Sitting in his cramped apartment on the seventh floor of the Metropol, Count Alexander glanced at the uneaten red apple balancing atop his copy of Anna Karenina. The clock was approaching twelve, and he dreamily contemplated the sight of the apple upon the book. Could the Greeks or the Romans—Homer or Virgil, Sophocles or Ovid, Pericles or Cato (or, for that matter, Cervantes or Montaigne or Goethe)—debase themselves to serve as the dusty table for a simple Russian folk fruit? The divine Shakespeare may be able to sustain this indignity, but not with the rustic grace of Tolstoy.

These two objects, the Count’s apple and his copy of Anna Karenina, seemed for a moment to speak with each other. They conversed about Russian families, happy and unhappy; about the spires and streets and grand hotels of Moscow that had charmed a million visitors; about the gentle Neva River tracing its way through Saint Petersburg (now Leningrad); about the innumerable lavrii and monasteries and grand cathedrals of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had so comforted the spirits of a hundred million serfs throughout the centuries; about the icons of Andrei Rublev and his acolytes, those awesome masterpieces of world art as moving as the great works of the Italian Renaissance that the Count had observed during his journeys throughout the continent.

Above all, the apple and Tolstoy spoke about the crisp air outside the Count’s dacha among the orchards of Nizhny Novgorod; about Russia’s ancient forests, its steppes, and those vast stretches of Siberia in the East; about the blistering Russian summers and its deadly winters; about the whole of the Russian soul stretching back from this cramped apartment in the Metropol through the glorious, but failed, Revolution of 1905 and the less-glorious, but successful, Revolution of 1917 to the Battle of Borodino and Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible, back as far as the waters that baptized Vladimir a thousand years ago.

This Russian soul, the Count concluded, was what had defeated the Mongols, the Golden Horde, and the waves of European armies (Karl XII of Sweden, Napoleon I of France, and Adolf Hitler of the Third Reich), not by the force of Russian armies, considerable though they were, but by the Russian soul’s innate, robust, cynical resistance to the charms of the West. This Russian soul, thought Count Alexander, would survive when the barbarism of the Bolsheviks had long faded from the scene.

Sofia, whose name was transliterated with an “f” and not the traditional Greek-inflected “ph,” because Sofia was a Russian woman and not a Greek woman, had been sitting in the room the entire time, although she had not been contemplating the apple. Interrupting her father’s meditations on the unique role of Russian in world history, Sofia rose to depart for the train station and then on to Stalingrad, where she would perform in a concert with the Red Youth’s Workers’ Brigade Soviet Orchestra to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the great battle in that city against the Nazis. It was 1953. “Da svidanya,” Sofia said in perfect Russian. “Adieu,” replied the Count in perfect French.

*

If you read my above parody, then you’ve basically read A Gentleman in Moscow. Amon Towles’s novel is a love letter to Russian literature and history, but it’s the kind of sappy love letter that a lovesick adolescent writes to his girlfriend (or, better yet, to the girl who marked “no” on the sheet that asked her, “Do you like me?”). At the very least, you’ve just read everything that irritates me about Towles’s prose and his portrayal of Russians in Russia.

A Gentleman in Moscow is a book written by an American novelist, graduate of Yale, and former investment banker who really, really, really loves nineteenth-century Russian literature. And so he has written a novel—an homage to Doctor Zhivago, basically—that romanticizes the Tsarist aristocracy, mocks the zealous earnestness and proletarian bad taste of the Bolsheviks, documents with horror the murderous oppression of Stalinism, and toes the American Cold War position on Khruschev and his era (a few actual Americans show up to do the toeing).

I am generally suspicious of the MFA dictum to “Write what you know” (Towles has an MFA from Stanford), but in this case, Towles might be better off just writing about American graduates of Yale who love Russian literature and quit their jobs in investment banking to write novels. I’d hope that such a book would feel a little more…authentic.

And I say that as someone who doesn’t trust our culture’s emphasis on “authenticity.” But when authenticity is entirely absent, you’re missing something.

Take, for instance, Towles’s obvious affection for the opening lines of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy, like his English contemporary George Eliot, frequently sprinkled little adages like these throughout his novels. (Sentences like these seem undeniably true when you read them but, if you think about it, they don’t say much. I mean, couldn’t you as easily write, “Each happy family is happy in its own way; all unhappy families are alike”? Wouldn’t that feel true, too?) Towles obviously loves these little pearls of wisdom, and he litters his novel with them. Except he doesn’t (surprise!) have the talent of Tolstoy and, consequently, A Gentleman in Moscow is full of sentences like this:

It is a well-known fact that of all the species on earth Homo sapiens is among the most adaptable.

and

Popular wisdom tells us that when the reel of our concerns interferes with our ability to fall asleep, the best remedy is the counting of sheep in a meadow.

and

For a thousand years, civilizations the world over have recognized the head of the table as a privileged spot.

For a thousand years…

Or take the many sweeping tangents and digressions by the characters in Towles’s novel, tangents and digressions on Russian identity performed by characters who would never, ever make such statements. For example: the Soviet colonel Osip, one of the novel’s best characters, is fond of American cinema and, late in the novel, he embarks on a long digression about the role of American movies in brainwashing the American proletariat: “Hollywood,” he says, “is the single most dangerous force in the history of class struggle.”

Has Osip read Adorno? Probably not. Certainly not. In no universe does an ordinary Red Army officer (as portrayed in the novel) possess the education or forethought or vision to step back and theorize at length about the American Culture Industry.

But Towles has probably read Adorno, and he uses Osip as a vehicle to express Adorno’s ideas about the relationship between the Culture Industry and class struggle, characterization be damned!

I’m reminded here of a scene in the film Mr. Jones (2019). The film is based on the true story (which Towles alludes to in the novel) of a Welsh journalist who uncovers the Holodomor (the 1932-33 manmade famine that killed nearly 5 million Ukrainians) despite the Soviet government and the New York Times’s best attempts to hide the famine from the world. In one absurd scene, the Welsh journalist is standing in a breadline somewhere in Ukraine. He asks a starving woman what was happening. She replies (I’m paraphrasing), “They tried to change human nature.”

In other words, the Marxists came to power in order to change the natural order of human relations (which is global capitalism, apparently), and the result was a famine on an unprecedented scale.

This is an observation that many historians and political theorists have made, that Marxism attempts to change human nature, and the results are unsurprisingly catastrophic. It’s the sort of conclusion you can reach once you step back and look at the Holodomor, the Stalinist purges, the Bolshevik reigns of terror, and the Gulags all together as a synthesis of Marxist policy. It’s not the sort of observation you would hear from a Ukrainian peasant, a woman whose entire world was her Ukrainian village, where information from the outside world was brutally suppressed and who was, therefore, probably unaware of the full scope of Soviet criminality, much less Western intellectual debates about human nature and Marxist praxis.

To be clear: I’m not knocking rural Ukrainians who suffered and/or died in the Holodomor. I’m just knocking storytellers like Agnieszka Holland and Adrea Chalupa (the filmmakers behind Mr. Jones) who use the experiences and voices of those Ukrainians as a megaphone for the filmmakers’ own ideas. The more intimate, more immediate voices of everyday Ukrainians should be enough. But the filmmakers couldn’t resist didacticism and easy morals. They couldn’t resist taking an easy shot at Marxism.

A Gentleman in Moscow is full of moments like this.


*

Let me be obnoxious for a minute: I've been reading Russian novels since I was 14. I studied Russian in college. I have read a lot of Russian history, literature, and political philosophy. I've watched Russian movies. I listen to Russian music. I have many Russian friends. I am a huge Russophile.

But at the end of the day, I know very little about Russia. I'm an American who has never lived in Russia, whose main impressions of and knowledge about Russia are academic, superficial, or distant.

This puts me in a tricky position when reviewing A Gentleman in Moscow, because I suspect that both Towles and I love Russia, and that we possess a similar amount of knowledge about Russia and its history (I'm judging Towles's knowledge based on what appears in the novel). Consequently, I don't want to judge Towles for "not knowing enough" or for "getting it wrong." I also don't want to be a prick and moan about the inauthenticity of Towles's version of Russia based solely on my own ideas about Russia. Nothing is more irritating than a critic who hates a book because the author got some details are wrong about a subject the critic cares a lot about.

And so...I don't know. Towles gets the dates rights and describes the major incidents of Russian history accurately, but the voices, attitudes, and worldviews of most Russians in the novel—proletarian or aristocratic—just feel so...fake. It really hampered my ability to enjoy what should have been a really fun, loving book about Russia.

*

So, will a reader who knows nothing about Russia enjoy Gentleman in Moscow. If you like accessible historical fiction full of romantic paeons to and nostalgia for the past, and especially if you like the romance and pageantry and “soulfulness” of the Russian nineteenth-century, and especially if authenticity isn’t your thing, then this is a book for you.

But in general, I’d recommend reading modern Russian authors instead: Olga Tokarczuk, Alisa Ganieva, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Eugene Vodolazkin, Viktor Pelevin, and many others. Get your Russia from the Russians. 

Edit: Olga Tokaruczkuk is Polish. Idiotic mistake on my part, especially in an essay where I make fun of Towles's superficial portrayal of Russia. I always a) associate Tokarczuk with Russian lit because Russian imperialism comes up so often in her books and b) for reasons completely mysterious to me, I always confuse her with Svetlana Alexievich (who isn't really Russian either, but is from the old Soviet Union and writes in Russian).