Exclusive interview with author Amor Towles about his new novel featuring an aristocrat sequestered at a hotel in post-revolutionary Moscow
“In 2009, while spending a week at a hotel in Geneva, I noticed the same well-dressed and weary people in the lobby every day,” says A Gentleman in Moscow author Amor Towles. “I found myself wondering what life would be like if I had to live there. Upstairs in my room, I began to play with the idea of a novel in which a man is stuck in a grand hotel. Thinking that he should be there by force, rather than by choice, my mind immediately leapt to Russia…where house arrest has existed as a practice since the time of the Tsars.” Four years later, Towles left the investment business to write full time.
A Gentleman in Moscow is set in post-revolutionary communist Russia. Most of the aristocrats are dead or have already fled the county. Count Alexander Rostov came back to Russia to help his grandmother escape. He stayed on in Moscow. The Bolshevik military leaders put him on trial for a poem he wrote. They decide he can live, but he’s not allowed to leave the Metropol hotel. They move him from the grand rooms he occupied to the top floor’s tiny servants quarters. He’s free to move around the hotel and even have visitors. Rostov meets Nina, a young girl living at the hotel with her father. She is fascinated by Rostov and the fact that he’s an aristocrat. Instead of being killed or sent to Siberia, for the next four decades Rostov will not leave the Metropol. Towles was inspired by his own experience living in hotels. “Over the two decades that I was in the investment business, I traveled a good deal for my firm. Every year, I would spend weeks at a time in the hotels of distant cities meeting with clients and prospects. I’m hardly a Russologist. I don’t speak the language. I didn’t study the history in school. I have only been to the country a few times. But in my twenties, I fell in love with Russian literature ranging from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to Mayakovsky and Solzhenitsyn.”
“Kazan Cathedral is a perfect symbol of Russia’s mystique for me,” says Towles. “Built in 1636 on Red Square to commemorate both the liberation of Moscow from interlopers and the beginning of the Romanov dynasty, Kazan was among Russia’s oldest and most revered cathedrals. In 1936, the Bolsheviks celebrated the 300th anniversary of its consecration by razing it to the ground. In part, they leveled the cathedral to clear Red Square for military parades, but also to punctuate the end of Christianity in Russia. Peter Baranovsky, the architect who was directed to oversee the dismantling, secretly drafted detailed drawings of the cathedral and hid them away. More than fifty years later, when Communist rule came to its end, the Russians used Baranovsky’s drawings to rebuild the church stone for stone.”
“I find every aspect of this history enthralling,” says Towles. “The cathedral itself is a reminder of Russia’s heritage…ancient, proud, and devout. Through the holy landmark’s destruction we get a glimpse of how ruthless and unsentimental the Russian people can be. While through the construction of its exact replica, we see their almost quixotic belief that through careful restoration, the actions of the past can effectively be erased. But most importantly, at the heart of this history is a lone individual who at great personal risk carefully documented what he was destroying in the unlikely chance that it might some day be rebuilt. Russian history abounds with sweeping moments of cultural change and with the stoic heroes who work in isolation towards some brighter future.”
Towles novel Rules of Civility was a New York Times bestseller, published in 2011 by Viking Penguin. Rules is being adapted into a film by Lionsgate with producer Marc Platt and director Sam Gold.
Towles next novel is set in America in the early 1950s. Viking Penguin has contracted to publish his next two novels.
Towles was born in Boston and now makes his home in Manhattan.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. Hardcover: 480 pages, Publisher: Viking; 1 edition (September 6, 2016), Language: English, ISBN: 9780670026197 $27.00
