A Gentleman in Moscow: Book 1, Around and About Summary & Analysis

On July 12, Nina catches the Count’s eye on the way to dinner, giving him a signal that they have established. She tells him that a certain gentleman has gone out to dine. They run upstairs towards suite 317—the Count’s old suite—before the narrator backtracks.

The Count stopped going to the hotel bar after having to be dragged up the steps by Audrius earlier that week. He had begun to be plagued by restlessness and ennui after only three weeks of his sentence, and he worried how he might feel after three years. But on the first Wednesday in July, while the Count is sitting in the lobby with nothing to do, he notices Nina zipping by.

The Count catches Nina and asks where she is headed. She reluctantly tells him the card room. When he asks why, she hesitates again, but then tells him that four women regularly met in the card room at three o’clock on Wednesdays. If she gets there at 2:30, she can hide in the cupboard, listen in on their conversation, and eat their cookies when they leave. When the Count asks where else she spends her time, she tells him to meet her in the lobby the next day at two o’clock.

Thus begins the Count’s education on the inner workings of the hotel. He has lived in the Metropol for four years, but Nina has had ten months of her own kind of confinement. Her father had not put her in school, as he was posted only temporarily in Moscow. Thus, Nina has spent her time discovering every room of the hotel, its purpose, and how it might be used better.

To initiate the Count’s explorations, Nina starts in the basement. She shows him the furnace room—where one could destroy secret messages and illicit love letters. She next opens the electrical room, where one lever could throw the ballroom into darkness and provide perfect cover for stealing pearls. At the far end of the basement, Nina and the Count pass a bright blue door. She says that she has not yet been in that room, and takes out her passkey for the hotel.

Nina and the Count opens the door to reveal the hotel’s silver service. From floor to ceiling are soup bowls and asparagus servers and silver utensils, enough for a grand banquet. The Count wonders why the Bolsheviks had not taken it all away, and Nina surmises that perhaps they need it. The Count thinks to himself that yes, they would likely be having banquets soon enough, because all leaders eventually like pomp and fanfare, regardless of their political leanings.

In the following days, Nina leads the Count from room to room, including the hotel suites, as each room has a different view. If one wants to watch guests arrive at the Bolshoi, the best vantage point is the northwest window of suite 317. So, on July 12, the Count and Nina find themselves in his old suite. They watch as the attendees disappear through the doors, when one final taxi pulls up and a woman in a red dress rushes up the stairs. Nina sighs, wishing that she and the woman could change places. The Count thinks to himself that longing for another life is a universal sentiment.

Later that night, the Count thinks about his visit to his old room. He had noticed the tea service on the table next to a folded newspaper. He imagines that the room’s resident had returned from some outing, ordered afternoon tea, and had whiled away an hour before dressing for dinner. The Count envies the anonymous man’s liberty and looks over his own room.

The Count rises from his bed and examines the closet, wondering if it had been built in an old doorframe. He kicks the inner wall in and slips through the crack, discovering himself in the interior of a neighboring closet, attached to a neighboring room whose door had been blocked. He clears the door and moves his furniture to create a new study for himself. He then nails the front door shut so that the only way of entering the room is through the closet in his bedroom. He thinks to himself that a room existing in secret can be “as vast as one cares to imagine.”