"A Study Guide for Amor Towles's ""A Gentleman in Moscow"""

By Gale and Cengage

"A Study Guide for Amor Towles's ""A Gentleman in Moscow"", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Dec 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9780028665887

Book preview

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A Study Guide for Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles

2016

Introduction

A Gentleman in Moscow is a novel by Amor Towles published in 2016. It recounts the adventures of Count Alexander Rostov, who in 1922 is sentenced by a Bolshevik revolutionary tribunal to spend the rest of his life in a glamorous hotel in Moscow, the Metropol; if he sets foot outside, he will be shot. The Count resolves himself to his fate with stoicism and ingenuity, managing to live as fully within the confines of the hotel as he did before his imprisonment. Over the course of the next thirty years he experiences love and fatherhood, embraces his new calling as a waiter, resists the petty tyrant who manages the Metropol, and embarks on a series of adventures. The novel received generally warm reviews and remained for months on best-seller lists; reviewers praised its attention to detail, its light comic tone, its refined prose, and the central character of the Count. The Count confronts his fate via several philosophies, chief among them ethics, stoicism, and the definition of a virtuous life, which dovetail with the novel's themes of time, adaptability, and love, among others. The novel itself is equal parts the description of an exemplary life and a series of capers.

Author Biography

Amor Hollingsworth Towles was born to Eleanor and Stokley Towles on October 24, 1964, and raised in Dedham, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. The family occupied the uppermost echelon of Boston society: their paper-manufacturing company had been founded in 1806 and was one of the largest in America, and Towles's father was a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman, the country's oldest private bank. Towles attended a prestigious boarding school in Dedham.

Media Adaptations

A Gentleman in Moscow was adapted as an audiobook by Penguin Audio on September 6, 2016. The run time is seventeen hours, fifty-two minutes.

His first success as a writer came at the age of ten, when he threw a bottle with a note into the Atlantic, hoping it would make it to China. It was retrieved a few miles down the coast by a managing editor of the New York Times, and the two of them corresponded for years afterward. Towles graduated from Yale and went on to graduate school at Stanford. His master's thesis, a short-story cycle called The Temptations of Pleasure, was published by the Paris Review in 1989.

That same year Towles began preparing for a teaching position in China on a Yale fellowship, but the program was canceled owing to the Tiananmen Square massacre. Towles described the situation, saying that the university

gave us each a few thousand dollars and sent us on our way. I had all my belongings in my car and had no idea what to do with myself. As it turned out, an old friend needed a roommate in

Reviews for "A Study Guide for Amor Towles's ""A Gentleman in Moscow"""

[Arlene Conboy · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Top notch study guide in every way includes: summary, key themes, characters, understanding genre of historic fiction, overview of Russia at that time and now and excellent references and suggestions for related reading.