The Count also sees that his way of life is being forgotten, since the aristocracy is no longer valued. Though he enjoys being with her, he begins to feel even more invisible, and as if he is losing control of his life’s path.

The night they meet, she invites him back to her suite and seduces him. That same day, the Count meets Anna Urbanova, a famous film actress who arrives at the hotel. He is excited to see how Communism will allow a new form of poetry to take shape. One year into the Count’s imprisonment, he receives a visit from his old friend Mishka, a poet who is eager for the changes occurring in Russian society. She then gifts him the key as a Christmas present. Nina has acquired a passkey for all of the hotel’s doors, and she shows the Count its various rooms and passageways. Her single father is temporarily posted to Moscow on state business, but as he did not enroll her in school, she spends most of her time exploring the hotel. His boredom is alleviated a little when he befriends a young girl named Nina, who is precocious, stubborn, and most importantly, adventurous. He feels restless and purposeless as he spends his days reading, visiting the barber, dining in the Metropol’s two restaurants (the Boyarsky and the Piazza), and drinking in the hotel bar, the Shalyapin. In the first few weeks and months, the Count has a difficult time coping with his new life. He is a member of the Russian nobility, which is quickly being dissolved in favor of a Communist government structure, and so when he returns to the hotel following his hearing, most of his possessions are confiscated, and he is moved from his luxurious suite on the third floor to a single room on the sixth floor. The sentence is handed down by a Bolshevik tribunal because the Count allegedly wrote a poem in 1913 with revolutionary undertones. On June 21, 1922, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to a life of house arrest in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel.

Book 5, Antagonists at Arms (And an Absolution).

Book 3, Antics, Antitheses, an Accident.

Book 2, 1923, An Actress, an Apparition, an Apiary.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles