as wide and wonderful as the world” (387). Nina showed him that “[o]ne does not fulfill one’s potential by listening to Scheherazade in a gilded hall” (387), and the Count wants more for Sofia than what he himself has had. He therefore ensures that Sofia fulfill not only Nina’s wishes but his own.