On Christmas, Nina gives the Count her passkey before leaving to spend the holiday at home with her father. Mishka, a gifted poet and supporter of the Bolshevik Party, has always been out of step with the times however, the Count is delighted to find that Mishka has become a member of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. One day in September, the Count is visited by his best friend, Mishka. The Count kicks out the wall of his closet to discover it connects with another room, which he makes his secret study. She takes the Count on her adventures, and together they visit the boiler room, storage rooms, and other secret rooms that make the hotel run. He is struck by her intelligence, lack of intimidation, and seriousness. In the time that follows, the Count meets with Nina frequently. As he eats, a little girl, Nina, approaches his table and surprises him by asking him personal questions and expressing bold points of view. One day not long after his house arrest begins, he is served at the hotel’s Piazza restaurant by an incompetent new waiter, whom he nicknames the Bishop. Despite the hardships, the Count decides to take the advice of his godfather, Grand Duke Demidov, and to “master his circumstances” (18). When the Count returns to the hotel, he is brought to a small room in a sixth-floor belfry that once housed servants. He is told he would have been executed had it not been for a poem he wrote years before that seemed sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause. On June 21, 1922, five years after the Bolshevik Revolution that led to the execution of Tsar Nicholas II, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov appears before the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel, where he lives in a luxurious suite.

The novel illustrates how people’s lives are intertwined and how the present can be informed but not mired by the past. A Gentleman in Moscow explores personal growth, the inevitability of change, and the nature of government and power.

As the Count befriends people of different nationalities and classes, he finds that “the inconveniences have mattered to most” (352). However, his time in the hotel teaches him lessons he would not have learned otherwise. As the years pass, the Count witnesses his Country changing outside his window, and he must learn to reconcile these changes with the past he holds dear.

The Count must adjust not only to his new circumstances in a small room in the hotel’s belfry but also to the knowledge that his way of life is disappearing under the Bolshevik regime. Published in 2016, A Gentleman in Moscow, by American author Amor Towles, is the story of Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian nobleman who, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, is sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel.

Towles a gentleman in moscow