As he climbs the 110 steps to his room, he can’t wait to descend them again he has begun, early on in his confinement, to be “threatened by a sense of ennui - that dreaded mire of the human emotions.” Yet even with this aim, the walls begin to close in. Rostov is an aesthete, an intellectual who will maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. When he bangs his head on the slope of the low ceiling, he announces: “Just so.” He bounces on the bedsprings and observes that they’re creaking in G sharp. 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. 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. 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.Ĭount 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.

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. 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. In the lobby, politicians whispered and movie starlets swanned across the floor, dragging recalcitrant borzois on their leashes. The Metropol, with its customs and routines, is a world unto itself.įor years, its florist adhered to the code of polite society and knew “which flower to send when one has been late when one has spoken out of turn.” The barbershop remained a kind of Switzerland, “a land of optimism, precision and political neutrality.” 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. 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. $27.īeyond 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.

A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW By Amor Towles 462 pp.

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