1923 / An Actress, an Apparition, an Apiary; Addendum; & 1924 / Anonymity

BOOK TWO

Summary: 1923 / An Actress, an Apparition, an Apiary

On the anniversary of the start of his house arrest, the Count prepares for dinner with Mishka, who is in Moscow for a congress of the proletarian writers’ association. In the lobby, the one-eyed cat taunts two dogs into giving chase, but the Count brings them to heel with an expert whistle. He and the striking-looking, willowy woman who owns the dogs have a chilly conversation about the difference between good breeding and good handling. 

Mishka has time for a beer but not for dinner, because he must get back to the congress. He reenacts the poetry reading the famous Mayakovsky gave. He describes with pleasure how a talented young poet named Katerina Litvinova invited Mishka to ride with her. (The Count now understands Mishka’s trimmed beard and new jacket.) After Mishka leaves, Audrius hands the Count a note from the woman with the dogs—an invitation to her second-floor suite. Audrius has to explain to the Count that the woman is Anna Urbanova, a movie star. The balding, smitten-looking man the Count just saw with her is presumably a fan.

Miss Urbanova has arranged for a private dinner with the Count, in her suite. She is more down-to-earth than she seemed at first. After she talks about her childhood as a fisherman’s daughter, the Count talks about the apple forests of Nizhny Novgorod (a city east of Moscow). The conversation ends abruptly when Miss Urbanova kisses the Count and invites him to bed. Afterward, she tells him to draw the curtains as he leaves. Unbidden, he also puts her blouse on a hanger. As the half-dressed Count steps out into the hallway, the click of the door behind him triggers a sensation of being a ghost, enjoying the quiet of empty spaces, free of human bustle and emotion. The disapproving one-eyed cat is the only creature he encounters on his way to the sixth floor.

Standing outside his room, the Count feels a breeze. He discovers, at the end of the hallway, a ladder leading to an open roof hatch. Climbing up, the Count is greeted by a handyman who has set up a nook with room to sit, and a brazier to heat coffee. Bees buzz in nearby hives and make honey that tastes like lilacs from the Alexander Gardens. The Count and the handyman drink coffee, eat dark bread with the honey, and talk about Nizhny Novgorod, where the other man, too, grew up.

Summary: Addendum

Anna Urbanova, irrationally vexed that the Count presumed to hang up her blouse, begins leaving her clothes on the floor. When her “dresser,” a seasoned older woman, finally orders her to pick them up, Anna throws all the clothes into the street. At night, however, she slips out to retrieve them.

Summary: 1924 / Anonymity

The Count is less and less the object of others’ attentions, because the Metropol staff are increasingly busy with foreign guests. Nina is busy, too, with schoolwork, but the Count manages to impress her with an observation about prime and non-prime numbers.

Mishka again cancels a dinner date, because back in St. Petersburg, his beloved Katerina is under the weather. Seated alone in the Boyarsky, the Count is taken aback when the Bishop arrives to take his order, and baffled at being told that the wine options are simply “white” and “red.” From Andrey, the Count learns that the incompetent Bishop obtained his new position by having a high-placed friend pressure Halecki. More appallingly, the Bishop filed a complaint which resulted in an edict, from the Food Commissar, that all the bottles in the wine cellar be stripped of their labels and sold at a single, fixed price. The ideals of the Revolution apparently require that wines be anonymous. The Bishop has taken revenge for the Count’s interference a year ago, as the young couple was ordering.

The Count now realizes that under the right circumstances, an entire way of life can be swept away in the blink of an eye. As Andrey watches, the Count searches the wine cellar until he locates a bottle with an embossed pattern marking the wine as the one the Rostovs use to toast departed loved ones. In two years, on the tenth anniversary of Helena’s death, the Count plans to drink to her memory, as his last act on earth.

Analysis: 1923 / An Actress, and Apparition, and Apiary; Addendum; & 1924 / Anonymity

Fate once again appears to orchestrate relationships that will prove to be of importance to the Count. Anna arrives on the one-year anniversary of the Count's confinement, just as he has been lamenting his situation and needing a new door to open. He has grown envious of his friend Mishka as they appear to have swapped places. Mishka is now a man about town while the Count is trapped inside. By taking charge, Anna keeps the Count guessing, and for the first time in his life, he is not in control of his romantic pursuit. While he is excited by Anna’s seduction, his loss of control is not entirely welcome. In his depressed state, the Count notes that instead of marking the year on the wall, the wall has marked him, meaning that he has let his circumstances master him. 

Like the Count’s chance meeting with Anna, Fate introduces the Count to the handyman on the roof, whose acquaintance realigns the Count’s understanding of education. The Count is learning more now than he ever could have in his previous life where he gained much of his knowledge through books, as illustrated in the experience of the lilac honey. If Anna had not appeared in the lobby, the Count would not have gone up to the roof and met his new friend, and so Fate continues to guide him along.

Both Anna and the Count struggle with loss of control and feeling irrelevant. Anna perceives the Count’s courtesy as a tipping of the power balance. Anna prefers to be independent and does not want any man asserting control over her, even as men dictate her life and career. The Count’s seemingly innocent gesture of hanging her blouse makes Anna feel like she has lost her power. At the same time, the Count feels invisible to the people who used to see him. Nina refuses to go on adventures as she is exploring her own new paths, experiencing new things in life, and determined to find the largest prime number for herself. She finds that the larger the number gets, indivisibility is more difficult to find. This metaphor for the Soviet Union is exemplified when Soslovsky and the man from Belarus argue over why Belarusians are slow to embrace Lenin. The Count saves the day thanks to his aristocratic upbringing, showing there is indeed still value and relevance in his talents, despite the fact that he feels his fading worth.

Although the Bolsheviks have opened their doors to foreigners in the desire for legitimacy on the world stage, they continue their pursuit of the destruction of individuality. Whereas the Count thought the Bishop unintelligent, he now sees that he is dangerous and vindictive. He is named for the chess piece, and the comparison of the sixth-floor window to a chessboard foreshadowed the role the Bishop would play in shrinking the Count’s world. The Bishop is politically well-connected and has a particular distaste of the aristocracy. Because of the Bishop, the Count’s beloved wines are stripped of their distinctive labels in service of some imagined equality. The wine is a metaphor for Russia and is described as unidentical to its neighbor and with a “history as unique and complex as that of a nation, or a man.” Thus, the Count falls into utter despair that change has accelerated and precipitated the erasure of his identity. However, he is still able to find the bottle with the two keys, offering hope that the things of the past have secret ways of enduring, and that he will always have a way of finding them.