NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. "Winning...Gorgeous...Satisfying...Towles is a craftsman." (New York Times Book Review). "A work of great charm, intelligence and insight." (Sunday Times)."Abundant in humour, history and humanity." (Sunday Telegraph). On 21 June 1922 Count Alexander Rostov - recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt - is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol. But instead of being taken to his usual suite, he is led to an attic room with a window the size of a chessboard.Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely. While Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval, the Count, stripped of the trappings that defined his life, is forced to question what makes us who we are. And with the assistance of a glamorous actress, a cantankerous chef and a very serious child, Rostov unexpectedly disco
In Paris and London, the crowds hailed him as the man who had conquered Napoleon, as the liberator of Europe, and as a benevolent, enlightened monarch. At home he came to be feared as a reactionary, o
As the central figure in Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin (17991837) has been claimed by nearly every political faction, right and left, in Russian cultural politics over the past two centuries,
In recent decades, the regions of Russia have taken different paths of regime transition. Despite the consolidation of an autocratic regime at national level and the centralization steered by Vladimir
