ĭue to his diminished circumstances and restricted freedom, the Count has time for self-reflection. These include a one-eyed cat, a young girl, a seamstress, a Russian chef, a French maître d'hotel and former circus juggler, a poet, an actress, an underemployed architect, an orchestra conductor, a prince, a former Red Army colonel, and an aide-de-camp of an American general. As time goes on, the Count cultivates a social circle of friends from his youth as well as selected residents, staff, and customers of the Hotel and its restaurants. Instead, he is placed under house arrest for life at his current residence, the Hotel Metropol in central Moscow.Ī military guard escorts the Count back to the Hotel Metropol, where he is ordered to vacate his luxurious suite and move to the cramped servant's quarters on the sixth floor. Because of a revolutionary poem attributed to him, due of which some senior Bolsheviks consider him one of the heroes of the struggle against the Tsarist regime, the Count is spared a death sentence. He is unrepentant, and eloquently refuses to confess. The Count is charged as a social parasite before a Bolshevik tribunal, with the expectation that he will be found guilty and shot. He combined the idea of luxury hotels with his knowledge of Russia's long-time historical tradition of house arrest. Towles's inspiration for the novel was his experience staying at luxury hotels, specifically, a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, where some guests were permanent residents. Upon returning home from Paris after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the Count was arrested. Demidov counseled him to be strong for his sister Helena, because ".adversity presents itself in many forms, and if a man does not master his circumstances, then he is bound to be mastered by them." The Rostov siblings are aristocrats, making social visits to nearby estates by horse-drawn troika or sleigh.Īs a young man, the Count was sent out of the country (as was the custom at the time) by his grandmother for wounding Helena's suitor, a cad who broke her heart. When the Count's parents died of cholera within hours of each other in 1900, Grand Duke Demidov became the 11-year-old's guardian. Rostov's godfather was his father's comrade in the cavalry, Grand Duke Demidov.
He was raised on his Rostov family's estate "Idlehour" in Nizhny Novgorod. The protagonist is the fictional Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on 24 October 1889. It is his second novel, published five years after his New York Times best seller, Rules of Civility (2011). A Gentleman in Moscow is a 2016 novel by Amor Towles.
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