THE RUSSIAN émigré is one of the great romantic figures of the 20th century. Writers, artists, composers, ballet dancers, all fleeing Soviet censorship and control over a culture seen as bourgeois at best—and aristocratic at worst—made their way from Moscow and St. Petersburg to Paris and New York, where they found themselves atop dizzyingly high society, or were forced to make their way as waiters, bellhops and washerwomen. Books and films about Russian aristocrats and refugees abound. Amor Towles’s hugely entertaining 2016 novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, is, perhaps, only the most recent entry in the genre.
Elliott Erwitt, a child of Russian
