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BOOK BLOG -
Well, I started reading this book at the end of December and since then had explored...Beyond the door of the luxurious Hotel Metropol lies Theater Square and the rest of Moscow, and beyond its city limits the tumultuous landscape of 20th-century Russia. The year 1922 is a good starting point for a Russian epic, but for the purposes of his sly and winning second novel, Amor Towles forgoes descriptions of icy roads and wintry dachas and instead retreats into the warm hotel lobby.
As post-revolution scarcity set in, the chef of the upscale Boyarsky restaurant worked magic with cornmeal, cauliflower and cabbage, while the Shalyapin bar offered candlelight and dark corners so Bolshoi dancers could sneak a postperformance drink. In the lobby, politicians whispered and movie starlets swanned across the floor, dragging recalcitrant borzois on their leashes.
Towles’s novel spans a number of difficult decades, but no Bolshevik, Stalinist or bureaucrat can dampen the Metropol’s life; World War II only briefly forces a pause. A great hotel is eternal, and the tidal movement of individuals and ideas into its lounges and ballrooms is a necessity for one longtime resident. He’s not difficult to spot: a man who enacts a set of rituals and routines, grooming and dining, conversing and brandy-drinking, before ascending each night to his room on the sixth floor, which has barely enough space for his Louis XVI desk and ebony elephant lamps.
Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov — a member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt — was already ensconced in luxury in Suite 317 when he was sentenced to house arrest in a 1922 trial, condemned for writing a poem. Saved from a bullet to the head or exile in Siberia because he was deemed a hero of the pre-revolutionary cause, he has been forcefully installed on a new floor. But Rostov is an optimist: The cramped room will at the very least keep him away from the Bolsheviks below, clacking out directives on their typewriters. He bounces on the bedsprings and observes that they’re creaking in G sharp. When he bangs his head on the slope of the low ceiling, he announces: “Just so.”
What is a cultured man to do? Suicide is an obvious choice. (Just so!) But the Metropol won’t let him simply drop and splatter from its roof. Towles has an educational scheme for his protagonist: If the hotel contains the world, Towles assiduously offers pleasures and lessons, room by room, as a reborn Rostov bears witness to his era.
Solzhenitsyn this is not. The frost gathers outside, but the book proceeds with intentional lightness. The tone is generally not far removed from the Fitzgeraldian tributes of Towles’s first novel, “Rules of Civility.” The book is narrated not by Rostov but by a hovering third person, sporting what seems to be a permanently arched eyebrow, who occasionally lapses into aristocratic fussiness. Wonder abounds. Secret panels open. A former juggler reaches out to grab a falling torte just in time. One-eyed cats look away at crucial moments.
What of the Russia that lies beyond? When he stops pacing the floor, Rostov’s anxious poet friend, Mishka, tells of his battles against censorship and hints that Rostov’s confinement might ultimately be for the best, arguing that their country’s great contribution to the world (at least one of them) is destruction: “For as a people, we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created.” Let us concede, our narrator dryly points out, that the early 1930s in Russia were unkind.
Mishka is one of many walk-ins who will tell of Russia’s condition and change Rostov’s static life. The movie star last seen dragging her barking borzois offers up for study the constellation of beauty marks on her back. Americans flit through, dispensing candy, cigarettes and opportunities. The most important introduction is to a young girl named Nina, who has a ripe sense of curiosity and a skeleton key that will allow her into any room, which is how Rostov splits his pants while contorting on the balcony as a Bolshevik assembly argues agenda points in the ballroom below.
But comrades must work, so the gentleman becomes a waiter. How important is good service? Even as a youngster on the estate in Nizhny Novgorod, he understood the power of a seating arrangement:
“In fact, if Paris had not been seated next to Helen when he dined in the court of Menelaus, there never would have been a Trojan War.” In the era of jockeying Soviet apparatchiks, it’s a skill Rostov can repurpose. Proper manners, he points out, always have their place. “Does a banquet really need an asparagus server?” Nina asks at one point. “Does an orchestra need a bassoon?” is Rostov’s reply.
As Nina grows up, her fervency and love of knowledge are transferred from the science experiments she conducts in the ballroom to the diktats of the party. At the beginning of the 1930s, Rostov catches sight of her in the lobby among a few adoring male comrades, about to leave with some cadres of the local Komsomol to help collectivize the provinces.
What happens when a novel centers on a character so capable, so witty and at ease in the world, even as that world convulses around him? Rostov has a portrait of his long-dead sister on the wall of his room, so it’s evident his life is anchored in pain — Russia is pain — but he remains untouchable, built to outwit the system. Part of the problem is that Towles repeatedly invokes the tortured, challenged, hand-wringing, deeply human characters of Russian literature. In contrast, Rostov seems destined always to succeed.
Towles is a craftsman. What saves the book is the gorgeous sleight of hand that draws it to a satisfying end, and the way he chooses themes that run deeper than mere sociopolitical commentary: parental duty, friendship, romance, the call of home. Human beings, after all, “deserve not only our consideration but our reconsideration” — even those from the leisured class. Who will save Rostov from the intrusions of the state if not the seamstresses, chefs, bartenders and doormen? In the end, Towles’s greatest narrative effect is not the moments of wonder and synchronicity but the generous transformation of these peripheral workers, over the course of decades, into confidants, equals and, finally, friends. With them around, a life sentence in these gilded halls might make Rostov the luckiest man in Russia.
The count “found political discourse of any persuasion to be tedious.” Bolsheviks are a bore, getting in colloquiums and congresses to “levy complaints, and generally clamor about the world’s oldest problems in its newest nomenclature.”
At one point, he learns that the existence of a wine list, a monument to the privilege of nobility, runs counter to the ideals of the revolution. Thus the 100,000 bottles in the Metropol’s cellar have had their labels removed, supposedly rendering them blissfully equal. No matter. Our accomplished gentleman will overcome. Down in the cellar, his talented fingers can still feel the telltale embossed ridges cut into a particularly important bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
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Q1) How Did the Count Finance his Time at the Metropol?
Well, basically because of the poem Where Is It Now, the Count has friends in the upper ranks of the party (which is why he was sentenced to house arrest rather than prison). It was not uncommon in the Soviet era for the favored to receive housing from the state. Maxim Gorky, for instance, was given the mansion of Stepan Ryabushinsky, a former millionaire to live in (an Art Nouveau masterpiece worth visiting when you’re in Moscow). So, I think we can assume the Count’s attic quarters are provided gratis. Early in the novel, the Count uses his gold for additional expenses. The day he decides to stop using the gold is the very day he approaches Andrey to ask for a job as a waiter.