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A Gentleman in Moscow By Amor Towles

Tue, 14 May 2024 16:17:54 GMT

A Second, Closer Look at Amor Towles’
“A Gentleman in Moscow”

With the popularity of Amor Towles at an all-time high from the recent launch of the TV series “A Gentleman in Moscow” based on his bestselling novel and his just-published and highly acclaimed Table for Two collections of short stories, multi-award-winning author William Maz (The Bucharest Dossier and The Bucharest Legacy) files this insightful essay prompted by his second read of A Gentleman in Moscow.

It is such a pleasure to be reading A Gentleman in Moscow (Viking) again, having first read it when it came out some years ago. And as it should be with fine works of art, the second reading is even more rewarding than the first. The question that crossed my mind before the first reading, and that sprang again before the second as a paradoxical memory, was how in God’s name is the author, Amor Towles , going to keep my interest over 400 pages recounting the story of a count condemned to spend the rest of his life in a hotel?

Of course, I had forgotten the novel Oblomov , by the Russian writer Ivan Goncharov that I read in college, in which the nobleman Oblomov rarely leaves his bed, and then only to move to a chair. I thought that surely the Count, after a few years, and certainly after decades of being ensconced within the walls of the grand hotel Metropol, would run out of things to do or say or think, and would succumb to the Russian instinct for brooding and depression at the meaninglessness of life, dragging us along with him. But the Count, and the author, do nothing of the kind.

As his beloved country is undergoing the Bolshevik revolution, the Count returns from Paris to assist his grandmother in her flight to Western safety. But instead of remaining abroad with his grandmother and enjoying his wealth and privilege, he returns to his beloved homeland where he is tried for being an aristocrat and is only saved from being shot because of a few revolutionary verses attributed to him.

He is instead sentenced to spend the rest of his life within the confines of the Metropol, the most opulent hotel in Russia. As the story traces his efforts to adapt to his interminable house arrest, we are also provided the opportunity to observe the many historical changes unfolding in Russia through the voices of intriguing characters and the eyes and wit of the Count.

The Count is a gentleman, first and foremost. Speaking with the unflappable humor and eloquence of the old nobility, often playfully contrasted against the plain functionalism of the new proletariat vernacular, he traces his own efforts to conform to the new authoritarian order — even taking on the tasks of headwaiter in the hotel’s famed Boyarsky dining room — with wit and an almost stoic acceptance of history’s daunting passage, all while maintaining his own sense of who he is.

The novel is a tour de force of character study, commentary on the human spirit, inane edicts by the obtuse apparatchiks, and eternal optimism for a mankind that seems to repeatedly tear down what it has built only to reconstruct it in yet another iteration.

Every sentence in this wonderful book is not only written in the stylish voice of the Count, but is chock full of wisdom and humor, sometimes slipped in through the side door, easily missed if not attentive. By the end of the story we have sauntered through events in history, listened to Chopin and Tchaikovsky, tasted the exquisite dishes of the Boyarsky, debated Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, and Aristotle, and reconsidered the meaning of life, all within the confines of the Hotel Metropol.

It is a book to be read slowly, its words and sentences to be savored like a fine wine or one of the Boyarsky’s legendary dishes served to the Count on a daily basis. It is also a salute to a period long gone that, despite being susceptible to rebukes of elitism, leaves one with a nostalgia for a time when people spoke with kindness and respect, when you could discuss pressing issues with humor and wit over a glass of wine, and when at the end of the day you could walk arm in arm with your adversary, stopping at the bar for a final nightcap, and see each other off safely into a cab.

Photo Credit: Dmitri Kasterine

About Amor Towles :

Amor Towles is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Lincoln Highway, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Rules of Civility. His novels have collectively sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than 35 languages. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

Buy This Book:

Greetings during this traditional holiday season! 2222

Thu, 25 Jan 2024 02:08:39 GMT

The world seems to be celebrating war this season, and we must not forget those suffering. Both the Israeli-Hamas war and the Russian-Ukrainian war are devastating, causing death and suffering to tens of thousands of civilians and destruction of cities. I’d like to focus on the Ukrainian war for a moment, since it is related to what I have been writing about in my books.

The invasion of Ukraine is a revanchist movement by the old Soviet guard to regain the power and glory that it thinks Russia once had. But these old nostalgic dreamers have gone back not to the communist system, which Putin declared a “dead end,” but to previous Czarist regimes, with the oligarchs playing the roles of barons, dukes, and earls of the previous nobility. This backward-looking dream is not that different from other revanchist movements, such as Napoleon declaring himself emperor after the French Revolution did away with nobility, and with the ultra-conservative Muslim movement in the Middle East which dreams of returning the region to a Caliphate dating back centuries. Both movements should be viewed not as regional conflicts, having nothing to do with us, but as direct threats to our own democracy.

The good news is that revanchist movements eventually fail because history has moved on, but in the interim they cause untold suffering and deaths. The key is to know history and learn from it. That is the main reason I wrote both The Bucharest Dossier and The Bucharest Legacy, which deals with the waning days of the Cold War, a war that did not disappear, like some have said, but that only remained dormant.

I hope you find my novels not only thrilling but informative.

The Bucharest Legacy—The Rise of the Oligarchs
is now available!

With sincere regards,

William Maz

What is the Oligarch System?

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 00:46:47 GMT

The oligarch system has been a tried-and-true method over the centuries for tyrants and despots to shore up their regimes by creating a class of wealthy individuals whose wealth depends on keeping the ruler in power. After communism fell, new oligarchs were created during the corrupt privatization process of state-owned companies through a symbiotic relationship between those in power and the retired leaders of the security services. These oligarchs continue to wield power throughout these former communist countries to this day.

The oligarch system, which has existed throughout European history in the form of dukes, earls, counts and barons, has not gone unnoticed by some of the “democratic” countries in the EU and NATO. In Turkey, Erdogan has given no-bid contracts and other government benefits to political allies, relatives, and friends to create his own oligarch system. These new oligarchs have bought up media companies to control reporting and employ propaganda to keep Erdogan in power for over twenty years.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbàn has done the same. His administration even touts this creation of Hungary’s version of the Carnegies and Rockefellers through crony capitalism as a way to ensure that Hungary doesn’t slide back to a communist or socialist system. Orbàn calls his government an “illiberal democracy,” which has been shown to use EU funds meant for development to prop up the oligarchs.

In Poland, President Duda has been creating his own version of the oligarch system. His Law and Order government holds majority stakes in public companies, such as PKN Orlen, the largest energy company in Europe, and has placed his own cronies to lead them. These companies have then used the same playbook to buy up media companies to use for propaganda to shore up Duda’s regime.

Although by classic definitions, America doesn’t have an oligarch system, many believe we are on our way to developing a version of it. Through campaign contributions, widely seen as a legal form of bribery, wealthy individuals have influenced politicians to do their bidding. You don’t have to look further than tax laws benefitting large companies and wealthy individuals, and our gun laws, to appreciate their influence. Media companies controlled by wealthy individuals can control what we see and read. Even in a country such as ours in which we are used to daily propaganda in the form of commercials, we have shown that we are very vulnerable to the political propaganda spread in social media and by one media company in particular, which has admitted to knowingly reporting conspiracy theories and outright lies to favor one political party. In addition to influencing the executive and legislative branches, wealthy individuals have also been shown to try to influence the Supreme Court.

Today, democracies do not have to be overthrown by tanks and coups. Instead, they can be slowly degraded by controlling media and politicians, changing laws and regulations, putting pressure on prosecutors and courts, and eliminating competition through lies, innuendo, and the spreading of money. Like a frog in a slowly warming pot of water, we may not realize what is happening until it is too late.

The Bucharest Legacy—The Rise of the Oligarchs is now available!

With sincere regards,

William Maz

What is an Oligarch?

wmazanitis@gmail.com — Sun, 24 Sep 2023 21:02:18 GMT

A term we have all encountered in relation to current events in Russia is that of “oligarchs.” But what is an oligarch?

The definition actually goes back to Aristotle. It refers to wealthy persons whose fortune depends on the king, or the ruler. In Europe oligarchs have gone by other names, such as duke, earl, count, or baron. These men—and they were usually all men—were political allies, great generals, or valiant warriors to whom the king gave a sizable piece of land, along with a title, as a reward for their loyalty. They knew that the king could take away their wealth at any time if their loyalty wavered. In a recent meeting Putin is reported to have warned his oligarchs that he gave them their wealth and he could take it away if they didn’t conform.

Throughout history, the oligarch system has been used by rulers to shore up their hold on power. Communism also created a form of oligarchs. Throughout the communist system, officials in power routinely stole from government coffers and demanded hefty bribes during transactions with Western companies. In Romania, the security service, the Securitate, knew and documented this corruption, and Ceausescu was well aware of it. But he did nothing about it. Why? Because he knew that he needed underlings whose wealth depended on keeping him and the communist system in power.

During the transition process to a democratic system, a new class of oligarchs was formed. The new government, whose members had previously been part of the communist system, had to privatize all the industries owned by the communist state. This privatization process was severely corrupted, resulting in these industries falling into the hands of a privileged few. These lucky people were all former Securitate officials or closely related to them. Why these officials? Because the Securitate held dossiers on all important people in the country documenting their corruption during the communist days. It included company managers, members of parliament, judges, and administration officials, including the president.

But blackmail was rarely necessary. The entire system was a symbiotic relationship between those in power—who received sizable bribes or became secret shareholders of these newly privatized companies—and the new oligarchs. Together they stole the country’s most valuable assets.

The corruption of the privatization system, and the formation of oligarchs, occurred in most of the communist countries. These new billionaires have since bought up media companies, which they use as propaganda machines to keep certain leaders in power, to pass favorable laws, and to wield political influence.

In the U.S. we don’t have oligarchs who depend on their leaders for their wealth, at least not directly. But we do have wealthy individuals who use millions in campaign contributions—which has been dubbed a legal form of bribery—to pass laws favorable to them. And we have a major news network that has admitted to using false propaganda to bolster one of the two major political parties—variations of the same tools refined over millennia.

Love Conquers All, Even in the Worst of Times

website@sitemodify.com (Website Editor) — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:33:32 GMT

What I find most magical about writing fiction is where the process takes you.

The Bucharest Dossier is a love story inside a spy thriller inside a historical novel, a structure that carries over into the sequel, The Bucharest Legacy . The historical aspect forms the background—the Romanian revolution of 1989 in The Bucharest Dossier, and the rise of the oligarchs three years later in The Bucharest Legacy. The spy thriller rises out of the historical background and, at the top, is the love story that rises out of both.

While most spy thrillers add the love story as a secondary plot to infuse depth to the main character and to add spice, the love aspect of both of my novels, especially The Bucharest Dossier, is the primary story. In fact, The Bucharest Dossier began in my mind as a romantic novel, the search by a young man for the childhood love he left behind in Bucharest that is based on a girl named Pusha whom I loved growing up in that city. It was originally meant to be a study of how memory can transform a love that began twenty years before into the worship of an almost mythological creature that bore little resemblance to the real person.

But as I thought more about it, I realized the story was intricately entwined with communism, the reason my character, Bill Hefflin, had to leave Bucharest with his family as a child. That led to the question of why Hefflin decided to return to Bucharest now, which led to the Romanian revolution and the idea that, now that communism was falling, he could find his Pusha again and, perhaps, rekindle their love, maybe even bring her to America. At that point I could have been satisfied that I had a plausible plot for a story about love lost and love regained.

But my mind kept telling me that something else was going on, that there was more to the story. I then asked myself who Bill Hefflin is, what he does for a living, and how it could be related to the revolution. I started doing research on the revolution and discovered that many questions had been left unanswered, the main one being whether it had been a real revolution started spontaneously by the people or a planned coup d’état.

Whenever facts don’t exist, conspiracy theories abound, especially in Romania. Other mysteries sprang up, such as who the Middle Eastern snipers were who started shooting at the people in Timisoara, the city where the revolution began, and why did General Stanculescu, the Minister of Defense, turn on President Ceausescu and organize the trial and execution of Ceausescu and his wife. Then I found in my research that one of the Romanian generals, General Militaru, had been a known KGB mole who had been planning a coup for years, and that General Stanculescu had probably been a CIA mole. The plot thickened, as they say. The more I read, the more spies and counterspies I found. The rumor mill had been right, for once. I had no choice. My love story had to be written as a spy novel.

The sequel, The Bucharest Legacy , takes place three years after the revolution. It picks up the threads left dangling in all three layers of the first novel. Hefflin discovers secrets about Pusha’s childhood and learns about the charmed life of Boris, the KGB puppeteer who had pulled on the strings of Hefflin’s life. And he learns how the old communist apparatchiks had transformed themselves into the wealthy ruling class, the oligarchs, who ran Romania once more, only now with the billions they had purloined while the people waited for the promises of democracy.

The Bucharest Legacy—The Rise of the Oligarchs is out now .

I hope you enjoy it.

With sincere regards,

William Maz

The Bucharest Dossier - A Novel

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 15:22:07 GMT

“Bine ai venit!”

Welcome and thank you for your interest in my writing! I am delighted you’re here. Whether you are writer, reader, or an agent of the CIA, I’d like to share with you how my new book The Bucharest Dossier came to be.

But first, some context…

I was born in Bucharest, Romania of Greek parents and lived under communism for a part of my early childhood. Since then, I have visited Bucharest many times, both during the communist years and after the revolution, and have relatives and friends still living there. I wanted to write about the Romanian revolution that brought it out of communism both for personal reasons and because I wanted to portray the lives of the people living under a totalitarian regime.

In December of 1989, the other former Soviet satellite countries had undergone their own version of a “velvet” revolution, a peaceful transition to democracy. Romania was the sole Soviet satellite country that still remained under the grip of the Stalinist tyrant Nicolae Ceausescu. Even the Berlin Wall had fallen. But the Romanian revolution would not be a peaceful one.

They always tell you to write about what you know. It is advice fraught with danger.

For beginning writers, which included me during my college years, writing about their own experiences invites many pitfalls. The main danger is that beginning writers feel an emotional imperative to recount the events just as they occurred in their own lives, and they often feel disloyal to those events if they change them to fit the story they are trying to tell. In writing classes, you often hear this impassioned response by the writer to criticism of his work: “But that’s what actually happened!” The writer mistakenly believes that by recounting the actual events from his life he is telling the “truth.”

The problem is that real life doesn’t unfold in packets of short stories or novels. Life often comes to us as an avalanche of seemingly unrelated events and characters without any obvious connection. Issues often resolve years or decades later, or sometimes never. Incidents and characters come and go, without us having much appreciation of their meaning in real time. Over millennia, mankind has evolved the ability to create the “story” in order to make sense of life’s twists and turns and reach some sort of understanding of the world around us. The story is a way of shaping events that may span days or decades into a few pages using a clear structure to arrive at some insight into their meaning. The creation and recounting of stories is such a universal attribute of the human race that some scientists believe it is hard-wired in our brains.

The basic structure of the story involves an inciting incident that causes the reluctant protagonist to leave his safe life to embark on a quest fraught with danger; of escalating obstacles by an antagonist resulting in ever-deeper setbacks for the protagonist; of the climax where the protagonist either achieves his goal or not; and the resolution in which the protagonist arrives at a new understanding of life. Of course, that simple structure has infinite variations.

Writers have to be very careful in how they use personal events from their lives. They must not allow these “real” events to imprison them into having to recount them exactly how they occurred. These events are only a tool to use very parsimoniously in the creation of their art.

The Bucharest Dossier has the structure of a love story inside a spy thriller inside a historical novel. I used certain events and characters from my personal life in all three levels, but was very careful not to succumb to their emotional demand for loyalty. For the love story, I used a little girl I knew as a child in Bucharest as my protagonist’s mythical love interest, but the rest of the love story is purely fictional. For the spy plot, I used certain localities and characters from my college and Bucharest experiences, but the rest is fiction. The historic background of the Romanian revolution is based on real events, which required many interviews and a great deal of research, but there, too, I used “poetic license” to propose a novel understanding of those events.

Life doesn’t provide “truth” on a platter. The writer’s job is to mold and shape life’s seemingly random events into a story that arrives at a higher truth which can then be conveyed to the reader in a compelling and emotionally satisfying manner. The loyalty of the writer is to the story, not to the life events from which the story sprang. Once the writer thus frees himself, he or she can use those kernels of truth to create that higher truth of the story.

With sincere regards,

William Maz

The Bucharest Legacy - The Rise of the Oligarchs

website@sitemodify.com (Website Editor) — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 02:09:58 GMT

The Bucharest Legacy - The Rise of the Oligarchs

The tragedy of many of the countries that suffered under the totalitarian yoke of communism is that the suffering did not end when the Iron Curtain fell, or when their governments declared they now became a capitalist democracy. The culture of corruption that had been engrained for several generations continued.

For decades communism functioned under certain rules and social norms. Contrary to their propaganda of a classless society in which everyone was equal, the society was divided into those who had power and those who had none. For the nomenklatura, the bureaucrats who ran the government and who were Communist Party members, life was quite different from the rest of the population. They had their own Party stores where they could buy food, clothing, televisions, liquor, Western music and films, and anything else they could import from Western Europe, while the rest of the population stood in line for food and basic needs, and had hot water for only a few hours in the morning and evening.

Since the government was accountable only to itself, these faceless bureaucrats and political leaders were free to skim off the top of their government budgets, demand bribes from local citizens and foreign companies trying to do business in Romania, and acquire wealth, which they hid in offshore accounts. Corruption became the norm, which filtered down to every corner of society. You had to bribe the government butcher to save you a slab of beef, or the government grocery store manager to put aside some eggs or milk for delivery after the store ran out and closed its doors. You could not see a doctor without a bribe, and if you needed surgery you better have some of your grandmother’s jewelry to hand over to the surgeon. Ironically, communism transformed itself into the basest form of capitalism in which nothing could be accomplished without a bribe, some of which I described in The Bucharest Dossier .

After the transition from communism to some sort of democracy, these countries continued the same practices, even on a larger scale. A class of people appeared who were suddenly immensely wealthy. These oligarchs did not only rise up in Russia, but in Romania, Hungary, Poland, and most of the other former communist countries. Most of these oligarchs were members of the former communist secret services—The KGB in Russia and the Securitate, Romania’s secret service. They also included former communist leaders, their families, and friends. They acquired their sudden wealth in various ways. Some bought the newly privatized

state companies in corrupt transactions for pennies on the dollar, others were given no-bid government contracts, while still others were simply placed in positions of power in newly privatized oil and gas companies, banks, and other industries, as Putin did in Russia with his KGB friends. They used the same methods of bribes and blackmail to overcome any resistance, aided by their archives of secret service dossiers from the communist era, which held incriminating evidence on all government officials and most of the population.

To this day, the same former communist leaders and their families and friends run these countries. Many of these leaders claim that the oligarch system is a stabilizing force in ensuring that a capitalist system survives. The system of corruption has continued down to regular citizens in everyday transactions. It should come as no surprise that even those former communist countries that joined the EU and NATO are listed as some of the most corrupt in Europe. But the irony is that these leaders are now using EU funds to create their crony capitalism.

Today, Russia is openly run by these oligarchs with the wealthiest of them all—purported to be the wealthiest man in the world—as its leader. It is not surprising that the Russian army that invaded Ukraine has been found to be a feckless shell. The military has been hollowed out by those same apparatchiks, now oligarchs, who in the past squirreled away stolen government funds in offshore accounts but who now build $500 million yachts and mansions all over the world. In this instance, maybe we should be grateful.

In the sequel to The Bucharest Dossier , I try to describe the situation in Romania three years after the revolution with the rise of the oligarchs who took over most of the country’s industries and who run the country to this day, no matter which party is in power.

The Bucharest Legacy — The Rise of the Oligarchs will come out in June of 2023. I hope you enjoy it.

a64834ba

A Gentleman in Moscow By Amor Towles

A Second, Closer Look at Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow”

Buy This Book:

Greetings during this traditional holiday season! 2222

What is the Oligarch System?

What is an Oligarch?

Love Conquers All, Even in the Worst of Times

The Bucharest Dossier - A Novel

The Bucharest Legacy - The Rise of the Oligarchs

A Second, Closer Look at Amor Towles’
“A Gentleman in Moscow”