A Gentleman in Moscow

On June 21, 1922, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov appears before the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. In testimony dotted with witticisms that elicit laughter, Rostov relates that he left Russia for Paris in 1914 and returned after the Revolution in 1918, when the Bolsheviks took power and executed Tsar Nicholas and his family. The prosecutor alludes to a poem Rostov wrote in 1913, “Where Is It Now?,” which seems sympathetic to the Bolsheviks’ cause. A presiding secretary says it is “surprising” that “the author of the poem in question could have become a man so obviously without purpose” (5). He believes “the clear-eyed spirit who wrote the poem[…] has succumbed irrevocably to the corruptions of his class—and now poses a threat to the very ideals he once espoused” (5). He states that had it not been for the fact that “there are those within the senior ranks of the Party who Count you among the heroes of the prerevolutionary cause” (5), the Count would be executed; however, instead, they are sentencing him to lifelong house arrest in the luxurious Metropol Hotel, where he’s lived for four years.