By Amor Towels
A classical historical fiction work written by famous 2016 kirkus prize finalist Amor Towels in 2016. The book tells the story of Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat who after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 gets arrested and sentenced to lifelong imprisonment for writing a poem in 1913 with revolutionary undertones. Count was home-arrest in Moscow metropolis hotel for more than 30 yrs.
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. In the first few weeks and months, the Count has a difficult time coping with his new life.
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.
However, his time in the hotel teaches him lessons he would not have learned otherwise. As the Count befriends people of different nationalities and classes, he finds that “the inconveniences have mattered to most”.
Through these 30 yrs, his life becomes a rollercoaster. His boredom is alleviated a little when he befriends a young girl named Nina, who is precocious, stubborn, and most importantly, adventurous whose single father is temporarily posted to Moscow on state business. Later, Count is visited by his best friend, Mishka. Mishka, a gifted poet and supporter of the Bolshevik Party, has always been out of step with the times; was now a member of Russian association of Proletarian Writers. He then develops a romantic relations with a film actress who stumbles at that hotel; Anna Urbanova.
In 1938, Nina returns to the Metropol, now with a five-year-old daughter, Sofia. She explains to the Count that her husband has been arrested and sent to Siberia, and she needs someone to watch Sofia for a few months while she attempts to find him. The Count agrees to look after Sofia, but he struggles at first while juggling his job in the Boyarsky. After a few days, and with the help of the seamstress who works in the hotel, Marina, the Count starts to adjust to living with a child.
Russia at that was healing from its involvement in both world wars and Nina & his husband’s life became a victim to it just like million others.
Hearing about the death of his friend, the Count resolves to take action and escape the hotel. When Sofia is invited on a tour to Paris with a music conservatory in 1953, the Count sees an opportunity for both of them to escape. Over the course of the next several months, he plans every detail.
Bishop (the hotel manager) discovered one of the Count’s maps and figured out that Sofia plans to run away from the tour, the Bishop then walks down to his office, intending to inform the authorities. When he arrives at his office, the Count is already sitting there with pistols in hand.
The next evening, Sofia performs a piano show. After she plays, she puts on the Italian clothes, cuts and dyes her hair, and runs to the American embassy. At the embassy, a friend of the Count’s named Richard Vanderwhile helps her seek asylum and make a new life in America. Richard also helps the Count escape, dialing thirty phones in the Metropolis at exactly midnight to confirm that Sofia made it safely.
In the pandemonium of the ringing phones, the Count quietly dons the American’s hat and jacket and walks out of the hotel. He then meets Stepanovich at a train station, and Stepanovich takes the hat, jacket and Finnish passport, and boards a train to Helsinki in order to confuse the police. Rather than joining Sofia in America, however, the Count heads back to his home province, where Anna Urbanova is waiting for him in a tavern.
A Gentleman in Moscow explores personal growth, the inevitability of change, and the nature of government and power. The novel illustrates how people’s lives are intertwined and how the present can be informed but not mired by the past. There’s just too much human compassion here for you to ignore. I think the world feels disordered right now. The count’s refinement and genteel nature are exactly what we’re longing for. If you long for and have a thing for historical fiction, this is the perfect book for you. I'll be waiting for a tv/web series based on this novel in coming years.
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