August 2020: A Gentleman in Moscow (Towles)

Post date: Sep 13, 2020 12:30:25 AM

Not everyone will enjoy A Gentleman in Moscow. Some might say its tone is too light, its plot too slow moving and too implausible, its refusal to dwell on the horrors of Soviet history too unforgiveable. My cynical side suspects that some readers will simply be turned off by the book’s optimism and by the fact that most of the characters are fundamentally decent, kind and even charming. In the opening sentence of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy famously wrote that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” A Gentleman in Moscow was inspired by Amor Towles’s love of Russian literature, and Anna Karenina is a work that the main character adores. However, in a sense, the book offers a respectful refutation of Tolstoy’s claim. Some families are born in the most singular of circumstances, and some families discover happiness in the most unique of ways.

A Gentleman in Moscow begins in 1922, as Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest by a Bolshevik tribunal. An unrepentant aristocrat, Rostov is saved from the firing squad by the fact that he wrote a poem that helped to inspire the revolution. Instead, he is told that he cannot leave the confines of his current residence: the Hotel Metropol in central Moscow. If he steps foot outside of that building, he is assured, he will be shot. He remains in the hotel for thirty-two years.

One of the original grand hotels of Europe, the Hotel Metropol is permitted to preserve much of its luxury and elegance because Soviet officials want to make a good impression on the visiting diplomats and foreign reporters who stay there. However, the struggles faced by the greater Soviet Union still reach the hotel and its staff and residents, including Count Rostov. Having been moved to a small room in the attic and deprived of most of his possessions, he quickly begins to feel the weight of his confinement. As the Russia that he knows and loves slowly disappears outside his small window, Rostov is saved from despair by the human connections that he makes within the hotel and by the complex world that he discovers within its walls.

As a story about one man thriving in the face of extended confinement, A Gentleman in Moscow seemed a fitting choice for our book club this summer: a perfect panacea to a pandemic. The fifteen members who attended our last zoom meeting all enjoyed the book and appreciated its optimism and fairytale like qualities as a pleasant break to the doom and gloom on the evening news. Some found the opening chapters a little slow and said they had to adjust to the mindset of the novel. Once they did, however, they felt captivated by the book’s charms and intrigued by, and invested in, the fates of the characters. Others loved the book from the get-go, falling almost instantly in love with Rostov and his effortless, though sometimes borderline pompous, gentility. Towles creates several other richly drawn characters, and we enjoyed discussing their strengths and failings. We also pondered upon the book’s reoccurring themes and its accordion-like temporal structure, which reminded us of a set of nesting Matryoshka dolls.

Perhaps our most critical discussion centered on the plausibility of the novel and of its ending. At one point, Rostov declares himself the luckiest man in Russia and, in the moment, the reader believes it. How likely, we later wondered, was it that an aristocrat such as Rostov would have been able to survive the persecutions of the Soviet era? Many critics fault the book for glossing over the worst horrors of these times. In response, we noted that the book recognized much of this history and that several of the characters lives were tragically shaped, or even destroyed, by these events. Still, A Gentleman in Moscow is not, nor is it intended to be, a work of historical fiction. It is a work of the imagination and an exploration of the human spirit. Towles claimed that he did most of his historical research after the writing the first draft. His primary relationship was not with the historical setting of the book, but with the intellectual and emotional lives of his characters.

In an interview with NPR’s Lois Reitzes, Towles discussed a passage where Rostov muses on the importance of second chances and on the time that it takes to understand the complexities of any human heart. This is not a piece of philosophy, Towles insisted, that he had ever propounded before or taught to his children. Instead, he insisted, he discovered this wisdom alongside the Count and inspired by the events he found himself describing. Perhaps it is this ability to learn from the book’s characters and relationships, and to be surprised by its hard won moments of optimism and happiness, that have prompted so many millions of people to read this novel, and to read it more than once. Several of our members noted that this was their second reading of the book and that they appreciated it in new ways on the second time around. To echo Rostov’s insights, great novels also reveal new depths to us upon repeat acquaintance, and I suspect that A Gentleman in Moscow is a friend several of us will revisit again.