A Gentleman in Moscow: Book 1, 1922, An Ambassador Summary & Analysis

The novel’s style shifts to prose. The Count is escorted back to the Metropol Hotel by two Soviet soldiers. As the Count waves to the hotel staff, they only stare in response. The Count and the two soldiers climb to the Count’s suite on the third floor, which has an interconnected bedroom, bathroom, dining room, and grand salon. One of the officers informs him that he will no longer be staying in the suite.

The Count is escorted to his new room on the sixth floor in the attic, which was originally built to house the butlers and ladies’ maids of the hotel’s guests. More recently, the room has been used to store assorted broken furniture and debris. Two of the hotel bellhops help the Count move all of the belongings he can fit into his new room. The rest, he is told, will become “the property of the People.”

The Count points at what he wants to keep: two chairs, his grandmother’s coffee table, a set of her plates, two table lamps made from ebony elephants, a portrait of his sister, Helena, a leather case that had been made especially for him, all of his books, and his desk, given to him by his godfather, the Grand Duke.

The Count looks out the window of his old suite, thinking about the experiences he will miss: the view from his window, drinking at the English Club, arriving late to the Bolshoi Ballet across the square.

The Count then takes an inventory of everything he will be leaving behind. His possessions at the hotel are already a small fraction of his former possessions, since moving from his family’s estate to the hotel meant that he couldn’t take very much in the first place.

The Count remembers the journey that brought him to the Metropol. In 1918, when the former Tsar had been executed by Bolshevik troops, the Count had feared for his grandmother’s life and returned to the family estate from Paris. He arranged passage for her out of the country, but told her he would not be going with her.

The Count and his grandmother (who had raised him since he was ten) parted without shedding a tear. They tried not to become emotional because his grandmother had taught him in childhood not to give his opponent the satisfaction of seeing him upset if he lost in a game.

After his grandmother left, the Count had loaded up a single wagon with their furniture, bolted the doors of the estate, and set out for Moscow. In the present, the Count reflects how people learn to say goodbye to friends and family at an early age, but that it is much harder to say goodbye to possessions. The Count takes one additional object—a pair of his sister Helena’s scissors—and says goodbye to the rest of the family heirlooms.

The Count returns to the attic and marvels at how in his youth he had loved the small space of a train berth, as he had stayed in one overnight when he traveled from Moscow to France. He thinks that at least he will not have to listen to the typists on the second floor, writing out the country’s new constitution.

A footnote states that the new constitution includes freedom of conscience, expression, and assembly, but also that these rights could be revoked if they are “utilized to the detriment of the socialist revolution.”

The Count unpacks a few more things, including his father’s twice-tolling clock and his grandmother’s opera glasses. At that moment, a pigeon taps and scratches at the single small window in the room. The Count sympathizes with the pigeon’s restlessness.

The Count hears someone clear his throat in the hallway. He opens his door and finds Andrey (the maître d’ of the hotel restaurant, the Boyarsky), Vasily (the hotel’s concierge), and Marina (the hotel seamstress) standing outside. The Count explains his sentence of house arrest. He opens his leather case, which contains twenty-six pairs of different kinds of drinking glasses, and pours a glass of brandy for each of them. They toast to the Metropol.

The Count, Andrey, Vasily, and Marina then have a night of good cheer and conversation. He is grateful that they seem so pleased that he narrowly escaped a death sentence, but he believes that their night of celebration is also a celebration of their survival in the face of seventeen years of mass upheaval. Since 1905, Russia had suffered a world war, a civil war, two famines, and the Red Terror. Thus, it was just as necessary, he believed, to drink to Russia itself.

At ten o’clock, the Count says goodnight to Andrey, Vasily, and Marina. He sits at his desk, which had been left to him by his godfather, Grand Duke Demidov. The Grand Duke had become a substitute father for the Count and his sister Helena when their parents had died of cholera in 1900. The Grand Duke told him at that time to be strong for his sister, and that “if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them.”

The Count runs his hands over the desk, and finds a secret catch behind one of the desk’s front legs. A seamless door opens to reveal stacks of gold coins within the leg. Each of the other legs has its own stack of gold as well.