Review: WE, Yevgeny Zamyatin

 A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles has produced a work that required a sustained and forceful act of imagination. The effort is impressive simply because there are in our era so few role models for the gentleman we come to know so well, Count Rostov. At least, I have met few exemplars in my long(-ish) life. People can be cordial, and pleasant. Politeness still surfaces in unexpected places, when merging into a lane of traffic, for instance, or when someone holds open a door. But such pleasantries seem to be on the decline—due, no doubt, to the neglect of refinement practiced by my generation. I have actually met more people of refined sensibilities overseas, in Japan and, remarkably, in post-Cultural Revolution China, than I have in my own country. Refinement of taste surely exists in America. It is simply not promoted by our coarsening culture, its media, our its schools.

None of this hand-wringing is relevant to this work, however, because the Count is much more than a refined sensibility. He combines in one person an exquisite palette with a world-weary appreciation of practicalities. His only equal is the immortal Frenchman, Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne in fact surfaces at key points in the narrative, more as a hovering spirit than a conscience, reminding the Count to at act all times with precision, engagement and joie de vivre. This the Count does, even noting details of his surroundings as he mounts a ledge in preparation of jumping to his death. No thought or observation is too small to benefit from his intelligence’s elegant refinement. Refinement of perception is his superpower.

The time is the beginning of a new era, communist Russia. The Count is confined to the grand Hotel Metropol, which to this day sits on Red Square in view of the Kremlin. He is free to live out his life as long as he does not leave the hotel. He begins living in an opulent suite, complete with furnishings retrieved from his own family’s estate in a far-off province. The hotel itself, down to all its employees, the furnishings, and, especially, the Count’s own mustache, are redolent of a bygone era, pre-revolutionary Russia. That era was the Silver Age, when Russian music, poetry, literature and painting advanced with breathtaking speed, only to be brought to heel by the chaos of World War I and Bolshevik ideology. Every fibre of the Count’s being longs for the pleasures and wonders of that world, one that crumbled before his eyes.

But Count Rostov is no nostalgic dreamer. He embraces life, his life, filling it with everyday concerns and situations. The plot is entertaining, if not dramatic, in a way not too different from a Molière comedy. It all takes place in a hotel, after all, and the scale is inevitably cramped and intimate. But in a grand hotel anything can happen. The result is a magnificent combination  of French farce with Red Terror, seasoned with wry commentary. Towles is a master of tone, able to keep characters safe in their own skins even as events uproot stable realities. The count goes from living in his opulent suite to a normal hotel room to a tiny room in the attic. His lifestyle morphs from one of aristocratic leisure to head waiter. Along the way we come to know his ample talents in fields from English literature to wine. While at all times a product of a bygone era, he remains a truly cultured and refined man. People react instinctively to this mixture of qualities. Some, such as the hotel manager, feel threatened. Others are filled with admiration. He strikes up a deep relationship with a  famous actress, an American spy, and a senior party member. Each of them will play important roles in his life, as will key staff in the hotel: the seamstress, the head chef, and the maitre d’. In this the Count’s network of allies also becomes his own work of art, a thing he nurtures with care.

His deepest relations are with two girls he more or less single-handedly raises to womanhood. Nina is a precocious fellow-resident in the hotel who becomes a political activist. And it is Sophie, her daughter, who ends up the Count’s permanent ward. Their adventures make up most of the plot developments. They also save Rostov from nihilism, surely the fate most of us would assume to be inevitable. The Count is never bowed, or defeated, to the end, a true Russian.