Monday
I’m close to finishing Amor Towles’s enchanting Gentleman in Moscow and use today’s post to share some of its literary allusions. (I previously wrote about the novel here.) Although Towles spends more time looking at food than at literature, he has talked of falling in love with Russia’s golden age writers when young (Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky) and later with Russia’s early 20th century avant-garde artists, including the poet Mayakovsky. Both periods show up in the novel.
At one point, protagonist Count Rostov is challenged to come up with three worthy Russian contributions to the world (in addition to Vodka, that is). To win the bet, he begins with Russian literature:
“Number one,” said the Count, adding a pause for dramatic effect: “Chekhov and Tolstoy.”
The German let out a grunt.
“Yes, yes. I know what you’re going to say: that every nation has its poets in the pantheon. But with Chekhov and Tolstoy, we Russians have set the bronze bookends on the mantelpiece of narrative. Henceforth, writers of fiction from wheresoever they hail, will place themselves on the continuum that begins with the one and ends with the other. For who, I ask you, has exhibited better mastery of the shorter form than Chekhov in his flawless little stories? Precise and uncluttered, they invite us into some corner of a household at some discrete hour in which the entire human condition is suddenly within reach, if heartbreakingly so. While at the other extreme: Can you conceive of a work greater in scope than War and Peace? One that moves so deftly from the parlor to the battlefield and back again? That so fully investigates how the individual is shaped by history, and history by the individual? In the generations to come I tell you there will be no new authors to supplant these two as the alpha and omega of narrative.”
Two and three, incidentally are the first scene of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and caviar. About Nutcracker, Rostov explains,
Dark, cold, and snowbound, Russia has the sort of climate in which the spirit of Christmas burns brightest. And that is why Tchaikovsky seems to have captured the sound of it better than anyone else. I tell you that not only will every European child of the twentieth century know the melodies of The Nutcracker, they will imagine their Christmas just as it is depicted in the ballet; and on the Christmas Eves of their dotage, Tchaikovsky’s tree will grow from the floor of their memories until they are gazing up in wonder once again.
At another point in the novel, we move from Russia’s Golden Age to its 20th century poets, Shortly after the revolution, exuding the confidence many felt about the creative potential released by the Russian Revolution, Rostov’s poet friend Miska explains the implications for literature:
“But what of poetry?” you ask. What of the written word? Well I can assure you that it too is keeping pace. Once fashioned from bronze and iron, it is now being fashioned from steel. No longer an art of quatrains and dactyls and elaborate tropes, our poetry has become an art of action. One that will speed across the continents and music to the stars.
Had the Count overheard such. A speech spilling forth from a student in a coffee house, he might have observed with a glint in his eye that, apparently, it was no longer enough for a poet to write verse. Now, a poem must spring from a school with its own manifesto and stake its claim on the moment by means of the first-person plural and the future tense, with rhetorical questions and capital letters and an army of exclamation points! And above all else, it must be novaya.
Sadly for Miska, the energies of avant-garde art, which swept the world, are subsequently declared counterrevolutionary, to be replaced by Gorky’s once fresh but increasingly cloying social realism (now socialist realism). Mayakovsky shoots himself and others fall silent or are silenced:
[W]hen Miska headed to the Central House of Writers, he happened to pass the statue of Gorky on Arbatskaya Square, where the brooding statue of Gogol once had stood. Other than Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky had been Miska’s greatest contemporary hero.
“Here was a man,” said Miska to himself (as he stood in the middle of the sidewalk ignoring the passersby), “who once wrote with such fresh and unsentimental directness that his memories of youth became our memories of youth.”
But having settled in Italy, he was lured back to Russia by Stalin in ’34 and set up in Ryabushinsky’s mansion—so that he could preside over the establishment of Socialist Realism as the sole artistic style of the entire Russian people….
“And what has been the fallout of that?” Miska demanded of the statue.
All but ruined, Bulgakov hadn’t written a word in years. Akhmatova had put down her pen. Mandelstam, having already served his sentence, had apparently been arrested again. And Mayakovsky? Oh, Mayakovsky…
Miska pulled at the hairs of his beard.
Back in ’22, how boldly he had predicted to Sasha that these four would come together to forge a new poetry for Russia. Improbably, perhaps. But in the end, that is exactly what they had done. They had created the poetry of silence.
“Yes, silence can be an opinion,” said Miska. “Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival. But it can also be a school of poetry—one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions. One that needn’t be written with pencils or pens; but that can be written in the soul with a revolver to the chest.”
It so happens that Count Rostov owes his own life, indirectly, to a Miska poem. Under the tsar, he has allowed one of Miska’s working class lyrics to appear under his name—Miska would have been imprisoned for it—and the Bolsheviks, when they come to power, don’t shoot him because of his having supposedly written it. Instead, he is condemned to live the rest of his life in the Metropol Hotel.
Here’s one final literary passage that I enjoy for its humor. Petty bureaucrats increasingly control every detail of the hotel’s service, including its fabled restaurant. Where personal interchanges once ruled, now everything must be written down. Count Rostov, who has become the head waiter, is irritated:
Now in all of Russia, there was no greater admirer of the written world than Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. In his time, he had seen a couplet of Pushkin’s sway a hesitant heart. He had watched as a single passage from Dostoevsky roused one man to action and another to indifference—in the very same hour. He certainly viewed it as providential that when Socrates held forth in the agora and Jesus on the Mount, someone in the audience had the presence of mind to set their words down for posterity. So let us agree that the Count’s concerns with this new regimen were not grounded in some distaste for pencils and paper.
One last note about the novel: Every once in a while, I will encounter in fiction an insight that touches me so closely that I sit back in wonder and gratitude. Such occurred when Towles describes “the Confederacy of the Humbled.”
Rostov is conversing with a Russian movie star who once thrilled silent screen audiences but has now become a “has been.” Since Rostov himself was once a privileged aristocrat, they form a bond. Rather than retreat into denial or self-pity, Anna and Rostov embrace humility:
Like the Freemasons, the Confederacy of the Humbled is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile.
My own fall was not as precipitous but I remember descending from hotshot new professor to one of the mass of St. Mary’s employees, eclipsed by new stars. It was a shock at first but I strove for a balanced perspective, which has served me well.
We watch such a perspective at work through the entire 30+ years that Rostov spends in the Metropol. Never once is he bitter about what has occurred. For me, it’s the novel’s chief attraction.