Moscow

 

One of the funniest, most charming books you will ever read is ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ by the American Amor Towles (2016). Every page contains lines, moments, meanings, characters designed to amuse and amaze. Friends had recommended the novel, so when a paperback copy arrived in the Library in donation I thought, okay then. It is an account of a Count, Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who by chance wrote a poem before the October Revolution that Bolsheviks in 1922 deemed revolutionary enough to spare him his life. They directed that Rostov vacate his customary Suite 317 of the Metropol Hotel, to live in an attic room; a form of house arrest. This is the sumptuous hotel near the Kremlin, opposite the Bolshoi Theatre, that remained sumptuous throughout the Soviet 70 years and beyond. What happened next I recommend you find out for yourself, however reading the book during the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given me pause at the social meaning of many things in the novel. For example, on page 289 Rostov and his friend Mishka discuss the age-old question of the burning of Moscow. This is 1946, after the city had just escaped the latest such threat. Mishka hypothesises on Napoleon’s facial expression if, the day after capturing Moscow, he awoke to find the citizens had burnt the city to the ground. Although unsettled, the Count agrees that this is “the form of an event. One example plucked from a history of thousands. For as a people, we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created.” Similar thoughts have crossed mine and other minds since February, as we watch from afar at how Russians, directed by people in the Kremlin, wilfully destroy that which they claim is actually Russia. Would you not want to protect and uphold that which you regard as your valued inheritance? Who would destroy it? After gloomy disquisitions on famous paintings about Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, Mishka continues, “How can we understand this, Sasha? What is it about a nation that would foster a willingness in its people to destroy their own artworks, ravage their own cities, and kill their own progeny without compulsion?” Towles inserts these harsh interludes to remind the reader of the brutal reality of the Russian world, views that seem belied by the rosy stoicism of the Count’s existence, as related with great humour and humanity the rest of the time. After retelling a dream of meeting the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky involving self-murder by revolver, Mishka concludes that unlike the British, French or Italians, Russians “are prepared to destroy that which we have created because we believe more than any of them in the power of the picture, the poem, the prayer, or the person. Mark my words, my friend. We have not burned Moscow to the ground for the last time.” Such is the morbid intensity of Mishka’s speeches, the Count is temporarily at a loss for words, a state that readers find hard to believe, myself included, given the detailed evidence to the contrary on the other 461 pages of the novel.