That honey had the taste of the apples of Nizhny Novgorod, the area of Russia where both Abram and the Count grew up.Īfter this experience, the Count took control of his life. He was stopped when the hotel’s handyman, Abram, shared with the Count the honey that the bees that Abram kept on the roof had made. The Count decided to kill himself by jumping off the building. Proof of this came when the waiters in the Boyarsky, the hotel’s upscale restaurant, were forced to remove the labels from its store of wines and market them only as red or white. He believed that his generation had been passed over.

The Count became disillusioned with his life when he noticed the way in which manners and common courtesy, the ideals upon which his life was founded, were being ignored and lost. The Count sought a purpose for his life and decided at first it was to provide for himself the pleasures of life. Instead of being allowed to stay in the suite he had inhabited for nearly four years, the Count was moved to an attic room once used as servant’s quarters. The novel opens with the Count being escorted back to the Metropol after he was sentenced to house arrest. Themes in the novel include finding one’s place in life, the impact of the arts, and the breakdown of the ideals of the aristocrat. While one might think the Count would have an unfulfilling life in the hotel, the Count’s life in bondage turns out to be quite rich and purposeful. Although the Count was imprisoned during the onset of Communism, he saw the changes in government reflected in the way the hotel operated. The novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles tells the story of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a Russian aristocrat sentenced to house arrest for his association with a poem with revolutionary overtones. NOTE: All citations in this Study Guide refer to the Kindle version of A Gentleman in Moscow, published September 6, 2016.

Books like a gentleman in moscow