Russian hotel aftermath meaning8/21/2023 Whichever win was within, it was decidedly not identical to its neighbors. But inside? Inside this dark green glass was what exactly? A Chardonnay to complement a Camembert? A Sauvignon Blanc to go with some chèvre? Picking up one at random, he reflected how perfectly the curve of the glass fit in the palm of the hand, how perfectly its volume weighed upon the arm. With a quick accounting of columns and shelves, the Count determined that in this row alone, there were over a thousand bottles - a thousand bottles virtually identical in shape and weight. Near the end of the aisle, the Count turned down one of the rows. With Andrey a few paces behind him, the Count began walking the cellar’s center aisle, much as a commander and his lieutenant might walk through a field hospital in the aftermath of battle. Well, though the Count, here is your substitute. How smugly the Count had observed at the time that there was no substitute for experience. But then a memory presented itself - a memory of a Christmas past when the Count had leaned from his chari to correct a certain waiter’s recommendation of a Rioja to accompany a Latvian stew. The wines of the Metropol had been turned into a single mass, undifferentiated except by their color. Now, there was no way to tell what was in any bottle, other than that it is either red or white. That’s it.Īndrey, the maitre’d of the Boyarsky, had to send a crew down to remove the labels from every single bottle of wine in the cellar. The Bolsheviks declared that henceforth, the hotel will sell all wine at a single price, and will designate them only as red or white. It was a monument to the aristocratic spirit, he charged. The waiter files a complaint with a Bolshevik official, alleging that the wine cellar of the Metropol - over 100,000 bottles - was counterrevolutionary. He gets his revenge later, when he’s moved up to join the staff at the Boyarsky. The waiter regarded the Count’s intervention as an insult from an aristocrat. The Count, sitting at a nearby table, intervened to advise a different wine - one that the young man could afford, and that was suited to the meal. The bad waiter knew nothing about wine, and was trying to steer the young man towards buying a bottle he couldn’t afford, and that would have overpowered the entree the two had ordered. ![]() The young man was desperately trying to impress his icy female companion, though he didn’t have much money. Earlier in the story, the Count was dining at the lesser restaurant, and spied a young couple out on their first date. The reader has met this waiter before, and knows him as an example of someone incompetent who has been given a position because he is politically connected, and because Bolshevism generally regards expertise as an offense against equality. In the novel, Count Rostov enjoys bottles from the cellar in his nightly dinners at the hotel’s Boyarsky restaurant.Īt some point, the Count finds that an ignorant waiter from the hotel’s lesser restaurant has been moved to the Boyarsky. Prior to the Revolution, the Hotel had a spectacular wine cellar. In real life, the Bolsheviks did their best to keep the Hotel Metropol a showplace of luxury, because they wanted to have a place to impress travelers from the West, and make them think that communism was working out. I found this scene below to be a profound illustration of the barbarity of egalitarianism. ![]() Novelist Amor Towles (an American) has a very light touch, one that allows him to make sophisticated observations about the nature of life, and even of politics, without coming across as heavy-handed or didactic. The novel also tells the story of what communism meant to Russia, through the lives and fates of the men and women who pass through the Metropol. The story plays out over the decades, within the universe of the Metropol, and we see the count grow as a man through the people he lives with there, and meets in their coming and going. ![]() It’s the story of Count Alexander Rostov, a young Russian aristocrat condemned by the Bolsheviks but sentenced for life to house arrest in the luxury Hotel Metropol. It’s been out for two years, but I’m just now finding it, and boy, is it ever a delight. I’m thoroughly enjoying the best-selling Amor Towles novel A Gentleman In Moscow.
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