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Landing Differently
Nov. 27th, 2023 09:14 pmNov 2022
A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles – Random House, 2017
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In the eyes of the western world, Russia has always had an interesting and troubling double nature. On the one hand, there are the incomparable contributions of Russian artists and scientists to world culture – Mendeleev, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich to name but a few – but on the other, there is its brutal and inhumane politics, from the oppressive reigns of the Tsars to the horrors of Stalinism. This book has that dichotomy at its heart. The friend who recommended this to me really liked it, describing it as "joyous" despite its portrayal of a Russian aristocrat who, at the height of the 1917 revolution, is sentenced to life-long incarceration in a swanky hotel in Moscow, on pain of being shot if he ventures outside it. And it is – Nicolai Rostov's response to his situation is full of wit and grace despite the unending humiliations that are heaped upon him. But I read it some months after the start of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, which meant that for me it landed rather differently.
This was particularly acute in the discussions concerning the destructive urges of the Russian state. Rostov's poet friend Mishka remarks that "we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created", which the official Osip subsequently argues is the necessary cost for achieving progressive goals such as universal literacy and industrial development. Which is at least arguable when it is elements of your own culture that you are destroying. When it's someone else's, that's very different.
