A Gentleman in Moscow is a novel by Amor Towles. It is his second novel, published five years after Rules of Civility He was raised on his Rostov family's estate "Idlehour" in Nizhny Novgorod. Rostov's godfather was his father's comrade in the cavalry, Grand Duke Demidov.
When the Count's parents died of cholera within hours of each other in , Grand Duke Demidov became the year-old's guardian. Demidov counseled him to be strong for his sister Helena, because " As a young man, the Count was sent out of the country by his grandmother for wounding a cad in defense of his sister - events covered through flashbacks. Upon returning home from Paris after the Bolshevik revolution of , the Count was arrested, beginning the narrative.
Each of the book's chapters is set according to a doubling then halving chronological structure. The first chapter is the day after the Count's arrest, the second is two days after, and subsequent chapters are set five days, ten days, three weeks, six weeks, three months, six months, one year, two years, four years, eight years, and sixteen years after the beginning of the narrative. At this point, the structure reverses, with the time between chapters progressively halving until the final day of the narrative.
Towles's inspiration for the novel was his experience staying at luxury hotels, specifically, a hotel in Geneva , Switzerland , where some guests were permanent residents.
He combined the idea of luxury hotels with his knowledge of Russia's long-time historical tradition of house arrest. The Count is charged as a social parasite before a Bolshevik tribunal, with the expectation that he will be found guilty and shot. He is unrepentant, and eloquently refuses to confess. Because of a revolutionary poem attributed to him, for which some senior Bolsheviks consider him one of the heroes of the struggle against the Tsarist regime, the Count is spared a death sentence.
