Summary, Analysis & Review of Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow by Instaread

By Instaread Summaries

Summary, Analysis & Review of Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow by Instaread

 

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A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is the story of a Russian aristocrat-turned-waiter who lives 32 years of his life under house arrest at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow. Set in

• Language: English
• Publisher: Instaread, Inc
• Release date: Feb 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781683785408

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Summary

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is the story of a Russian aristocrat-turned-waiter who lives 32 years of his life under house arrest at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow. Set in post-revolutionary Russia, the novel follows its protagonist, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, as he develops new friendships, family, and loves, all while confined within the walls of the Metropol.

In 1922, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, Rostov, originally a gentleman from Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod province, is deemed a threat to the Communist Party and sentenced to house arrest at the hotel where he has been living in luxury. The party is suspicious of Count Rostov, who left Russia after the tsar’s execution in 1918, but returned four years later. What saves Rostov from being executed is a single poem published in 1913 espousing revolutionary ideals, to which he claims authorship.

Upon sentencing, the Count is forced to move his things from his suite to a tiny cell off a narrow corridor on the hotel’s sixth floor. In his new room, there’s little space for more than his bed. Among the things the Count brings are a portrait of his deceased sister Helena and his desk, which has a hollow leg filled with gold pieces.

One day in the Piazza, the glass-ceilinged hotel courtyard, Rostov meets a precocious Ukrainian nine-year-old, Nina Kulikova. Nina sits down at his table and asks whether it’s true that