Are the New Testament's Birth of Jesus Stories True?

Are the New Testament’s Birth of Jesus Stories True?

It’s Christmas time. At least out in the world it’s Christmas time. In the church as I write this on December 12 it’s Advent not Christmas, but never mind. For a great many of us a big, much loved part of Christmas is hearing the stories of Jesus’ birth all over again. Especially Luke’s version, but sometimes we hear part of Matthew’s version too, at least the part about the visit of the Magi. We always conflate the two stories of course. We set up creches with both Magi and angels and shepherds, never mind that there is no birth of Jesus story in the Bible that has both Magi (from Matthew) and angels and shepherds (from Luke). That conflation is theologically and historically questionable at best, but it’s how we all grew up with the Christmas stories, so I won’t quibble about it here. We love the Christmas stories, even if we’re more likely to say Christmas story than Christmas stories.

I lead a Bible study group at the local retirement home. We meet on Wednesday mornings. We usually look at lectionary readings for the coming Sunday, but this week we didn’t. I suggested that since we had only today’s meeting and next week’s before we miss two weeks because Christmas Day and New Year’s Day are on Wednesdays this year that we spend those two sessions looking at the New Testament’s two birth stories.[1] Today we considered Matthew’s story. Next week’s we’ll consider Luke’s. And here’s an undeniable truth about those two stories: They’re not the same story. They have some significant similarities—birth in Bethlehem, virgin conception, earthly parents named Mary and Joseph—but otherwise they are radically different. In Matthew the Annunciation, such as it is, comes to Joseph in a dream. In Luke it comes to Mary while she’s awake. In Matthew Mary and Joseph live in Bethlehem. In Luke they live in Nazareth and have to travel to Bethlehem. In Matthew Jesus is born in a house where Mary and Joseph live. In Luke he’s born in a stable and laid in a manger because there was not room for them at an inn. In Matthew the first revelation of the birth of the Messiah comes not to any Jews to but Gentile sages from the east (the Magi, who, by the way, Matthew never calls kings). In Luke it comes to Jewish shepherds. In Matthew there’s a miraculous star associated with Jesus’ birth. In Luke there isn’t. In Matthew no one sees angels while awake. In Luke both Mary and the shepherds do. In Matthew the Holy Family flees to Egypt to escape the murderous King Herod. In Luke they just go back to Nazareth, and Herod plays no role in the story. In Matthew they leave Egypt and move to Nazareth where, as far as we know, they’ve never been before. In Luke they don’t have to do anything like that because Nazareth is where they already live. At this level of the details of the narrative the two stories are radically different.

Which raises an important question: Are the birth stories about Jesus in Matthew and Luke true? When we raise that question we immediately run into a big problem. These stories can’t both be factually true. Mary and Joseph live either in Bethlehem or in Nazareth but not in both. They either had to travel to Bethlehem or they didn’t. I suppose the Annunciation could have come to both Joseph and Mary in different ways, but no biblical story says it did. There either was a miraculous star or there wasn’t. The Holy Family either fled to Egypt to escape Herod or they didn’t. The first to hear of the wondrous birth are either Gentile Magi or Jewish shepherds, but not both. It simply is undeniable that the stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke cannot both be factually true.

So does that mean they aren’t true at all? Should we just chuck them and forget about them? A great many people today would answer those questions by saying that if they aren’t factually true they aren’t true at all and that yes, we should just chuck them and forget about them. Most Christians however would abhor those answers. We all grew up with these stories. We all love these stories, even if we conflate them into one story and actually prefer Luke’s story to Matthew’s. We don’t even want to think about a year without Christmas even if we aren’t retailers who depend on the Christmas trade to make ends meet. Our souls cry out: These stories must be true! They can’t not be true! But if their facts conflict, how can they be true?

Well, here’s the great good news. They are true. Both of them. They just aren’t factually true, or at least not all of the facts in them are accurate. These stories are true in a much more powerful way than being mere facts. They are deeply, powerfully true even if the things in them that sound like facts to us never really happened. These stories are symbolically true. They are mythically true. They bring us truth in the way in which the ancient culture that produced them conveyed truth, not by writing theological essays but by telling stories. They point beyond themselves to truths that are deeper than words. They point to truths about who Christians confess Jesus Christ to be, who God is, and how God relates to us and wants us to relate to God. They are true in ways that mere facts can never be.

Christians have been living with and into those truths for nearly two thousand years. These stories are alive for us so long after they were written not because they give us facts but because we keep discovering new truths in them, or at least truths that are new to us. It would be presumptuous to try to list all of those truths here, but here are some of them:

·        Jesus Christ has a relationship with God that is closer and more intimate than the relationship any of the rest of us has with God. He is in a direct and immediate way the Son of God. That’s the truth to which the stories of Jesus’ virginal conception, usually wrongly called his virginal birth, point.

·        The Good News of Jesus Christ is not only for the Jews, and it is mostly for the poor and outcast. Matthew’s story of the Magi points to that first truth. The Magi were Gentile wise men from the east, probably Persia. They were the ones to whom Matthew has the first revelation of the birth of the Messiah come. Luke’s story of the shepherds points to the second truth. In first century Israel shepherds were despised and outcast, considered dishonest just because they were shepherds. They were poor. They almost certainly did not own the sheep they tended or the land on which the sheep grazed. Luke has the first revelation of the birth of the Messiah come not to the wealthy and powerful but to these poor, despised shepherds.

·        The Good News of Jesus Christ is a threat to worldly power. That’s the truth to which Matthew’s story of King Herod and the “massacre of the innocents” points. Herod was right to be afraid of this newborn king of the Jews, for Jesus would be a very different kind of king than Herod or most any other earthly ruler was or is; and he would call people to a new way of living, a new way of being that rejects and condemns the violence and oppression by which most earthly rulers rule.

·        Jesus is both king and priest, that is, he has immense significance both temporally and spiritually. That’s the truth to which the Magi’s gifts of gold and frankincense point. But he is also mortal and will die. That’s the truth to which the Magi’s gift of myrrh points.

·        Jesus will save God’s people from their sin, and that salvation is for everyone. The name Jesus, from the Greek form of the Hebrew name Joshua (Yeshua in Aramaic, Jesus’ native language) means “God saves.” God saves Jews and Gentiles. God saves the poor and lowly. God saves the wise and the unlettered. Jesus is for everyone.

Matthew’s story and Luke’s story of Jesus’ birth taken together like we always take them point to these truths. They invite us to live into these truths. They are mostly not factually accurate, and that fact bothers us modern fact fundamentalists who think only facts are true. We need to get over it, and our culture is moving in the direction of getting over it. God invites us not into historical facts but into divine truths. The New Testament’s stories of Jesus birth point to those truths. So let’s not worry about the facts. Let’s open ourselves the truths to which these stories point. Are the New Testament birth stories true? Yes. They are deeply, powerfully true. May we open our hearts this Christmas season to those deep, powerful truths.

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[1] I hope I don’t really have to say it here, but the Bible has four Gospels but only two stories of Jesus’ birth. Matthew has one, and Luke has one. Neither Mark nor John does. Mark says nothing that even suggests anything about Jesus’ birth. John says “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14), but that Gospel has no interest whatsoever in how that happened, only that it did. You might spend some time thinking about what that truth means for the necessity to Christian faith of birth stories about Jesus.

Not Forgotten, Forsaken

Not Forgotten, Forsaken

I recently watched a rerun of PBS’ production Jesus Christ, Superstar, in Concert. It’s not exactly “in concert.” I mean, there’s a lot of staging and acting involved. Still, it’s a powerful presentation of the Webber/Rice show about Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem, his crucifixion, and his resurrection (of sorts, at least). John Legend presents a powerful depiction of Jesus. Sara Barellis is moving as Mary Magdalene. Brandon Victor Dixon virtually steals the show as Judas. Alice Cooper as King Herod is a hoot. He’s got two of the best lines in the show. He sings to Jesus: “Prove to me that you’re divine, turn my water into wine,” and “Prove to me that you’re no fool, walk across my swimming pool.” All in all it is a powerful presentation.

It surely is that, but there are two things about it to which I object. One is that it presents Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. The Christian tradition came long ago to say that she was that, but nowhere in the Gospels does it say that. The Gospels just don’t say that about her. Making her a prostitute was part of the sexist Christian tradition demeaning a woman who clearly was one of Jesus’ closest disciples because it couldn’t stand the fact that a woman was precisely that, one of Jesus’ closest disciple. That Jesus Christ Superstar perpetuates that calumny is of course highly significant. My other objection to something that happens in this show is, however, even more important.

In the show Jesus is shown on some kind of cross. It isn’t really a Roman cross, but never mind. While he is on the cross Jesus recites basically Jesus’ last words from all four Gospels, ending with John’s “It is finished.” In reciting Jesus’ last words from Mark and Matthew, however, this show’s Jesus gets it wrong. He says “My God, my God, why have you forgotten me?” That simply is not what Mark and Matthew have him say. They have him say “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Perhaps Tim Rice simply didn’t understand the theological import of “forsaken” here. Or maybe he couldn’t deal with the power of “forsaken” here. Whatever. The fact remains that Rice turning “forsaken” into “forgotten” takes all of the theological teeth out of the words that first Mark (chronologically first) and then Matthew have Jesus say. It is that taming of Mark’s language that I want to address here.

We start with the fact that “forgotten” and “forsaken” are not the same thing. Forgotten is innocent. Forgotten is inadvertent. No one, not even God, sets out to forget something or someone. Or if they do their trying to forget just keeps bringing the thing they’re trying to forget back to their minds. Beyond that, it is hard to believe that the omniscient God has ever forgotten anything. Forgetting is a very human thing. We all do it. God doesn’t. “Forsaken” is not innocent. It is not inadvertent. To forsake is intentional. It is something someone affirmatively decides to do. God doesn’t forget. God can forsake (although whether or not God ever does is a complex question. Stay tuned) So no, “forgotten” is not a synonym for “forsaken.” It is not an adequate substitute for forsaken. Having Jesus say it from the cross is just wrong. But perhaps you’re thinking well, yes, forget and forsake don’t mean the same thing; but what difference does it make? Does it really matter whether Jesus says God has forsaken him or forgotten him? Well, yes. It matters. It matters a great deal. Here’s why.

When on the cross Jesus says God has forsaken him he means that God has affirmatively turned God’s back on him. Abandoned him. Left him on his own. Left him to suffer and die without God. To suffer and die because he has done God’s will throughout his public ministry and, we presume, throughout his life. He means that God has in effect said to him: “Sorry kid. I’m out of here. Deal with this hell yourself.” If all God had done was forget Jesus God could have remembered him, said “Oops! Sorry about that. I’m back.” Not so with forsaking. When Jesus says “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” he says that he feels abandoned. He is in despair because the God to whom he had devoted his entire life and because of his dedication to whom he is now suffering and dying has left him there to suffer and die alone. With no one to suffer with him. With no Divinity to give him strength and solace. With no sacred voice to say you suffer now but know, really know, that I go through it with you and have a blessed welcome for you on the other side. With God forsaking him he is left to believe that he was wrong. That he’d backed the wrong horse. He’d radically misunderstood who God is and what God wanted from him. God “forgetting” him has none of that meaning. It might mean he didn’t think Jesus was important enough to remember, but it can’t mean much more than that. “Forsaking” means more than that. A lot more than that.

“Forsaken” means a lot more for Jesus than “forgotten” would mean. And because it means a lot more for Jesus, it means a lot more for us. Life isn’t easy. It is easier for some than for others of course, but no one goes through an entire lifetime without suffering. We all feel pain. We all feel lost at times, like we don’t now what we’re doing or what we’re supposed to be doing. Perhaps most importantly no one gets out of this life alive. Our loved ones die. In the end we die. Perhaps our death isn’t as miserable and unjust as Jesus’ death was, but we all still die. In our modern world a sense of the absence rather than the presence of God can seem nearly universal. When we look at the state of the world, at all of the violence and injustice, at the environmental degradation that we don’t have the will to reverse, at all of the prejudice and hatred, it’s easy enough to wonder whether God has actually forsaken the whole earth and everyone on it. Perhaps none of us will experience the torment that caused Jesus to say that God had forsaken him, but we all suffer nonetheless. It’s easy enough for all of us to feel Godforsaken ourselves.

That’s why Jesus’ so-called cry of dereliction from the cross is so important. Who after all is it who is feeling Godforsaken in that scene? Yes, it’s Jesus; but who is Jesus? We Christians confess that he is the Son of God Incarnate. He is Emmanuel, God with us. He is a miserable, persecuted, dying human being; but at the same time he is God Godself being miserable, persecuted, and dying. There is a profound paradox in Jesus crying out that his God has forsaken him, for when he does it is God Godself crying out that God has forsaken him[1]. In Jesus’ cry dereliction it’s not just a man feeling abandoned by God. It is God feeling abandoned by God. It is God feeling abandoned by God in God’s own person. The great paradox of the cross is that in Jesus’ cry of dereliction God feels abandoned by God. It is that on the cross of Jesus God Godself suffers, feels abandoned, and dies.

Which means something really important. It means that in Jesus on the cross God is both present and absent at the same time. Yes, I know. That doesn’t make any sense. That is, it doesn’t make any rational sense, but it makes profound spiritual sense. It tells us that when we feel Godforsaken, when we lose hope, when we suffer and die, God is with us. God knows what we suffer because God has suffered it Godself—and worse[2]. And that makes all the difference. Because of Jesus’ cry of dereliction we know that however Godforsaken we may feel God has not forsaken us. Rather, God is present with us in our feeling of being Godforsaken. You see, God really had forsaken Jesus on the cross, and God really had not at the same time. It was God after all who was Godforsaken. A profound paradox to be sure, but deeply true.

That’s why it is so wrong to replace “Why have you forsaken me?” with “Why have you forgotten me?” God simply forgetting Jesus on the cross could have no profound meaning other perhaps than that God is uncaring, which we know isn’t true. God forsaking Jesus on the cross has the most profound meaning in all of human existence. It tells us that no matter what happens to us, not matter how bad it is, no matter how much we suffer, and even when we die God is with us. That is truth, the most profound truth there is and truth we truly need. Thanks be to God!

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[1] All profound truth is paradoxical. Especially in Christianity it is. God is Three and One at the same time. Not possible, just true. Jesus Christ if fully human and fully divine at the same time. Not possible, just true. God is utterly transcendent and intimately present at the same time. Not possible, just true. God feels abandoned by God. Not possible, just true.

[2] Several years ago my twin brother had a severe stroke. As I sat in the family room of the ICU unit where he was being cared for I felt nearly as bad emotionally and spiritually as I ever have save when my first wife died. Then I saw a crucifix on the wall, a cross with the body of Jesus on it. I thought: Oh yeah. That’s right. You’ve been here, and worse. It helped.

Notes to and Comments on A Gentleman in Moscow, Book Five and the Afterword

Notes to A Gentleman in Moscow, Book Five and The Afterword

Page 379 VOKS. This is a real Soviet institution that existed from 1925 to 1958.

Page 382 Crossed himself twice. Orthodox Christians often make the sign of the cross on their chests like Roman Catholics do, but they do it differently. Catholics move their hand up, down, to their left, then to their right. Orthodox Christians move their hand up, down, to their right, then to their left. That the Count crosses himself here is the first indication in the book that he has any continuing relationship to Russian Orthodoxy.

Page 382 Presidium and Council of Ministers. These were two institutions of the Soviet government. The Presidium acted for the Supreme Soviet, the country’s nominally democratic parliament, between the meetings of that body. The Council of Ministers was the nominal government of the Soviet Union. In the USSR there were essentially parallel Party and governmental organizations. On paper it could look like the government really ran the country. It didn’t. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union did. The word “soviet” is the ordinary Russian word for council. Its use as the name of the country comes from its prerevolutionary use as the name for councils of workers that formed in opposition to the tsarist regime. That both of these entities were meeting together at the Boyarsky meant that the country’s most powerful governmental officials, all of whom of course were members of the Party, would be together in one place at the same time.

Page 383 Gorky Park. Gorky Park is a large amusement park in central Moscow. It’s full name translates as The Park of Culture and Relaxation Named for Gorky (the Soviet author). An aside: American author Martin Cruz Smith has written a crime novel titled Gorky Park. When I read it back in the 1980s it depicted Soviet Moscow so well that as I read it I felt like I was back in that city. I was amazed when I learned that at least when he wrote the book Smith had never been to Moscow. He got is information about the city by interviewing Russian ex patriots. That he was able to depict the city so perfectly without ever having been there is truly remarkable. Towles actually depicts Soviet Moscow far less well than Smith does. Towles has done his homework about Russian and Soviet history, but his book is so centered on the life of the Count in the Metropol that the city of Moscow plays a relatively small role in the story, or at least it has so far.

Page 389 Yaroslav Yaroslavl. This is a strange name. Yaroslav is a Russian first name, but Yaroslavl is a city north of Moscow. It is one of the great centers of old Russian culture with magnificent Orthodox churches that are well worth the trip to see. Perhaps Yaroslavsky would be good Russian last name, but I’m not sure Yaroslavl is.

Page 392 Oblomov. Oblomov is the title character in a book by the Russian author Ivan Goncharov, published in 1859. The character Oblomov is a young nobleman who is unable to make significant decisions or undertake any significant acts. He is, they say, the epitome of the “superfluous man,” the idle rich who have privilege but accomplish nothing meaningful. It seems to me, frankly, that that’s who the Count is. He did many things in his life, but did he ever do anything significant? Sure doesn’t seem like he did at least up to this point in the book.

Page 392 TsUM. TsUM stands for Tsentralnyi universalnyi magazin, the Central Department Store. The biggest department store I knew in Moscow was GUM, Glavnyi universalnyi magazin, the Main Department Store. It occupies most of the east side of Red Square across from the Kremlin. I don’t know if TsUM is the same store with a different name or not. I bought a Hungarian vinyl briefcase at GUM that I still sometimes use.

Page 392 Tarnowsky. Sergei Tarnowsky was one of Horowitz’s piano teachers in Horowitz’s youth.

Page 394 Crossing himself. Once again the Count here crosses himself (see above). This is the second time he has done so, both of them later in the book. Odd. Does it have some significance? We’ll see.

Page 397 The Internationale. The Internationale is a song that became the anthem of leftwing movements around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was originally written in French and was translated into many different languages, including of course Russian.

Page 410 46 members of a political party. The text refers to the members of the Presidium and the Council of Ministers as “members of a political party.” They certainly were all members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (which was usually referred to as the “KPSS”), but nominally this is a meeting of governmental institutions not Party ones. Whether he intended to do so or not Towles’ referring to them as party members rather than members of the government points to how the USSR really worked. It was the Party that mattered. The government may have administered policy, but the Party set policy. The Party was everything. It controlled everything. It controlled everyone. It was in total control of the place until very near the end of the USSR.

Page 411 Malenkov and Khrushchev. Upon the death of Stalin in 1953 Georgy Malenkov became Premier, that is, the nominal head of the government. He had of course been a Stalinist, as had all of the people mentioned here. He was also briefly the most powerful, or at least highest ranking, member of the Party’s Secretariat, making him in effect the head of the Paarty too. However, he held that position for only nine days. He was forced to relinquish his Party post but allowed to keep his governmental one. He was eventually expelled from the Presidium after opposing the rise of Nikita Khrushchev. The years from roughly 1954 to 1964 are known as the Khrushchev era of Soviet history. Nikita Khrushchev, so famous for banging his shoe on his desk at the United Nations, was a close associate of Stalin’s. From 1958 to 1964 he was both General Secretary of the Communist Party (the head of the Party) and Premier (the head of the government). The Party removed him from both positions in 1964. The text calls him a former mayor of Moscow. In the mid-1930s he was the head of the Communist Party in the city and province of Moscow, which made him the de facto mayor of the city. He oversaw the completion of Moscow’s magnificent subway system. He spent many of his earlier years as a Party official in Ukraine, where he was almost certainly involved in the man-made famine that killed millions of people there as part of Stalin’s effort to force peasants into collective farms. In 1954 he redrew the borders of the Russian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics to move Crimea from Russia to Ukraine. At the time that didn’t make much difference, but it has played a big role in international affairs in more recent years.

Page 411 Lavrentiy Beria: Beria is perhaps worth knowing a bit more about. He was Stalin’s most vicious head of the NKVD, later the KGB. He was known as utterly ruthless in the execution of his duties. He oversaw a great expansion of the Gulag. Some sources say he organized the Katyn massacre in Poland after the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939[1]. Many observers saw him as the most likely successor to Stalin. After Stalin’s death he was briefly Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and one of three leaders, along with Malenkov and Molotov, who ruled the country. In June, 1953, with the help of Marshall Zhukov, the Soviet Union’s greatest general in World War II who had fallen out of favor with Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev staged what amount to a coup, removed those three leaders, and took over himself. Beria was arrested on charges of rape and treason and executed in December, 1953. During his time as head of the NKVD the mere mention of his name was enough to strike fear into the hearts of most Soviets. He was a truly evil man, as ruthless and murderous as Stalin himself. Stalin introduced him to FDR at the Yalta Conference as “our Himmler.”[2]

Page 412 Grand Duke Demidov: The Demidovs were a family of Russian nobles who before the revolution of 1917 were reputed to be the second richest family in Russia after only the Romanovs, the family of the ruling dynasty.

Page 412 The Countess Shermatova: This character and her son are apparently fictional.

Page 413 Sverdlov: Yakov Sverdlov was an early Bolshevik. After the tsar’s abdication in March, 1917,  Sverdlov returned to St. Petersburg from internal exile in Siberia (together with Stalin) and became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In late 1917 he became chairman of the All Russian Central Executive Committee, which made him the head of the Communist state. He may have ordered the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. He died in 1918 of either typhus or the flu. The reference to a constitutional drafting committee is apparently the group that drafted the Communist state’s first constitution.

An aside: It seems unlikely to me that a “Former Person,” that is, one sentenced essentially to internal exile, would have been allowed to wait on the leaders of the USSR, although perhaps we are to assume that these men didn’t know who the Count was.

Page 413 Obninsk: The city of Obninsk is located about 60 miles southwest of Moscow. The Soviets established it in 1945 as a “science city,” that is, a city established specifically as a place for scientific research. In 1954 the world’s first nuclear power plant used for the generation of electricity began operation there. This is the power plant to which the text refers.

Page 417 Okroshka. Okroshka is a cold Russian vegetable soup.

Page 432: The sacrilege. This scene is set in 1954. Stalin died in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev instituted a radical de-Stalinization that removed all images and veneration of Stalin from Soviet life (except in Stalin’s native Georgia), but he didn’t begin that campaign until 1956. So in this scene the picture of Stalin that had been on the wall during Stalin’s lifetime was still there, and the Bishop would still have considered Stalin to have been practically a demigod and the great benefactor of the Soviet people. He would indeed have considered shooting Stalin’s portrait to have been something of a sacrilege.

Page 440 and the later part of the book. As I write this I haven’t finished the book. I don’t know if Sofia succeeds in her attempt to defect or if the Count makes it to Finland, but I thought I’d say a bit about how Soviet performers, scholars, athletes, and others were permitted to travel to the West. The Soviet authorities went to great lengths to keep people from defecting. Towles has suggested some of their measures, including having KGB agents accompany Soviets abroad most everywhere they went. They would also typically not let anyone go abroad who didn’t have close family that stayed in the Soviet Union. The thought was that people were less likely to defect if it meant abandoning family back home. Nonetheless many Soviets who got to travel abroad did defect. Mikhail Baryshnikov, who defected to Canada in 1974, is a good example. Soviets were attracted to the West for at least two reasons. One was the greater economic prosperity that was available. Another was the much greater artistic freedom that was also to be had outside the Soviet bloc. The latter is primarily why Baryshnikov and other performing artists defected. The character Sofia is at least attempting to do something many Soviet people of her level of artistic ability also tried, some successfully and some not.

Page 445 Malyshev: He was mentioned earlier, but I’ll tell abut him here. Vyacheslav Malyshev was a leading figure in Soviet industry in the 1940s and 1950s. He oversaw the production of tanks during the war, Soviet tanks being a primary means by which the Soviets defeated the Nazis. He served as Vice-Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars twice, once under Stalin and once under Khrushchev. He oversaw the development of the Soviet nuclear program. He was exposed to radiation at a nuclear test site in 1953 and died as a result of this exposure in 1957. He is buried in the Kremlin wall on Red Square, the most honored burial site for Soviet heroes.

Page 452 Old St. Petersburg Station. This is presumably the train station from which I took the train from Moscow to Leningrad five times during my stay in the USSR. I have described that train elsewhere in these notes.

Page 453 KGB men: The name of the NKVD was changed to KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopastnotsi—the Committee on State Security—in Russian only the first letter of the first word of a title is capitalized) in 1954, so Towles is correct to call these people KGB men at this point in the story.

Page 457 Vyborg: Vyborg, despite the Swedish sound of its name, is a Russian city about half way between St. Petersburg and Helsinki near the Russian-Finnish border. Finland had been part of the Russian Empire until the collapse of the tsarist regime. It is one of the few parts of the Russian Empire the Soviets never conquered. They invaded Finland in 1939, but the Finns beat them back in what is called the Winter War.

Page 458 Round up the usual suspects: This is brilliant. If you’re not familiar with the movie Casablanca that has been referenced many times in the book, “round up the usual suspects” is what Captain Renault, the local French police chief played by Claude Rains, says to his officers after a crime has been committed. It suggests police activity for the sake of showing police activity rather than any serious attempt at finding a suspect.

Some concluding thoughts: A Gentleman in Moscow is a beautifully constructed and written novel with a surprise ending. It is I suppose possible to read it without looking up all of the references to facts and people from Russian and Soviet history, of which there are dozens at least. Still, it is impressive that Towles, who as far as I know has no Russian studies background or experience in Russia, has done so much homework for his writing of this book. It is not always clear when a person is named whether that person is historical or fictional, but a great many of them other than the main characters of the story are historical people. The book contains a good deal of information about Soviet history up to 1954, but as I’ve commented before it doesn’t do a great job of conveying what the USSR was really like in those years. It minimizes the suffering and the terror that the regime inflicted on the people. It underemphasizes the horror of WWII in the USSR. It underemphasizes the extent to which the tyrannical monster Stalin got the people of the country to idolize and practically worship him. Still, it is a good book and a good read, especially for a Russia nut like me.

Just one quibble: The Count and the other characters in the hotel seem to have easy access to things essentially no Soviet person would have had easy access to, especially in the years when this story is set. The American film Casablanca is a good example. Only top Party officials would have had access to something like that. The same is true for much of the food and wine served in the hotel. Towles says nothing about how the Count got ahold of the movie or how the hotel got the food and wine. It seems that either he wasn’t aware of the problem or thought it not worth dealing with.

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[1] The Katyn massacre: The UISSR invaded Poland from the east when Nazi Germany invaded that country from the west. In 1940 the NKVD, under Beria, slaughtered something like 22,000 Polish military officers and members of the Polish intelligentsia. The killings took place in multiple locations but collectively are known as the Katyn massacre after Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered. The Soviets blamed the Nazis for the crime until 1990, when they finally admitted to having done the killings and condemned them.

[2] The Yalta Conference was a meeting of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt at Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula in February, 1945.