Around and About; An Assembly; Archaeologies; & Advent

Summary: Around and About

Nina, too, is effectively confined to the hotel, because her father, a Ukrainian bureaucrat, has been posted to Moscow for nearly ten months, and her governess does not take her on outings. A few days after she and the Count have tea, he learns that she has been exploring the Metropol by means of a passkey she keeps on a chain around her neck. (How she acquired the key is never explained.) Nina shows the Count spaces he never gave much thought, such as the boiler room and the room where guests’ abandoned possessions—including his—are stored. Together, they discover where all the banquet silver is kept, now brought out to serve the privileged members of the new order instead of the titled and wealthy members of the old. One day, they visit his old suite while the new occupant is away.

Back in his room, the Count thinks about hidden spaces. The closet, he now realizes, backs up against a doorway to an adjoining room, which he gains access to by kicking out the back of the closet. After he has retrieved some of his furniture and books from the hotel basement and nailed the other room’s main door shut from the inside, he has a secret study, cozy and secure.

Summary: An Assembly

Nina wants to spy on a gathering in the ballroom. On the last excursion into the cramped balcony, the Count ripped his trouser seam. This time, a committee of the railway workers’ union is discussing an amendment to a sentence in the union charter. After much debate, “enable and ensure” replaces “facilitate.” The Count finds the proceedings comically dull, but Nina talks excitedly about the miracle of railway travel. Afterward, the Count asks Marina to again repair his trousers. While he waits, he laments that Nina is no longer interested in princesses. Marina reminds him that little girls outgrow their interest in princesses rather quickly.

Upon leaving Marina’s office, the Count is unexpectedly asked to see Jozef Halecki, the Metropol’s manager. When Halecki, after some awkward pleasantries, informs the Count that the staff will no longer be calling him “Your Excellency,” the Count is unperturbed. Just then, Arkady, the front desk captain, asks Halecki to step outside. While the two of them and a third person talk about some unspecified matter, the Count presses a wall panel. It clicks open to reveal a cabinet that contains a box with brass fittings, just as the Grand Duke described. The objects inside are perfectly crafted.

Summary: Archeologies

The Count is performing a card trick for three young ballerinas from the nearby Bolshoi Theatre when Arkady nervously informs him that he has a visitor, a stranger who stormed into suite 317 demanding to see the Count. The visitor turns out to be a friend of the Count’s from university days, “Mishka” Mindich. At the time, the two were opposite spirits drawn together: the Count a refined and sociable temperament, Mishka a rough, combative personality more comfortable with books and ideas than people. Mishka became a regular summer guest at Idlehour, the Rostov estate in Nizhny Novgorod Province.

Now, following Rostov family custom, Mishka has brought wine to toast the Count’s godfather on the tenth anniversary of the Grand Duke’s death. After the toast, the Count listens fondly as Mishka holds forth about mankind’s progress, and about a new kind of poetry—a poetry of steel, of action. Mishka has always been out of step with the rest of the world, but now the world has fallen in step with him.

Summary: Advent

One evening in late December, the smells of the Metropol coatroom bring to the Count’s mind Christmas Eves of long ago, when he and his sister would visit friends by sleigh, then stop at midnight to listen to the bells of the nearby monastery church—bells that Red Cossacks would later throw down from the belfry, and the poor abbot after them.

In the Piazza, over ice cream, Nina glumly informs the Count that after the holidays, she will be starting school. When he ventures that formal schooling broadens one’s horizons, she counters that travel—actual movement beyond actual horizons—would better serve the purpose. Mentally acknowledging defeat, the Count presents a Christmas gift: his grandmother’s opera glasses. Nina’s gift to the Count is a large box, not to be opened before midnight. After Nina leaves to join her father for dinner, the Count observes a couple one table over. The young woman is unimpressed with the young man, but she softens when he declares his fondness for The Nutcracker. Just then, the oblivious, bishop-like waiter invites the couple to order. The Count permits himself to correct the Bishop’s wine recommendation.

In the lobby, the Count recognizes a violinist, a young Prince who has fallen on hard times. They chat and agree to meet again. (A long footnote explains that because they will not actually meet again, the Prince does not matter for the rest of the story.)

At midnight, the Count opens Nina’s gift. Inside the smallest of a nested series of boxes is the passkey Nina has been wearing on her neck. In bed, the Count reads Dickens’s Christmas Carol before falling asleep. Had the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come paid him a visit, the Count would have seen himself climb onto the Metropol’s roof, in order to throw himself off it.

Analysis: Around and About; An Assembly; Archaeologies; & Advent

Using her passkey and her knowledge of the Metropol’s layout, Nina literally and figuratively opens new doors in the Count’s life. Before meeting her, the Count was completely unaware of how many secret passages there were in the Metropol, and these symbolize new paths for him to tread. Nina, although she has the freedom to walk out the doors of the Metropol, wishes she could trade places with the woman they see outside, proving that she shares the Count’s feelings of purposelessness. Witnessing Nina’s wistfulness prompts the Count to take a measure of control over his own life, and he breaks down the back of his closet, creating his own secret passage to the adjoining room and further expanding his domain. In a world where individuality is dwindling, this is a place where he can keep his identity and memories of the time before. There, he can secretly bask in nostalgia where even familiar stories are refreshed. The opening sentence of a familiar book takes on new meaning, implying that happiness is singular and boring while unhappiness is where the stories lie. 

Along with the hidden world of the Metropol, Nina opens the Count’s eyes to the inner workings of the Bolsheviks. When they discover the banquet silver, the Count cannot comprehend why the Bolsheviks have not destroyed it along with all the other vestiges of nobility. Nina incisively understands the depth of their hypocrisy and simply states that they have left it there because they will someday need it. The Count realizes that the Bolsheviks plan to eventually use the silver, enacting the same ostentatiousness that they have so heartily denounced as a trait of the nobility. In the Assembly, the Count and Nina observe that much of what they witness is similar to how the nobility behaved, but with different leaders in the chairs. Just as the nobility bickered and quarreled over unimportant things, the men waste time arguing over semantics rather than contributing to significant work. Nina is captivated by the assembly, and promptly moves on from her obsession with princesses. In the same vein, the loss of the Count’s titles further supplants his past, and he begins to understand that the new world he lives in may not require nobility's excesses. 

The appearance of the Count’s old friend Mishka introduces the idea that compromise is possible even for people with diametrically opposing viewpoints. Mishka is the first character introduced in the present that knew the Count before his confinement in the Metropol. Mishka supports the Bolsheviks and despises the aristocracy, yet he and the Count are close friends. For the first time, the Count opens his secret refuge to a visitor, allowing his past to intermingle with his present. Mishka's decision to burst into the Bolshevik leader’s room demanding to see the Count shows that although he agrees with their core ideas, he has little regard for their tactics. The Bolsheviks have dismissed any possibility of compromise after the nobility suppressed the poor for centuries. Mishka and the Count’s relationship is a sign that compromise is indeed possible between differing classes if they are allowed to interact, and not everything must belong to one extreme or the other.

Earlier foreshadowing pays off as the two unexpected friends, the Count and Nina, share gifts with each other and pieces of themselves. At the beginning of the story, immediately after the Count first unpacked his grandmother’s opera glasses, a pigeon appeared in his window. The window was described as the size of a dinner invitation, which foreshadowed this dinner with Nina, and the pigeon symbolized freedom. Now, freedom is symbolized by the hotel key that Nina gifts the Count. Nina has helped the Count expand his world, and she gives him her key so that he can continue to explore and grow in her absence. In earlier musings, the Count said that things like opera glasses were of a bygone era and had outlived their usefulness, and the Bolsheviks view the Count in much the same way. But he knows that Nina sees him as more than just an aristocrat; she values him as a beloved friend and as an individual. He gives her the opera glasses because he knows that she will appreciate the meaningful and cherished heirloom as more than just a symbol of wealth.