For example, when a customer in the hotel barber shop chops off half his luxuriant mustache because of an unfair place in line, the count does not make a fuss.

He accepts his new world where he is no longer addressed as Your Excellency, and even relinquishes small privileges. The count adjusts to the trauma of his new life although it has to be said that the Metropol at its worst is probably an improvement on most lodgings at their best. And in the count, Amor Towles has created a magnificent literary character, a man of intelligence, humor, charm and resilience. Assigned to a 100-square-foot attic, the count philosophically turns it into a charming new home for the next few decades. Count Rostov happily resumes residence in the Metropol, although not in his previous luxurious suite. He returns to the most elegant hotel in Moscow, which retains its magnificence because the revolutionaries realize that they need at least a shred of what once was to bring outsiders back to the wreckage that is Moscow. Ironically the tribunal has done the count a great favor. It is only because he has to his credit a revolutionary poem that he hasn’t already been stood up against a wall.

If he leaves the hotel, he is warned, he will be shot.

His punishment as imposed by a Bolshevik tribunal in 1922 is lifetime house arrest in the Hotel Metropol in Moscow. The crime of Count Alexander Rostov is that he is an unrepentant aristocrat in the bloody aftermath of the Russian revolution.

A gentleman in moscow