Kazan Cathedral is a perfect symbol of Russia’s mystique for me during the Soviet era. The deeper I delved into the country’s idiosyncratic psychology, the more fascinated I became. Going through those works, it began to seem like every accomplished artist in Russia had his own manifesto. Later, I discovered the wild, inventive, and self-assured writing styles of Russia’s early 20 th century avant-garde including the poet Mayakovsky, the dancer Nijinsky, the painter Malevich, and the filmmaker Eisenstein. But in my twenties, I fell in love with the writers of Russia’s golden age: Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. I don’t speak the language, I didn’t study the history in school, and I have only been to the country a few times. What is the nature of your fascination with Russia? In the next few days, I sketched out most of the key events of A Gentleman in Moscow over the next few years, I built a detailed outline then in 2013, I retired from my day job and began writing the book.
Thinking that he should be there by force, rather than by choice, my mind immediately leapt to Russia-where house arrest has existed since the time of the Tsars. Upstairs in my room, I began playing with the idea of a novel in which a man is stuck in a grand hotel.
In 2009, while arriving at my hotel in Geneva (for the eighth year in a row), I recognized some of the people lingering in the lobby from the year before. Every year, I would spend weeks at a time in the hotels of distant cities meeting with clients and prospects. Over the two decades that I was in the investment business, I travelled a good deal for my firm. A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW tells the story of a Russian aristocrat living under house arrest in a luxury hotel for more than thirty years.
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