Russia on my mind

(not another travel story)

About a month ago, I finished ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ by Amor Towles. It was a long book and took me about a month in between cooking, work from home and trying to keep it all together. But I also took my time reading it – relishing it, stopping frequently to enjoy some passages, turns of phrase and character quirks.

‘A Gentleman…’ is the story of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov who has been imprisoned in a hotel by Soviet Russia, when the government was on a drive to stomp out any remaining signs of Russia’s aristocratic past. The Count is spared his life for a poem he wrote, which the tribunal sentencing him deemed revolutionary. From his luxurious suite at the posh Metropol, he is downgraded to a shabby, tiny room that used to be ‘servants’ quarters’ from a time when ‘servants’ used to accompany the rich nobility in their travels.

The opening is staggering – I wondered how this man would take what has hit him – but the Count certainly doesn’t take it lying down; he is, after all, a ‘master of his circumstances.’ The book takes us through over thirty years of his life, as we see him face danger, death, betrayal, heartbreak, and more. It’s been a long time since I fell absolutely in love with a character. The Count, as was perhaps common for many ‘nobility’ folk, knew a lot. Think of a charming and less cunning Tyrion Lannister. He’s a man of fine taste – in food, music, books, and wine. He has a strong, nearly-always-well-informed, opinion about everything. He is friendly to all, well-groomed, amicable, and determined to live life on his own terms even if his living quarters has a sloping roof, at one end of which the six-foot-tall Count can’t stand fully erect. Towles’s mastery is in writing this character to be lovable and making us root for him, rather than making him an insufferable know-it-all – a difficult feat when writing about a character that knows which wine should be paired with every dish on the menu, or one who can easily switch between several European languages. Every single instance, I only grew fonder of the Count. I found myself smiling through non-English references that I understood, and curious to know about those that I didn’t understand (reading on Kindle made that easy).

The book, nearly 500 pages long, goes into loving detail about the Moscow that the Count could see from his suite, then the random view from his room, then from the terrace. It tells us of the Moscow he remembers from his carefree days, and of St. Petersburg from his time there as a student. Localities, landmarks and sights of Moscow’s central areas are liberally sprinkled through – the Bolshoi theatre, the Red Square, the line to see Lenin’s preserved body, the Arbatskaya, and Teatralnaya – and reading just one of these names was all it took to send me tumbling down nostalgia over my trip to Russia, something that seems distant, unbelievable and incredibly bittersweet now.

I took my time with the book, at times even opening it in the middle of the night when I’d woken up and couldn’t go back to sleep. I feverishly highlighted passages and read all the footnotes, greedily lapping up all information I could about the characters, the city, and the real-life events that happened in the years in which the book is set. There were many times when I laughed out loud for a simple turn of phrase or an action described vividly. I remember my heart feeling full when, upon being challenged by a German to name three contributions from Russia to the world, the Count lists them with ease – and undeniable flair, of course – and I was overjoyed that I knew and had experienced two of the three. I checked the translations of very many exotic dishes and foreign phrases the Count refers to (mon Dieu!) And so when I finished the book, after a couple of hours going through the last stretch without a break, I put the Kindle down and suddenly found myself tearing up. I was overwhelmed – with the story, the writing, the characters, and the many acts of courage and kindness throughout the Count’s journey. On many occasions, I thought the Count was done for; there seemed to be no way for him to get out of it this time, surely! But the Count surprised me, and I was caught unawares by my cynicism that was puzzled by kind, helpful and contented characters. Over and over, I found myself thinking about the Count’s contentment while living a life of imprisonment. And not in a saccharine sweet way that tries to teach you a lesson about taking life as it comes, like some of those movies I’m sure you’ve seen. Amor Towles has kept the book far from preachy goodness, a real achievement.

…the Confederacy of the Humbled is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile.

I think I can see why I teared up the  night I finished the book. I was stumped that the book told the tale of someone who mastered his circumstances, where even in his bleakest of times, there was someone around to help and there was enough to give him reason to smile. Living as we are through a pandemic, it as a reminder of something that I have to constantly practice – to look for good news.

This book was all I needed to get lulled into a warm feeling towards anything Russian. The night I finished the book, I told VK about The Metropol (the hotel in which the Count is locked up), and we vaguely remembered seeing it during our time in Moscow. We started a hunt for it, looking for pictures, Google Earth snaps, and so on, until we found a landmark nearby that helped us place it. Minutes after reaching that area by metro, we had stopped outside the hotel to fish out our umbrellas from our bags as it started drizzling. If only I’d known!

Then I went on to reread ‘A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian’ (yes, it’s not Russian, I know), a book I’d tremendously enjoyed in 2009. I vividly remember laughing out loud many, many times while reading it, but this time, I raced through it in two days, noting with a hint of sadness that I hadn’t laughed through it even once. I then binge-watched Chernobyl on Hotstar, remembering a vague connection to nuclear power in ‘A Gentleman…’

But the most comforting of all of these post-book actions were the random snippets of memory from the trip to Russia. The three-minute-long escalator rides from the metro entrance to the train platforms. The whoosh and blast of air when you push open a heavy wooden door to enter the metro station. The smokers everywhere. The vegan shop from which VK got me soup when I was sick. Our Airbnbs, the one in St. Petersburg being ridiculously large and the one in Moscow astonishingly tiny. I reminisced about parks, streets, tram rides and the softly lit roofs of buildings at nights. The corridors at the centre of every apartment complex in St. P. A stunning video of an art installation by the artists we stayed with in St. P just added to it all. With a now-dull regularity, I wonder when I’ll get to travel for leisure again. I laugh at the arrogance with which we said in our photo album from the Russia trip, “We look forward to being in England in 2020!” But well, if the Count could thrive during his house arrest, so can I?!

For his part, the Count had opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed. Not only was he disinclined to race toward some appointed hour – disdaining even to wear a watch – he took the greatest satisfaction when assuring a friend that a worldly matter could wait in favor of a leisurely lunch or stroll along the embankment. After all, did not wine improve with age? Was it not the passage of years that gave a piece of furniture its delightful patina? When all was said and done, the endeavors that most modern men saw as urgent (such as appointments with bankers and the catching of trains), probably could have waited, while those they deemed frivolous (such as cups of tea and friendly chats) had deserved their immediate attention.