Notes to A
Gentleman in Moscow, Book One
You may find more information here than you care about, but
I’m having fun researching and writing these notes, so here they are.
Count Rostov is a fictional character not an historical one.
The Metropol Hotel in which the story is set is a real
place. It was built before the Russian Revolution of 1917 and is the only hotel
in Moscow dating from before that revolution. You can easily find pictures of
it on the internet. It looks elegant, ritzy, and more expensive than the prices
quoted online seem to be.
P. 3. The Emergency Committee. Probably the organization
better known in English as the Extraordinary Committee, the Russian Communists’
first secret police and terror organization tasked with keeping the population
under control. It is often referred to as “the Cheka,” from the Cyrillic
letters that are used as initials for the organization. The People’s
Commissariat for Internal Affairs is best known as the NKVD, from the first
letters of its Russian name. NKVD became associated with the secret police and
is a predecessor of the KGB.
P. 3. A. Y.
Vyshinsky, who interrogates Count Rostov, was a Soviet prosecutor and diplomat.
He was the prosecutor for Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s. He became Deputy
Foreign Minister in 1940 and was the Soviet Foreign Minister from 1949 to 1953.
As I recall from my reading recently Stalin considered him perfectly dull and
therefore perfectly reliable.
P. 16. “Boyarsky.” This is the first reference to it. On p. 26
we learn that it is a restaurant in the Metropol Hotel.
PP. 16 and 17. “The Delegation.” The text explains that the
Delegation was the group representing Russia that signed the treaty ending the
Russo-Japanese War. That war took place in Russia’s far east in 1904 and 1905.
Russia lost. It was the first time an Asian power had defeated a European one
militarily. Russia was humiliated, and that humiliation played a part in the
Revolution of 1905. That revolution was the first Russian revolution of the 20th
century. It forced Tsar Nicholas II to introduce a very weak sort of
constitutional democracy in which the tsar still held all the power.
P. 17. Red Terror. The Red Terror was a period of brutal
political repression and killings during the Civil War that broke out after the
Bolshevik coup in 1917. It was carried out by the Cheka, that first predecessor
of the KGB that I’ve already mentioned.
Through page 18 and thereafter. The author is giving us a
picture of a member of the social elite of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Count
Rostov is very wealthy. He was highly connected in imperial circles. He is used
to being respected and even honored because of his social position. He is used
to having servants and to being waited on hand and foot. The book has not quite
yet explained why the Communists didn’t execute him simply for being an
aristocrat. Eliminating people like Count Rostov was a prime objective of the
Communists in the early years of their rule. Many such people fled Russia while
they could. Many of them ended up living in Paris. Some of them ended up living
in the US. Very few if any of them survived in Communist Russia. Notice all the
references to western literature in the story’s musings about the Count. He was
highly educated in the western style, something that was true of many Russian
aristocrats but not at all of ordinary Russian people.
P. 19. Tverskaya Street. Tverskaya Street was (and is) a
major street in downtown Moscow. From 1935 to 1990 it was known as Gorky
Street. Maxim Gorky was a Soviet writer. Tver is a Russian city located 110
miles northwest of Moscow. Tverskaya Street heads out of downtown Moscow toward
Tver.
P. 21. The Arbat. Arbat Street, usually called The Arbat in
English, is a pedestrian street in downtown Moscow. It once housed many
craftsmen and later became a preferred residence location for petty aristocrats
and later for Soviet officials.
“Idlehour.” There are several references to the Count’s
country estate called “Idlehour.” The estate wouldn’t be called that in Russian
because the name we’re given consists of two English words. The name is clearly
symbolic. Many members of the Russian aristocracy were, for the most part,
idle. Recall that Rostov tells those examining him at the beginning of the book
that gentlemen don’t have occupations. The name of the estate points to the
Count being essentially useless despite his high social position.
P. 23 and previously. “Serov.” Valentin Serov was a premier Russian
portrait painter of the late imperial period. That he had done a portrait of
the count’s sister indicates the high social position and the wealth of the
family.
P. 32. Yaroslav Yaroslavl. Yaroslavl is a city on the Volga
River north-northeast of Moscow. It is one of a number of cities outside Moscow
collectively called the Golden Ring that have at least at times played
important parts in Russian history. They are important centers of early Russian
culture.
P. 34. “The hopak.” The hopak is a Ukrainian folk dance
often called the national dance of Ukraine. It is, to say the least, quite
energetic. This book starts in June, 1922. The Soviet Union was formally
established in December, 1922. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was the
first specifically Ukrainian political entity ever. Before then Ukraine had
simply been part of Russia.
P. 39. “Okroshka.” Okroshka is a cold Russian soup
consisting of raw vegetables, meat, and kvass, kvass being a nonalcoholic
beverage fermented from bread. It all sounds perfectly awful to me.
P. 44. Lensky and Oneigin. These two men are characters in Alexander
Pushkin’s work Yevgeniy Oneigin, Pushkin’s best known work that is described as
a novel in verse. Pushkin is considered the greatest Russian poet and the
founder of modern Russian literature. Tchaikovsky wrote an opera based on the
work in which Lensky has a tenor aria that is quite wonderful. Pushkin did
indeed die in a duel.
P. 49 and earlier. Fontanka Canal. The Fontanka Canal (or
Fontanka River) is a branch of the River Neva on which St. Petersburg is built.
The Fontanka flows through the central parts of that city.
P. 50. Kudrovo. Kudrovo is a town that is essentially a
suburb of St. Petersburg located immediately adjacent to that city to the east.
P. 60. November 7. The Bolshevik coup that brought the
Communists to power took place on November 7, 1917. However, Russia used the
old Julian calendar rather than the newer Gregorian calendar that everyone uses
today. On the Julian calendar the coup took place on October 25 not November 7.
The Soviets always celebrated “the October Revolution” on November 7.
P. 63. Vronsky. This is the second mention of Vronsky. Count
Alexei Vronsky is Anna Karenina’s lover in Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina.
I’m not sure what the reference to saddlebags is about. Maybe I’d know if I’d
read the novel. The line “All happy families are alike…” that appears at the
end of the chapter is the first line of Anna Karenina.
P. 67. “Captain Radyanko.” This does not appear to have been
an historical character.
P. 77. “Gorsky.” Alexander Gorsky (1871-1924) was a Russian
ballet dancer and choreographer. In 1900 he became the manager of the Bolshoi
Ballet in Moscow. The Bolshoi Theater (which means The Large Theater), the home
of the Bolshoi Ballet (the ballet company of The Bolshoi Theater) is visible
from the Metropol. There is another theater near the Bolshoi called The Maly
Theater, i.e, The Small Theater. It is perhaps interesting that the Russian
word for large or big, bolshoi. Is the origin of the word Bolshevik, which
means something like “a member of the larger group.” The term Bolsheviks
actually first applied to a minority group within the Russian Social Democratic
Labor Party, which is the party that became the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union was originally called.
P. 77 “Petropavlovsk.” The author probably means a town
called Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii, located on the Kamchatka Peninsula which is
about as far east and away from Moscow as you can go and still be in Russia.
Hardly a desirable place for a ballerina to be.
P. 79. The age of “comrade Tarakovsky.” This character is
said to be 82 years old, which would make him born in 1840. The Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party (the Communist Party) was formed in 1898.
P. 80. “Sredny Prospekt.” Sredny Prospekt is a main street
on Vasilevsky Island, a part of St. Petersburg with the Neva River on one side
and the Gulf of Finland on the other. The University of St. Petersburg is
located on that island. I stayed in a student dormitory of that university
(then the University of Leningrad) when I was doing research in an archive in
Leningrad in the spring of 1976.
P. 81. “St. Sophia’s.” The reference may be to the Cathedral
of St. Sophia in the Russian city of Velikii (Great) Novgorod, located to the
northwest of Moscow and a bit southeast of St. Petersburg. There is also a city
of Nizhny Novgorod (Lower Novgorod) on the Volga river east-northeast of Moscow.
From 1932 to 1990 it was called Gorky after the writer Maxim Gorky, who was
born there.
P. 81. “Sasha.” Although in English Sasha has become a
feminine name, in Russian it is the diminutive of Alexander.
P. 81 “RAPP.” The Russian Association of Proletarian
Writers, after the un-transliterated letters of the organization’s Russian
name.
P. 83. “Ownership of souls.” The reference is to the
institution of serfdom, in which Russian peasants were little better than
slaves of the landowners. Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom on private lands
in 1861. He abolished it on state owned lands in 1866.
P. 83. “An age of elaborate artifice and base
superstition….” This is a description of pre-revolutionary Russia, in which a
very small number of people lived lavish and mostly idle lives and the mass of
the people toiled in illiteracy, ignorance, and simplistic folk religion. This
is the Russia the Communists set out to abolish. Of course, they replaced it
with something worse, but never mind.
P. 84. “Droshkies.” A droshky was a kind of horse-drawn
carriage common in Russia. The other things in the list here are also
horse-drawn carriages.
P. 84. Akhmatova, etc. The writers listed here are all
well-known pre-Soviet or Soviet authors.”
P. 85. “Age of Steel.” The name of the monstrous Soviet
dictator Stalin, who would rise to absolute power just a few years after the
time when this story is set, means man of steel.
P. 85. “Shukhov Radio Tower.” The Shukhov Radio Tower, named
after the person who built it, is a rather odd looking metal tower constructed
in Moscow between 1920 and 1922. Tarakovsky is apparently citing it here as an
example of the modern wonders newly possible in Soviet Russia.
P. 86. “novaya.” Novaya if the nominative
feminine singular form of the adjective “new.”
P. 86 more or less. Tarakovsky seems to represent the
romantic optimism of so many in the early years after the Bolshevik coup of
1917. By 1922, when this story is set, a huge number of people had died from
the wars, starvation, and executions brought on by the Bolsheviks, but it was
still possible for people to convince themselves that it was all necessary for
the good of the people and the advancement of humanity. After all, Stalin
hadn’t happened yet. Even when Stalin was happening many American intellectuals
fell for the romantic promise of Marxism-Leninism, a promise of world without
classes in which all would be free and all would have what they needed to live.
Between 1927 and 1953 Stalin would put a brutal end to all that romantic
optimism.
P. 89. “Ivan the Great tower….” The Ivan the Great Bell
Tower is the tallest structure in the Kremlin. It was built in 1508 to serve
the three cathedral churches in the Kremlin, the cathedrals of the Archangel, the
Assumption, and the Annunciation. Ivan the Great was Ivan III. Reigned 1482-1505.
He is known as Ivan the Great mostly because he ended the domination of the
Tatars over Russia. His title was originally Grand Prince of Moscow and All
Rus’ (Russia). The Grand Princes of Moscow began calling themselves Tsar, a
Slavic version of the Latin Caesar, after Byzantium fell to the Turks in 1453.
They called Moscow “the Third Rome.” Both the original Rome and Byzantium (the
second Rome) had fallen. Muscovites began to say that Moscow, the greatest
remaining Orthodox Christian city, was the Third Rome, and a fourth there would
never be.
P. 90. “In anticipation of the New Year.” The restaurant is
being decorated in what we would think of as Christmas decorations. In Russia,
however, New Year’s Day has always been a much bigger deal than Christmas.
Easter is the really big Orthodox Christian holiday. For Christmas 1975 in
Moscow we bought a Russian fake tree, very sparse but better than nothing, that
to us was a Christmas tree. To the Soviets and to the Russians before them it
was a New Year’s tree.
P. 91. Peter the Great traveling incognito through Europe.
Tsar Peter I, known as Peter the Great (ruled 1682-1725) traveled in western
Europe without revealing his identity to learn western shipbuilding techniques
among other things. It’s hard to believe that people didn’t recognize him. He
clearly was Russian, and he stood 6 feet 8 inches tall. That’s really tall
today, and it was an even rarer height in Peter’s time.
P. 95. Unification of the Soviet Republics and the Transcaucas
question. In 1922, where this part of the story is set, the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics had not yet been established. It was created in 1924. It
then consisted of four “republics”—The Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, and
Transcaucasian. The “Transcaucas question” presumably had to do with how to
organize that part of what had been the Russian empire. The Transcaucasian
republic would later be split into the Azerbaijani, Georgian, and Armenian
republics. Eventually there were fifteen republics in the USSR. Each of them is
today a sovereign nation with borders (except for Russia’s annexation of
Crimea) that had been drawn by Soviet bureaucrats.[1]
P. 101. “When the Hermitage fell.” The Hermitage is the
Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The Bolshevik coup of 1917 consisted mostly of
the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace and deposing the Provisional
Government that had replaced the monarchy when Nicholas II abdicated earlier in
1917.
P. 102. Herr Drosselmeyer. Drosselmeyer is one of the
characters in Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker.
[1]
Actually, when those Soviet bureaucrats originally drew the borders of the
republics Crimea was part of the Russian republic. In 1954, for reasons no one
quite understands, Khrushchev transferred it to the Ukrainian republic. In 2014
Putin took it back for Russia.
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