Prologue – 21 June 1922

Summary: Prologue

The novel starts with the first 19 lines of a 1913 poem called “Where Is It Now?” by Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. The poem’s central question centers around where “purpose” has gone. The poem’s narrator lists places where purpose is not found, including “Peter’s Square” and “Vronsky’s saddlebags.” The poem ultimately serves to critique the upper-class nobility.

Summary: 21 June 1922

At age thirty-two, Count Rostov appears before an Emergency Committee. A prosecutor questions the Count about a poem he wrote in 1913, about his departure for Paris the next year, and about his return to Moscow in 1918. The Count answers all questions light-heartedly. Asked whether he came back intending to take up arms for or against the Revolution, he replies that by then, his days of taking up arms were behind him. The Committee, instead of sentencing the aristocrat to death, places him under lifelong house arrest at the Hotel Metropol, where he has already been residing for the last four years. He will be shot if he sets foot outside it again.

Analysis: Prologue – 21 June 1922

The poem and court transcript that serve as the opening of A Gentleman in Moscow reveal crucial background information about the protagonist, Count Alexander Ilych Rostov, and why the story must begin at this exact moment in his life. The poem “attributed” to the Count, a member of the Russian aristocracy, denounces the upper class of which he is a part and questions where purpose lies, setting up his main pursuit in confinement. His interrogation reveals his mysterious absence and subsequent return after the revolution, which seems foolish as he is a direct target of the Bolsheviks. Despite being grilled by an intimidating force, the Count is calm, witty, and charming. If not for the poem demonstrating his support of the revolution, he would have been killed. Instead, he is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel for the rest of his life. This opening section introduces the main character as a complex man who criticizes his own class shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution, during which the Russian nobility was overthrown in the name of equality.