A Gentleman in Moscow

The Count is escorted back to the Metropol so he can begin his house arrest. Outside the doors of his third floor suite, he encounters a captain of the guards, who informs him the suite is no longer his home. The Count is escorted three flights up a utility stairway, to an old servants’ quarters. The Count’s room is small, and the roof slopes, barely allowing the six-foot-three Count to stand at his full height. He is taken back down to his suite, where he decides which possessions to take with him; the rest, the captain informs him, “[b]ecomes the property of the People” (11). Two bellhops look ruefully on; the Count assures them, “It’s all right, fellows” (11).

The Count opts for family heirlooms and objects that remind him of those he’s loved. Among the items he takes is a desk, telling the bellhops, who complain about its weight, that “[a] king fortifies himself with a castle” (12) and “a gentleman with a desk” (12). The Count gazes out the window, thinking of the many times he’s watched the goings-on in the city from that window. He is reminded of how in 1918, after the Revolution, he returned to Idlehour from Paris and helped his grandmother flee the country before he himself moved to Moscow. He looks at the possessions he must leave behind and ponders how objects that remind us of our pasts carry emotional significance.

Back in his room, the Count consoles himself by recalling how, as a boy, he wanted to travel by ship and train “[b]ecause their berths had been so small” (15). He is grateful that, up on the sixth floor, he is out of earshot of the second floor, where the Bolsheviks have set up a headquarters and type loudly throughout the day.

He is visited by Andrey, the maître d’; Vasily, the concierge; and Marina, the seamstress, who are elated that his punishment is to live in the hotel. The three drink brandy from glasses in the Count’s “Ambassador,” a leather trunk made in London. After they leave, the Count thinks about the history of his desk, which was built in Paris in the age of Louis XVI and had been given to him by his godfather, Grand Duke Demidov, who once told him that “if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them” (18). The desk also contains a hidden compartment in each leg, each containing gold pieces.

The Count dreams of the days when he was free to stroll along Tverskaya Street and purchase a newspaper, eat at the Jockey Club, and stop in Filippov’s bakery for his favorite pastry, a mille-feuille. He wakes up and remembers that “there’s to be none of that” (20).

A young hotel employee delivers his breakfast; the Count asks him to deliver a note to Konstantin Konstantinovich. After commiserating with the hotel’s one-eyed cat, he decides he has taken too much furniture and too many books, which were his father’s and are of no interest to him. He brings a large portion of his belongings to another room on his floor, then sits to read one of his father’s favorite books, a collection of essays by Montaigne. As he reads, he remembers “glorious spring days” (23) with his late sister, Helena, who used to embroider as he read to her.

Konstantin, a lender, visits, and the Count shows him a rare coin “minted in commemoration of Catherine the Great’s coronation” (25), suggesting he has many more. The two men agree to terms for an exchange.

The Metropol’s restaurant, the Boyarsky, is the best in Moscow, though it has lost patronage under the Bolsheviks. The chef, Emile Zhukovsky, is considered brilliant, no less so under the “economic declines, failed crops, and halted trade” (27) that have made fine ingredients scarce. The Count enjoys a fine meal made from more common ingredients, admiring Emile’s innovation. He also admires how Andrey, the “handsome, tall, and graying” (27) maître d’, upholds “the Boyarsky’s reputation for excellence” (27) with his swiftness and class.

Remembering the words of his godfather, “that a man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them” (28), the Count decides that he will commit “to the business of practicalities” (29). Just as Robinson Crusoe, on realizing he would not be saved soon, took to learning about his new environment, the Count decides to make the most of his circumstances. Earlier, he had asked Konstantin to deliver three notes. That evening, he receives new linens, his favorite soap, and a mille-feuille.

The Count is determined to read from Montaigne, but he finds it full of contradictions, and he can’t help looking at the clock. He discovers he is not retaining much of the information; he feels that reading the collection of essays is as strenuous as crawling across the Sahara. When the clock finally strikes noon, he gladly tosses the book on the bed and heads downstairs for his weekly appointment with the hotel barber, Yaroslav Yaroslavl.

On the way through the lobby to the downstairs shops, he recalls how the florist, Fatima Federova, was forced to close her shop in 1920 and how her flowers used to grace the hotel’s lobby and rooms. He is comforted thinking that Paris also must have closed its florist shops during the French Revolution but “now abound[s] in blossoms” (33). He believes this means that “the time for flowers in the Metropol would surely come again” (33).

In the barber’s shop, Yaroslav takes the Count ahead of a belligerent-looking man who had been waiting when the Count arrived. The man asserts that he was next; the Count explains that he has a weekly appointment. The man rises, grabs a pair of scissors, snips off one side of the Count’s mustache, and tells him, “You’ll have your appointment soon enough” (36) before storming out.

Yaroslav is horrified, but the Count says the man “was perfectly right” (36) and that he should have allowed Yaroslav to take the man first. He looks at himself in the mirror and sees himself as never before. He considers how the world spins and rotates, as does the galaxy—“a wheel within a greater wheel” (37)—and how a mirror can show a man “not who he imagines himself to be, but who he has become” (37). At Yaroslav’s question, “But what are we to do?” (36), the Count responds, “A clean shave, my friend” (37).