A Gentleman in Moscow

*Among readers of European fiction, the character names in Russian novels are notorious for their difficulty. Not content to rely on given and family names, we Russians like to make use of honorifics, patronymics, and an array of diminutives—such that a single character in one of our novels may be referred to in four different ways in as many pages. To make matters worse, it seems that our greatest authors, due to some deep-rooted sense of tradition or a complete lack of imagination, constrained themselves to the use of thirty given names. You cannot pick up a work of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Turgenev without bumping into an Anna, an Andrey, or an Alexander. Thus it must be with some trepidation that our Western reader meets any new character in a Russian novel—knowing that in the remote chance this character plays an important role in future chapters, he must now stop and commit the name to memory.

As such, I think it only fair to inform you now that while Prince Nikolai Petrov has agreed to meet the Count on Saturday night for a drink, he will not be keeping the appointment.

For when the quartet finishes their engagement at midnight, young Prince Nikolai will button his overcoat, tighten his scarf, and walk to his family’s residence on Pushkin Square. Needless to say, when he arrives at 12:30, there are no footmen to greet him. With his violin in hand, he mounts the staircase headed toward the room on the fourth floor that has been left to his use.

Though the house seems empty, on the second floor Nikolai comes upon two of the house’s newer residents smoking cigarettes. Nikolai recognizes one of them as the middle-aged woman who now lives in the nursery. The other is the bus operator with a family of four who lives in his mother’s boudoir. When the Prince wishes them a goodnight with the unassuming smile of the house, neither says a word. But when he reaches the fourth floor he understands their reticence and can hardly blame them. For standing in the hallway are three men from the Cheka waiting to search his room.

Upon seeing them, Prince Nikolai does not make a scene or voice some idle protest. After all, it is the third time they have searched his room in six months, and he even recognizes one of the fellows. So, familiar with the procedure and weary from a long day, he offers them the same unassuming smile, lets them inside, and sits at the little table by the window as they go about their business.

The Prince has nothing to hide. Just sixteen years old when the Hermitage fell, he has never read a tract or harbored a grudge. If you asked him to play the imperial anthem, he wouldn’t remember how. He even sees some sense in his grand old house being divvied up. His mother and sisters in Paris, his grandparents dead, the family servants scattered to the winds, what was he going to do with thirty rooms? All he really needed was a bed, a washbasin, and a chance to work.

But at two in the morning, the Prince is awakened with a shove by the officer in charge. In his hands is a textbook—a Latin grammar from Nikolai’s days at the Imperial Lyceum.

“Is it yours?”

There is no point in lying.

“Yes,” he says. “I attended the academy when I was a boy.”

The officer opens the book; and there on the front plate looking regal and wise is a picture of Tsar Nicholas II—the possession of which is a crime. The Prince has to laugh, for he had taken such pains to remove all portraits, crests, and royal insignia from his room.

The captain slices the page out of the grammar with the blade of a knife. He marks the back with the time and place and has the Prince undersign it.

The Prince is taken to the Lubyanka, where he is held for several days and questioned once again regarding his loyalties. On the fifth day, all things considered, Fate spares him. For he is not ushered to the courtyard and put against the wall; nor is he shipped off to Siberia. He is merely given a Minus Six: the administrative sentence that allows him to roam Russia at will, as long as he never sets foot in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, Kharkov, Yekaterinburg, and Tibilisi—that is, the country’s six largest cities.

About fifty miles from Moscow in Tuchkovo, the young Prince resumes his life; and for the most part, he does so without resentment, indignation, or nostalgia. In his new hometown, the grass still grows, the fruit trees blossom, and young women come of age. In addition, by virtue of his remoteness, he is spared the knowledge that one year after his sentence, a trio of Cheka will be waiting for his old instructor when he comes home to the small apartment where he lives with his aging wife. When they haul him before a troika, what seals his fate and sends him to the camps is evidence that on multiple occasions he had hired Former Person Nikolai Petrov to play in his quartet despite a clear prohibition against doing so.

But having said that you needn’t bother to remember the name of Prince Petrov, I should note that despite the brief appearance of the round-faced fellow with a receding hairline a chapter hence, he is someone you should commit to memory, for years later he will have great bearing on the outcome of this tale.