Stalinist Russia

Review: A Gentleman in Moscow

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A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles. New York: Penguin, 2019.

Summary: Count Rostov has been sentenced to house arrest in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol for life during Stalin’s regime and must find purpose for life within its confines.

Count Alexander Rostov, born to nobility and refinement, has become the enemy in Stalinist Russia. On the pretense of a few lines in a poem, he is tried for his life in 1922, but spared death for a life of house arrest in the place he has made his home, the Hotel Metropol. Not entirely a bad fate. At least he has his luxury suite and all his books and the refinements of life. Not so, he learns, for this, too, has been appropriated by the State. He is confined to a top floor garret, little more than a closet. His life becomes forfeit the day he steps beyond the Metropol’s confines.

How will he face a life confined within the walls of this hotel, the tiny confines of a room? How far will the equanimity and cultured refinement take him when his life is a round of meals, conversations with hotel staff, and long hours in his room? Will he go crazy, or suicidal, or attempt escape? It matters little to Mother Russia, for whom he has become a non-person.

A Gentleman in Moscow traces the next 32 years of his life. We see him in the depths and at his most unpretentious, romping with nine year-old Nina of the yellow outfits, exploring the hidden corridors of the hotels, splitting out the seat of his pants to be repaired over and over by the seamstress, Marina. He becomes the trusted friend to whom she entrusts her daughter Sophia, supposedly for a few weeks which turn into forever. By then he has taken a position as waiter at the Boyarsky, rising to headwaiter, with Andrey the maitre d’ and Emile the chef, the triumvirate of the Boyarsky. He coaches a rising Russian party figure on the ins and outs of western culture, a man whose business is to know everything about people like Rostov. He encounters an American operative at the bar. He lives under the jealous eye of the Bishop (Leplevsky) who has it out for him.

He is the gentleman whose grace wins him the friendship of all, save the Bishop, and the love of his adoptive daughter Sophia, a budding piano prodigy. He discovers that his life is not merely the inner life of equanimity characterized in Montaigne’s words, “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” He also learns what it means to belong to his friends, who enrich and guard his life. He remains loyal to his writer friend Mishka, and experiences unexpected loyalty from Osip, the Russian party man, at a moment of extreme need. He lives a life in full in within the confines of his house arrest, exchanging the grand life in society for the pleasures of food well prepared and well served to guests well seated.

It seems that many have been drawn to this book in pandemic times, under the conditions of our own house arrests. We’ve struggled to live and found new ways of living under stay at home orders. Or we’ve chafed at them and put our lives at risk, as the Count would have in departing the Hotel Metropol. As we consider the ways the Count copes and thrives in his house arrest, we’re invited to consider how well we have coped, and how then will we live in the months that remain until our return to whatever new normal follows.

Review: The Noise of Time

/ rtrube54 / 5 Comments

The noise of time

The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Summary: A work of fiction, exploring the inner world of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, as he seeks both to survive and maintain artistic integrity in the totalitarian milieu of Soviet Russia under Stalin and Khrushchev.

A meme spoofing the “Mozart effect” that came across my newsfeed today underscores the dilemma composer Dmitri Shostakovich faced in these words:

 The Shostakovich effect: Child only expresses themselves in parent-approved ways.

Shostakovich lived under a tension between artistic integrity and the requirements of a regime that decided that art must be for the people and advance the interests of Power. Novelist Julian Barnes, winner of the Man Booker Prize, explores the interior life of Shostakovich in a work of fiction through an “inner monologue,” over the course of the composer’s life, as he wrestles with the relationship between artistic and personal integrity, between pursuing one’s artistic muse, and living to compose another day.

The novel proceeds by chronicling three “conversations with Power” that occur at twelve year intervals. The first follows a 1936 performance of his opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, which had received much foreign and national acclaim and had attracted the attention of Stalin, who attended a performance and was not please as evidenced in an article in Pravda titled “Muddle and Not Music”, denouncing Shostakovich as a “formalist”. Not only were his works suppressed but he is called in for an interview with Zakrevsky at which he must denounce his work and confess his errors in a second interview. The interview never occurs and Zakrevsky disappears, as do a number of artists. He is not called back, nor “disappeared,” but lives under a cloud and turns to composing film music, which Stalin favors, and the Fifth Symphony, a more conservative work that gained great acclaim and put him back in favor.

The second conversation with Power comes after a second period, following World War Two, when his works had once again fallen in disfavor. He receives a personal phone call from Stalin in 1948, requiring him to go to New York for the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace. He attempts to resist but relents, even beginning to give a speech written for him, only to have the remainder given by a translator. This is followed by an embarrassing confrontation with Nicolai Nabokov, where he is questioned as to whether what was read truly represented his views, to which he assents. Still, because of this, and his composition of Song of the Forests, he enjoys Stalin’s favor and is rehabilitated after the denunciations in the previous years.

The third conversation comes in 1960, under Nikita Khrushchev, where he is asked to become General Secretary of the Composers’ Union, which requires him to join the Communist Party. On the one hand, he can help and represent composers, and yet this appeared and has been criticized by many as another concession to power. Indeed, his access to dachas, limousines, and other perquisites enjoyed by party members set him apart from the struggles of other artists, and also give him greater latitude in his composing work.

And here is the struggle narrated via Shostakovich’s interior monologue. On the one hand, we see a composer who only ever is seeking to write music answering to his artistic vision. Yet we see a man who also lives in fear and conflict with himself, and in his relationships and expects (wants?) to be dead by 1972 (he died in 1975 from lung cancer).

We don’t tend to hold up as heroes those who appear to “toady” to Power. And yet there is the undeniable power of works like Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet, written after some of these accommodations. Barnes novel raises questions of whether the personal conflicts might even shape the artistry of such works. He portrays an artist who hopes in the end his music will rise above “the noise of time” on its own merit rather than heroism or accommodations of the artist to Power. Time will tell, but Barnes, in an elegant and compact work, delves into the complexities that resist our simple verdicts.