A Gentleman in Moscow
A Gentleman in Moscow
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
Quizzes
NEWReading Tools
Amor Towles on A Gentleman in Moscow
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A lobby in Geneva, a footnote in StanfordThe premise arrived during a business trip, not at a desk. Towles had been staying at the same Geneva hotel annually for eight years as an investment professional, and on the eighth arrival something clicked: the faces in the lobby were the same faces from the year before, fixed in amber.
In 2009, while arriving at my hotel in Geneva for the eighth year in a row, I recognized some of the people lingering in the lobby. It was as if they had never left. Upstairs in my room, I began playing with the idea of a novel in which a man is stuck in a grand hotel.
The Geneva observation gave him a premise, but the deeper source was two decades older. As a graduate student at Stanford in the late 1980s, Towles reached for Chekhov’s collected stories in the library stacks and pulled down the collected letters by mistake. A footnote inside revealed that one sentence praising Berlin bread had been silently cut when the Soviet government first published the correspondence. He kept a copy of that letter, and when he began the novel roughly twenty-five years later, it worked its way in as a plot point for the Count’s oldest friend.
the power of a single sentence could undermine an entire government. [paraphrased from audio]
His attraction to Russia was built from reading rather than residence. He does not speak the language and had visited only a few times, but by his twenties he had worked through the full sweep of Russian letters, from the nineteenth-century novelists to the early Soviet avant-garde, and what struck him was the sheer density of artistic ambition concentrated in a single country across a single century.
In my twenties, I fell in love with the writers of Russia’s golden age: Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov. Later, I discovered the wild, inventive, and self-assured writing styles of Russia’s early 20th century avant-garde, including the poet Mayakovsky, the dancer Nijinsky, the painter Malevich and the filmmaker Eisenstein. Going through those works, it began to seem like every accomplished artist in Russia had his own manifesto!
How he wrote it
The diamond, the outline, and the juggler he didn’t know aboutTowles structures his novels before he drafts them, producing outlines of 25 to 40 pages that map each chapter. The payoff of that upfront work is psychological: with all the plot decisions settled in advance, he can enter the actual writing without his analytical mind running the numbers on what happens next.
focus on the psychological nuances of the moment, the poetry of the language, and whatever surfaces from my subconscious.
The novel’s architecture was its hardest single problem. Towles wanted the first half to feel complete and pleasurable on its own, while secretly loading every room, object, and passing remark with work it would perform later. He called the shape a diamond on its side.
From the moment the Count passes through the hotel’s revolving doors, the narrative begins opening steadily outward. Over the next two hundred pages detailed descriptions accumulate of people, rooms, objects, memories, and minor events, many of which seem almost incidental. But then, as the book shifts into its second half, the narrative begins to narrow and all of the disparate elements from the first half converge. Bit characters, passing remarks, incidental objects come swirling together and play essential roles in bringing the narrative to its sharply pointed conclusion.
Tight outlining did not prevent genuine surprise. Even with a chapter map in hand, Towles found that his characters kept volunteering information about themselves mid-scene, information that had not been planned and that arrived with the same unexpectedness a reader would feel.
I was in the middle of writing the bouillabaisse scene in A Gentleman in Moscow, for instance, when I discovered that Andrey was a juggler. I was in the middle of drafting Sofia’s fitting, when I discovered (alongside the Count) that Marina had designed a dressless dress. And I was in the midst of the second or third draft when I noticed for the first time that moment in Casablanca when Rick sets upright the toppled cocktail glass.
He visited the Metropol hotel only after the first draft was complete, reading firsthand accounts from Americans who had passed through, including Steinbeck, e.e. cummings, and Lillian Hellman. Research, for him, is a finishing coat rather than a foundation.
One practical fear about the confined setting, that a single building would shrink the book, dissolved as he wrote. His experience of the Metropol during the drafting process mirrored what the Count discovers over his thirty-two years inside it.
with enough life, enough personality, that once you’re inside, it sort of grows around you and becomes a bigger and bigger environment in which to have life unfold. [paraphrased from audio]
His treatment of historical fact is deliberate rather than careless. The first Soviet nuclear power plant is in the novel because it happened; the party assembly staged to watch Moscow go dark is invented. He draws the line not at accuracy but at tone.
For me, history is the painted backdrop. I really don’t care that it be very precise. It should not be very precise. It’s not hyper-realism. It should be impressionist.
The personal thread
Dishwater and memory behind the swinging doorsBefore he was an investment professional or a novelist, Towles spent his teenage years as a dishwasher at an inn in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts. That experience, not any culinary research, is what gives the Metropol’s kitchen its specific social texture.
The camaraderie of what happens behind the swinging doors, the hierarchy in the kitchen between the chef and the sous chef and the waitresses — it was all influenced by those memories.
He has described his characters as inventions, but he acknowledges that the border between invention and autobiography is porous. The Count’s confinement, played out across thirty-two years in a single building, is in some ways a distillation of what Towles had observed across twenty years of hotel lobbies: that circumscribed space, if you look closely enough, contains a world.
My characters are all inventions but every now and then something from my life will sneak into my work.
What he wants us to sit with
A kaleidoscope, not a mosaicAsked directly whether the novel has a central theme, Towles refused the premise of the question. He sees that kind of fixed meaning as the enemy of what a novel can do, and he has a precise image for the alternative.
I certainly hope not. In crafting a novel, I do not have an essential message I am trying to communicate. Rather, I hope to create a work of art that, while being satisfyingly cohesive, contains such a richness of images, ideas, and personalities that it can prompt varied responses from reader to reader, and from reading to reading. In essence, I want to gather together a pile of brightly colored shards of glass. But rather than assemble these shards into a mosaic with a fixed image, I want to drop them into the bottom of a kaleidoscope where, thanks to a glint of sunlight and the interplay of mirrors, they render an intricate beauty which the reader can reconfigure by the slightest turn of the wrist.
Though he resists themes, purpose is the novel’s spine. Count Alexander Rostov is condemned at his tribunal as a man without purpose, and the thirty-two years the book tracks are his answer to that charge. Towles wanted to write not about confinement itself but about what confinement forces a person to find.
I don’t think of myself as writer of ‘Historical Fiction’. I think of myself as a novelist. I am interested in using the contours of history as a backdrop for a narrative that is principally about characters, how they interact and evolve.
When COVID lockdowns arrived in 2020, readers wrote to Towles connecting the trapped Count to their own circumstances. He did not treat this as coincidence or as something he had engineered. He saw it instead as evidence of how a book with the right qualities survives its own moment.
If you’re successful in writing something that has the quality of timelessness, then what can happen is that the times find the narrative. Different times will find the narrative in different ways.