A Gentleman in Moscow

When the Count first meets Nina, who always wears yellow, she is 9 years old and living at the Metropol while her father, “a widowed Ukrainian bureaucrat” (40), is posted in Moscow. She surprises the Count by approaching him as he sits in the Piazza to inquire what happened to his mustaches. Seated at his table, she asks him about princesses and duels, and also eats half his lunch. At their next meeting, she asks how a princess would behave and verbally spars with the Count over whether she should be required to say “thank you” if something is offered to her that she did not ask for. Nina is charmed by the idea of acting like a princess but refuses to partake in behavior that does not make sense to her. Nina’s refusal to affect this aspect of being a princess shows the staunchness of her beliefs and foreshadows her association with the Bolsheviks.

Precocious and intelligent, she does not go to school and, to pass the time, explores the hotel with her passkey. Nina makes the most of her circumstances by hiding in the cupboard of the card room to listen to raucous conversations that take place there. She also invites the Count to sneak into the balcony of the ballroom to listen to Bolshevik assemblies. After one such assembly of the Railway Workers of Russia, she is awed by the thought of how much must happen for them to be able to travel by rail—a thought that had never occurred to the Count. Nina thus inspires the Count to look beyond the extravagant exterior of the hotel and of other luxuries to which he’s grown accustomed. In fact, it is the Count’s “course of study” (57) with Nina that inspires in him the idea that because the hotel is full of secret rooms, he might push back the wall of his closet into the next room, creating his own secret study. Nina thus teaches the Count that freedom can exist even when one is a captive.

On Christmas of the first year of the Count’s captivity, Nina surprises the Count by giving him the passkey. Nina tells the Count she does not want to go to school; she believes the best way to obtain an education is to travel, for one could see an “actual horizon” (93). The Count finds himself unable to argue with her suggestion that, rather than see the pay Scheherazade, one would do better to actually go to Arabia; he finds “defeat” to be “inevitable” (94).

Nina grows more studious over the years. When she is 11, the Count finds her in the card room writing all the prime numbers. When she is 13, he finds her in the ballroom conducting gravity experiments with a classmate; years later, he will tell Sofia that Nina “was not one to take anything on faith” (328). In 1930, when Nina is 17, he talks with her briefly (she separates from her friends to do so, so as to avoid having to explain how she knows a Former Person) as she is preparing to go with other young Bolsheviks to help with collectivization. After Nina’s lengthy, earnest explanation of the necessity of their work, the Count worries that “the force of her convictions will interfere with the joys of her youth” (189). Later that year, the Count muses how Nina is “too alert and too vibrant for Life to let her shake a hand and walk off alone” (225).

The Count sees Nina for the last time in 1938, when she briefly speaks with him in the Metropol lobby to tell him she is following her husband, as he is being sent for corrective labor and needs the Count to watch her 5-year-old daughter, Sofia, for a couple of months while she situates herself with an apartment and a job. The Count is surprised by the tenderness with which she speaks with Sofia; Nina is firm and serious as always, but caring and patient at her daughter’s frightened tears. The Count, though he makes inquiries, never hears news of her again. The Count takes Sofia as his own daughter and frequently talks to her about her mother. He finds that Sofia differs from Nina in many ways: though both are studious and poised, Sofia has a playful, mischievous streak, and while Nina is impatient with those who disagree with her, Sofia is an attentive listener.

The Count’s fatherly concern for Nina is made tangible in his fathering Nina’s daughter; his easy way of speaking with her—the way he is honest with her, but also indulgent of her childlike inquiries and concerns—seems to endear Nina to him. The Count does not talk down to Nina; he is an adult in her life but also a friend. Nina tells the Count on several occasions that he knows her better than anyone. From Nina, the Count learns to look beneath the surface of his extravagant lifestyle to the inner workings that make it possible. Her giving him the passkey represents her giving him this knowledge, and in giving him her daughter—the daughter he loves as his own—Nina gives him purpose in his life.

Mikhail Mindich, or Mishka, is “like a brother” (79) to the Count. He and the Count went to school together in St. Petersburg and became close friends despite the differences in their backgrounds and personalities. Mishka, a surly, passionate poet and member of the Bolshevik party, “had been raised in a two-room apartment with his mother” (80). As the Count’s roommate, he preferred to read in their rooms above a cobbler’s shop while the Count socialized out on the town. Mishka has a habit of pacing the room, especially when talking about books.

Mishka appears for the first time in A Gentleman in Moscow when he visits the Count at the Metropol; he barges into the Count’s old suite, demanding to see him. Up in the Count’s room, Mishka tells him about the goings-on in the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, delighting the Count, who is pleased that the times are finally suited for his “out of step” (86) friend. As Mishka philosophizes about poetry and politics, the Count ponders how Mishka is “like a lone sailor adrift for years on alien seas” (87) and who has woken “one night to discover familiar constellations overhead” (87). Knowing it to be a Rostov family tradition, Mishka visits on that particular day in order to bring the Count a special bottle of wine so they can toast to the ten-year anniversary of the death of the Count’s godfather, the Grand Duke. As Mishka looks at a photo of the Grand Duke, he thinks of the bygone days at Idlehour and how the Grand Duke is “[a] man of another time” (84).

Mishka visits the Count at the Metropol from time to time, but his visits grow less frequent as the years go on. In 1923, Mishka begins a romantic relationship with fellow poet Katerina Litvinova, and while the Count is happy for his friend, he can’t help but “feel the sting of envy” (117) because it is now Mishka, not the Count, who is relating exciting tale. The Count is disappointed when Mishka cancels a visit with the Count because Katerina is sick. This incident contributes to an ever-growing feeling of anonymity in the Count, who begins to feel that life is moving on without him.

In 1938, Mishka is told by his editor to strike a few lines from a letter in which Chekhov writes that “[p]eople who have never been abroad don’t know how good bread can be” (264). The next day, incensed, he bursts into a meeting and rants about the silencing of poets. After an investigation, Mishka is sent to Siberia “in the name of Article 58” (287). In 1946, having been given a Minus Six, he uses a borrowed passport to visit the Count, who is unnerved by his appearance: Mishka is “[t]hirty pounds lighter, dressed in a threadbare coat, and dragging one leg behind him” (287). Mishka is now a member of the community of zeks, or those who have been through the Communist prison system and been made “indistinguishable from one another” (289). He talks to the Count about how Russians are “prepared to destroy that which we have created” (291) because they believe in “the power of the picture, the poem, the prayer, or the person” (291).

In 1953, the Count is approached by Katerina, who had left Mishka years before and now comes to report news of his death. She also gives the Count Mishka’s latest project, a collection of centuries’ worth of quotations from great literature referencing bread. The final quotation is from the Chekhov letter he was ordered to censor. Katerina and the Count agree that Misha was, at his heart, “a man of devotions” (368). The Count reveals to Katerina that Mishka in fact wrote the poem, “Where Is It Now?,” that they had decided to publish it under the Count’s name to protect Mishka, who would have been arrested. After Katerina leaves, the Count weeps, both for his friend and for the loss of the last person who knew him as a young man.

Mishka represents the Bolsheviks’ cruelty and the cold sacrifice of the individual for the collective. The fact that Osip’s assertion—that no progress can be made without great cost—follows the Count’s 1946 meeting with Mishka suggests that Mishka is collateral damage in the Bolsheviks’ relentless push toward their vision of modernity. Mishka stands by his principles and, unwilling to silence himself as did his favorite poets, is punished severely for it. In this way, too, Mishka differs from the Count: whereas the Count is able to adjust and change with the times, Mishka is inflexible, and his inability to bend causes him to break. Mishka’s failure to perceive the danger of his actions results in his deterioration in the gulag and his subsequent death, and it illustrates the importance of flexibility.

Because he and the Count come from such starkly different backgrounds and perspectives, Mishka also shows the Count’s eagerness to befriend all kinds of people. This unlikely friendship, which spans decades, offers hope for unity and love in an otherwise bleak political landscape.

Anna is a “willowy” actress the Count first meets in the lobby of the Metropol in 1923, after he’s been on house arrest for a year. She is described as having “arches over her eyebrows” (112) that are “very much like the marcato notation in music—that accent which instructs one to play a phrase a little more loudly” (112). Her voice is distinctly husky. When her dogs cause a scene by chasing the hotel cat through the lobby, the Count easily stills them, prompting a curt conversation with Anna in which she suggests the dogs are ill bred. He counters that they’re merely improperly handled.

Later that evening, after the Count sees her having a drink with an enamored “round-faced” man, Anna leaves a note with Audrius, the bartender, asking that the Count join her in her room. Over expertly-filleted fish, the two chat about their histories until Anna abruptly kisses him and leads her to her bedroom. When the Count hangs up her blouse before being sent on his way, Anna grows increasingly furious, believing this act presumptuous. She is angry with him even when returning home and leaves piles of clothes on her floor deliberately, forbidding her servants to pick them up.

Over the years of his stay at the Metropol, Anna continues to see the Count sporadically when she visits Moscow and stays in the hotel. For a time, her visits are short and infrequent. Their first reunion after that night in 1923 occurs in 1928, when she is brusquely rejected by a date and encounters the Count in the lobby. While at first she turns to walk away without addressing him, she resigns herself to speaking with him, confessing, “Whenever I am in this lobby with you […] it seems that I am destined to be humiliated” (195). After he charms her with a witty comment, Anna invites him upstairs to her modest room, where the two commiserate over being partners in “the Confederacy of the Humbled” (196): though she had originally starred in glamorous pictures, changing tastes (and tacit condemnation from Stalin) made movies depicting the lives of the wealthy less popular, and Anna found work less and less easy to come by. Additionally, with the onset of movies with sound, Anna fell more out of favor when people heard her husky voice.

Anna regains popularity after a small role in which she plays a middle-aged factory worker; though she is “no longer young and ravishing” (198), her voice is “that of a woman who has breathed the dust of unpaved roads; who has screamed during childbirth; who has called out to her sisters on the factory floor” (198). She becomes “the voice of my sister, my wife, my mother, my friend” (198), and the round-faced man of her past—now a senior official to the Minister of Culture—speaks to directors on her behalf. Eventually, Anna returns to the stage, which “seemed to understand the virtues of age” (338). Anna plays the likes of Medea and Lady Macbeth, “roles for women who had known the bitterness of joy and the sweetness of despair” (338). The Count is pleased that she is now “in residence for months at a time” (338).

The two lie in bed and share intimate conversation, with the Count noting the constellation of freckles on her back and Anna confessing she had made up a story she’d told him about having grown up in a fishing village. The Count also speaks with Anna about more serious issues, often sharing with her conversations he has during the day. For example, after speaking with Richard Vanderwhile about inevitable changes to Russian rule, Anna soberly suggests the Count does not “want to accept the notion that Russia may be inherently inward looking” (351), noting that no one wonders if America will close the door on the world.

Anna and the Count develop a relaxed and easy relationship. When Sofia arrives in 1938, Anna is immediately understanding and gives the Count her luggage, which he uses to transport linens and other supplies. Anna often helps Sofia when the Count cannot, or when Sofia needs a mother: she helps Sofia model the gown she will wear in Paris and lends her a necklace for the occasion, and she goes with Sofia for her school competition, afterward bursting into the Count’s room to inform him that she’s won. Anna is in the Count’s room when the Bishop arrives with the director of the Red October Youth Orchestra, who demands Sofia join them in Stalingrad; she saves Sofia from this fate by saying Nachevko—the round-faced fellow, who happens to be the Minister of Culture—prefers for her to stay in Moscow. Anna also encourages the Count to embrace modernity, describing the lure of American “conveniences” (351) and gently suggesting he is “stodgy” (404) in his horror over Sofia’s backless dress.

Anna experiences changing times and changing tastes, and her popularity rises and falls with the times. In Anna, we see the transformation from youth to middle age and the sense of invisibility that often goes along with it. Like the Count, Anna goes through a period of anonymity in which her sense of purpose seems lost; as her youth fades and the public’s desires shift, Anna must adjust or fall from the public eye. Once haughty and confident, Anna becomes humble as she is forced into a less glamorous lifestyle. She also becomes more wary, not exposing as much of herself in order to save herself from disappointment. Anna’s journey from playing the role of the elegant debutante to the grizzled factory worker to the staunch older woman suggests a similar transformation in herself. Her return to the stage marks a refreshing era in which she is appreciated for the wise older woman that she is. Anna’s additional role as a mother figure to Sofia similarly gives her new purpose. At the end of the novel, when the Count returns to Novgorod Nizhny, Anna is waiting for him in a café; having grown together for decades, the two end up in the same place, both literally and figuratively. 

Sofia’s arrival was, according to the Count, “the only […] time when Life needed me to be in a particular place at a particular time” (421). The Count meets Sofia, the daughter of Nina and the young man who had fetched her coat in the Metropol lobby, when she is 5 years old.

The Count becomes unnerved by Sofia’s silence and tendency to watch him; his first day with her, the Count does not know what to do with her—he has “57,600 seconds!” (237) to fill. Her presence in his room makes him realize how set in his ways he has become, and he wonders “how it is possible that she takes up so much space” (240).

Sofia embarks on “a cavalcade of Whys” (246), asking the Count about his twice-tolling clock and listening intently to stories about Idlehour. In the Piazza, Sofia is impressed by the elegant surroundings. She is shy at first and neglects to ask that the Count cut her meat or take her to the ladies’ room; however, she gathers the courage to ask for dessert, just as the Count chastises himself for lacking the perception to tend to these things himself.

By the time she is 13, Sofia, though still cool and composed, has developed a mischievous, playful streak. Her favorite game is to shock the Count by turning up in unexpected places, rushing up and down the service stairs to beat the Count when she’d seen him somewhere else only moments before. She falls one night doing so, knocking herself unconscious, and the Count leaves the hotel for the first time since his confinement in order to rush her to the hospital. The Count weeps in his room upon his return. The incident results in a streak of white in Sofia’s hair.

As she grows, Sofia begins to call the Count “Papa.” She also proves to be unlike Nina in some ways. Whereas Nina “was prone to express her impatience with the slightest of the world’s imperfections, Sofia seemed to presume that if the earth spun awry upon occasion, it is generally a well-intentioned planet” (321). Sofia befriends Anna and Marina, the two older women often mentoring her or stepping in as surrogate mothers. Anna goes with Sofia to her school competition, which Sofia wins; in 1954, Sofia is invited to play piano in Paris with the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Shortly before she leaves, Sofia changes her mind, saying she “like[s] it here with” the Count (387). The Count, telling her he has done her a disservice by making the hotel “seem as wide and wonderful as the world” (387) and how proud he is every time she walks out of the hotel, encourages her to go.

In encouraging Sofia to go to Paris, the Count recalls how her mother once noted that “[o]ne does not fulfill one’s potential by listening to Scheherazade” (387), thus ensuring Nina’s daughter follows a path of which his mother would approve. After long, complex preparation, the Count arranges for Sofia to leave the tour and find her way to Richard Vanderwhile at the embassy, in order to escape to America. From Sofia, the Count learns to devote his life to another and that sometimes the most uncomfortable beginnings lead to the most meaningful experiences of all.

The Bishop—so-called because of his long face, short hair, and smugly ecclesiastical smile—begins as a waiter in the Piazza. The Count is frustrated by his incompetence; the Bishop does not sense when the Count is ready to order, takes his soup before he is finished, and fails to bring his wine. Shortly after, the Bishop incenses the Count by interrupting a young couple at precisely the wrong moment: when he approaches their table just as the couple’s conversation takes a serious turn, the Count exclaims to himself, “Of course they are not ready to order […] As any fool can see!” (96). When the Bishop recommends a bottle of wine ill-fitting to the dish and to the young man’s budget, the Count is compelled to intervene. The Bishop’s lack of perception and attention to detail not only offend the Count’s commitment to propriety and manners but also his ability to read what people need at any particular moment.

The Bishop becomes the bane of the Count’s existence, and the two are established as adversaries from the start. The Count is dismayed when the Bishop is promoted to the Boyarsky; Andrey suggests to the Count that he had been recommended by a friend in the Bolshevik party. When the Bishop refuses to fill the Count’s wine order, telling him he has only two choices, red or white, Andrey takes the Count down to the wine cellar, where all the labels have been removed from the wine. It is suggested that the Bishop had complained to the Commissar of Food, and a decree was passed that, as “the existence of our wine list runs Counter to the ideals of the Revolution” (142), all wine must be the same price. In remembering the incident with the young couple, the Count realizes that the Bishop had found a way to “substitute” for the Count’s superior “experience” (143) by ensuring no one can demonstrate their superior experience again.

As hotel manager, the Bishop—now Comrade Leplevsky—exchanges paintings of hunting scenes with portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Marx. He micromanages the staff, making changes to Emile’s menu and tweaking the seating chart, insisting on flipping through the entire reservation book each time he turns to the evening’s listing. He creates a complex order-taking system in the Boyarsky and holds firm to it even after the Count informs him guests’ dinners are arriving cold, offending the Count by suggesting he is trying to prevent thievery.

The night before the Count escapes the Metropol, the Bishop, rummaging through the Count’s room, discovers his and Sofia’s plan; the Count beats him back to his office and at gunpoint forces him to give him his keys. In the Bishop’s filing cabinet, the Count finds files on himself and all his friends, in which the Bishop has documented “specific instances of tardiness, impertinence, disaffection, drunkenness, sloth, or desire” (435)—“a careful accounting of human flaws” (435). During their time together in the Bishop’s office, the Bishop sneers that the Count’s “sort” has always been enamored with “the rightness of your actions” (433), deriding their “precious manners and delightful way of putting things” (433) and claiming that “you have had your time” (433). The Count forces the Bishop to burn the files before locking him in the storeroom and escaping the hotel. Upon being found, the Bishop reveals in vain all he knows about how to locate the Count.

The Bishop’s nickname is ironic considering his incompetence, pettiness, and malice. He demonstrates the hypocrisy of the Bolsheviks in that he revels in his power and seeks to be superior, all under the guise of equality. Unskilled and unknowledgeable himself, he resents the Count’s ease and confidence. His manipulation in having the wine labels are removed, for example, helps him ensure he will never feel inferior over wine choice again. By claiming the expensive wines are “a monument to the privilege of the nobility” (142), and appearing to be motivated by a desire for equality, he is able to make himself equal with the Count without having to learn his trade. He resents being left out of the Triumvirate’s meetings and keeps a watchful eye over all his employees, hoping to catch them misbehaving—an opportunity to exercise his authority. The similarities between the new and the old regimes are a theme in A Gentleman in Moscow. The Bishop represents the baser, more self-serving nature of the Bolshevik party; he is a man of humble birth who aligns himself with the party to even the playing field on his own behalf.

In 1930, Osip requests a private room in the Boyarsky and that the Count serve him there. He invites the Count to dine with him, and the two engage in cautious but friendly banter before Osip explains that he is an official in the Party and that because Russia is preparing to become a great world power, he desires to learn French and English in order to speak to the most powerful people in the world. After that evening, they meet every third Saturday of the month in the private room, where they discuss languages, politics, and movies, a topic that fascinates Osip.

Osip, a diehard Bolshevik, believes “Hollywood is the single most dangerous force in the history of class struggle” (294). He believes film noir movies offer “an unflinching portrayal of Capitalism as it actually was” (294) and wonders why the government allows them to exist. Still, he enjoys the movies thoroughly, amusing the Count with his inability to sit still and tapping his feet while watching Fred Astaire and jumping from his seat while watching Bela Lugosi. After the Count’s troubling meeting with a newly-freed Mishka, Osip and the Count discuss Mishka’s theory that Russians “are more apt than others to destroy that which we have created” (295)—a conversation that enlivens the already enthusiastic Osip. Osip believes Russia is experiencing a great period of progress and that its “industrial production outpaces that of most of Europe” (297). He is eager for Russia to join America on the world stage, suggesting the bird in the Maltese Falcon is “an emblem of the church and the monarchies” (297) and that “love of that heritage” (297) is misguided. Osip argues that the past “must be swept aside” (297) and that America and Russia have both done so, though while America embraces “their beloved individualism” (298), Russia does so “in service of the common good” (298). He admits this comes “[a]t the greatest cost” (297) but holds that no achievement comes without cost; for example, America could not be the superpower it is had it not been for slavery.

When the Count tells him about Sofia’s sudden arrival, Osip willingly cuts their meeting short so he can tend to her. Osip remembers his own children and the days “[w]hen there was a pitter-pat in the hallways an hour before dawn” (261), and he smiles at the Count’s evident belief that after some “minor adjustments […] everything should go back to running without a hitch” (262). When Sofia falls on the stairs, Osip, tasked with keeping an eye on the Count, sends the best doctor to care for her, arranges for her to be moved to a better hospital, and ensures that the Count can return in secret to the hotel. Over the years, he and the Count see less of each other, though their respect for each other does not fade. At their last meeting, in 1954, they watch Casablanca, the Count drifting into a reverie about Sofia in Paris. Though he is not named, Osip is the Chief Administrator who, in “Afterwards…,” is informed of the Count’s escape. His final line in the book—“Round up the usual suspects” (458)—is a reference to Casablanca and an indication that he is going to let the Count escape without chase.

Whereas Mishka is an example of a countryman shattered and left behind by the Bolsheviks, Osip represents Bolshevik idealism, the drive to compete with America, and the belief that obliterating one’s enemies is the price they must pay for progress. His long friendship with the Count, a man of very different beliefs and background and with whom a friendship would not be encouraged, suggests unity among the people even in the midst of political upheaval. At the end of the novel, the Count disagrees with Osip’s cynical opinion about Casablanca—that the saloonkeeper’s composure in the face of a man’s arrest shows “indifference to the fates of men” (459). The two men hold different perspectives on humanity, on politics, and on the fate of their country, but their enduring respect for each other offers hope for the future.

Originally from France, Andrey is maître d’ of the Boyarsky and part of the “Triumvirate.” Andrey is described as “handsome, tall, and graying” (27). Andrey, composed, dignified, and elegant, is “the man who secured the Boyarsky’s reputation for excellence” (27). With his “well manicured” (27) hands and fingers “half an inch longer than the fingers of most men his height” (27), Andrey is perceptive and swift, seeming to sense instinctively when a guest of the Boyarsky needs something. He seems to pull back the chairs of a table of women “all at once” (28); when he recommends a wine, he extends his finger “in a manner reminiscent of that gesture on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling with which the Prime Mover transmitted the spark of life” (28). Andrey is dependable and discreet, and much admired by the Count. He is also one of the three hotel staff members whom join the Count for a drink his first night in his new room.

When the Count wonders why the Bishop says he can choose only between red and white wine, Andrey takes him to the wine cellar and tactfully informs him of the new regulations requiring the labels to be removed from the bottles. Along with the other members of the Triumvirate, Andrey helps procure rare ingredients for Emile’s bouillabaisse. The night of their special dinner, Andrey reveals that he had been a juggler for the traveling circus. He proves it by juggling leftover oranges and then knives. The Count feels his “hands had been crafted by God to juggle” (223); the oranges “moved like planets governed by a force of gravity that simultaneously propelled them forward and kept them from flinging off into space” (223).

In 1954, the night of the combined dinner of the Presidium and the Council of Ministers, Andrey informs Emile that he has been experiencing hand tremors and will not be able to serve, forcing the Bishop to allow the Count to do so. Later, after the Count has escaped the hotel, Andrey reveals that in fact he has had no tremors at all, suggesting he had only said so to help the Count escape.

Readers are offered a deeper glimpse into Andrey’s life when, after visiting Sofia at the hospital, he takes the bus home to his small apartment to prepare dinner for his wife. He goes into the room of his late son, who had been killed in the war, and ponders how the room, which they’d kept untouched since his death, is now a source of sadness rather than comfort.

Andrey’s friendship helps sustain and give meaning to the Count’s time in the Metropol. He grows to depend on Andrey and Emile; his daily meetings with them are a moment of respite in the changing times.

Described as being “five foot five and two hundred pounds” (28), Emile, a member of the “Triumvirate,” has been chef de cuisine of the Boyarsky since 1912. Back then, he had “a seasoned staff and a sizable kitchen” (26), as well as extensive spice shelves. A talented chef in times of plenty, his true genius is demonstrated in the years that follow the Revolution, when “economic declines, failed crops, and halted trade” (27) lead to ingredients becoming rare. Emile has been forced to improvise, using more common ingredients to create the same elegant dishes guests of the Boyarsky have come to expect. The Count is impressed with Emile’s ability to create these fine dishes under such circumstances. The Count sometimes aggravates Emile by managing to guess the secret ingredients he uses.

Emile’s fiery temperament and emotional disposition both contrast and complement Andrey’s cool composure. He tends to begin the day feeling cynical, then becoming more optimistic as the day goes on. He is known for his chopping knife, which he uses not only to deftly chop food but also to point angrily at his staff with. He grows frustrated when the Bishop, as manager of the hotel, begins sitting in on the Triumvirate’s meetings and requiring him to substitute ingredients for those that are more cost-effective. The night the Triumvirate makes bouillabaisse, he is at first flustered by the Bishop’s intrusion; however, when the Bishop asks “[a]t whose request” (221) they have gathered, Emile is overcome with rage and chases him off with his chopping knife, only to find he had grabbed a celery stalk by mistake. That night, he is delighted by Andrey and the Count’s reaction to his dish, and as they laugh and reminisce, he finds that “this universe could not be improved upon” (224).

When Mishka, looking ragged and broken, visits the Count in 1946, Emile lets them sit in his office to talk, offering bread and salt, “that ancient Russian symbol of hospitality” (287). Upon leaving the hotel, Mishka, looking “from gentle Andrey to heartfelt Emile” (292), observes to the Count that when the Count was sentenced to house arrest, he became “the luckiest man in all of Russia” (292). Like Andrey’s, Emile’s friendship helps sustain the Count in his years of captivity.

In 1946, Richard Vanderwhile is aide-de-camp to an American general. He watches along with the Count as geese run free in a hallway of the Metropol, telling the Count, “How I love this hotel” (281). The Count sees him again later in the Shalyapin, shortly after discussing Russia’s past and future with Mishka and Osip. Sensing the Count has something on his mind, Richard encourages the Count to speak with him; after hearing the source of the Count’s thoughtfulness, Richard says both Mishka and Osip are “missing something” (302), that “grand things persist” (302), and that “[w]e don’t know how a man or his achievements will be perceived three generations from now” (304). When the Count returns to his room after leaving Sofia in the hospital, he sees that Richard has left him a phonograph and records. Later, Sofia will listen to these records and teach herself to play piano.

He and the Count continue to see each other over the years when Richard is in Moscow. By 1950, when Richard is with the State Department, they’ve known each other only four years, yet “[t]hese two would have felt like old friends had they met just hours before” (333). They are bound not only by “common ground and cause for laughter in the midst of effortless conversation” (333) but also by “upbringing,” for they were both “[r]aised in grand homes in cosmopolitan cities, educated in the liberal arts, graced with idle hours, and exposed to the finest things” (333).

In 1952, Richard speaks privately with the Count in the Count’s old suite. Noting how with Stalin’s inevitable death the relationship between their Countries may change, he tells the Count he is going to Paris to work in “the intelligence field” (347) and asks that the Count be one of a cohort of friends “who might be in a position now and then to shed some light on this or that” (347).

At the end of the novel, the Count ensures that he is serving the combined dinner of the Presidium and the Council of Ministers and retaining all he overhears. Giving Sofia a map of Paris, he directs her to leave her music venue and walk to the embassy to find Richard, who, after sending Sofia to go with his wife to find clothes, uncovers a secret message hidden in her backpack. In a tightly-rolled scroll, the Count details the events of the dinner. He also leaves instructions for Richard to signal to him that Sofia is safe. The Count had previously sent a letter to Richard via Pudgy Webster, an American he met at the hotel, in which he presumably arranged for Richard to help Sofia escape to America. The information he reveals from the Council of Ministers dinner is, we can assume, his way of thanking Richard for saving his daughter.

Richard and the Count “had more in common with each other than they had with the majority of their own countrymen” (333). In this way, Richard contrasts with Osip. The Count and Osip are the products of two different Russian eras, with the Count representing the past and Osip representing the new Bolshevik regime. The Count and Richard think objectively about their countries, bound by their philosophical similarities even though they were “born ten years and four thousand miles apart” (333).

When Sofia is 17, the Count finds her in the ballroom with Viktor and grabs him by the collar, only to discover that he is giving Sofia piano lessons. Viktor, the conductor of the band in the Piazza, had heard Sofia playing Mozart in the ballroom and was so entranced by her talent that he decided to take her as a student. The Count likens him to a Manchester moth: the moth, over years, evolved to blend in with the soot-covered landscape; Viktor, who studied at the Conservatory and received the Mussorgsky Medal, conducts at the Piazza to “make ends meet” (336).

By 1954, Viktor has joined a chamber orchestra and visits the Metropol less frequently. He approaches the Count frantically one night to speak with him about Sofia, who has informed Director Vavilov she will not be going to Paris. Upon learning Sofia made the decision herself, he begs the Count to convince her to change her mind, insisting she “come to the defense of her own talent” (384).

Though a minor character, Viktor plays a key role in the Count’s escape from the Metropol. Viktor, despite his wife’s pleading and his own reservations, leaves his home at midnight on June 21, 1954 in order to meet the Count at the café of the old St. Petersburg Station, where the two discuss Casablanca. Viktor then takes the train to Helsinki wearing the journalist’s coat and hat, which he leaves, along with the Finnish guidebooks, in the bathroom at the station in Vyborg before returning home to Moscow. When he finally watches Casablanca a year later, he finds “the saloonkeeper’s cool response to Ugarte’s arrest” (459) to be a sign “that by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world” (459).

Viktor represents generosity of spirit, staunchness, and the fulfillment of dreams, both for oneself and for others. He shows how one can have an enormous impact on someone no matter how small one’s role in someone’s life, and that others can have an impact on one’s life, too.

When the novel opens, Marina has just been promoted from chambermaid to seamstress: while the Metropol had had several seamstresses, they had all been fired by the Bolsheviks, who ultimately realized mending linens was cheaper than buying new ones. Marina is one of the three staff members who joins the Count in his room for a drink his first night in his new room.

Marina frequently serves as a firm voice of reason for the Count and becomes a confidante. When the Count begins working at the Boyarsky and needs to learn how to mend his jacket, Marina teaches him, and the two share an appreciation for detail. When the Count expresses concern that Nina’s “convictions will interfere with the joys of her youth” (189), Marina says he must “trust in her” (189), and that “life will find her in time” (189). Marina is firm with the Count when Sofia first comes to him: when the Count suggests Marina take Sofia, Marina tells him he is “up to the challenge” (253) and gives him a thimble to hide in a game with her. She also watches Sofia that first day while the Count takes care of his business.

Marina makes a gown for Sofia to wear in Paris and is offended when the Count expresses hesitation at its backlessness, suggesting, “Perhaps we should drape her in sackcloth” (403). She also tells him she has “no interest” in the Count’s “scruples” (403).

Along with Anna, Marina serves as a mother figure to Sofia. She is one of the many adults who play an important role in Sofia’s life.