Opening
In these chapters, the Metropol thrums with reinvention and risk as Count Rostov’s cloistered life widens—first through a renewed, truer love with Anna Urbanova, then through a dangerous alliance with a Party official, and finally through the arrival of a child. Moments of glamour and camaraderie collide with state power and loss, culminating in the Count’s most consequential choice: to become a father.
What Happens
Chapter 16: An Afternoon Assignation
In 1930, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov lies in a hotel bed with Anna Urbanova, their old games burned away, intimacy in their place. The story rewinds to trace how they return to each other. After early triumphs, Anna’s career collapses: Stalin’s subtle disdain for her director’s nostalgic, character-driven films gets her blacklisted, and talking pictures expose her husky voice, souring audiences by 1928. She loses her mansion and dacha and moves into a modest apartment. Counted among the “Confederacy of the Humbled,” she learns to prize substance over celebrity.
That November, the Count watches as a swaggering young director snubs Anna in the Boyarsky lobby. She turns to the Count rather than retreat, and he offers quiet solidarity. They share the vodka and caviar she had prepared for the director in her small room and recognize one another as fellow travelers fallen from grace. From there, she uses the Metropol as a base to rebuild strategically. The Count waits for her after professional dinners; her humility sharpens her talent; and a role that makes her voice an asset sparks her comeback.
Back in the present, their talk is playful and sincere. The Count traces the constellation Delphinus in the freckles on her back and tells a Greek myth. When he asks for a sea tale, she confesses her fisherman’s-daughter story was an invention and offers a real folktale: a merchant’s son grows rich by revealing the worth of salt. The parable, echoing Adaptation and Mastering Circumstances, captures how both she and the Count salvage value from what others dismiss—an intimacy formed in the shadow of History, Politics, and the Individual.
Chapter 17: An Alliance
The Count’s vocation as head waiter takes center stage. He inspects the Boyarsky like a general before review, correcting glasses, napkins, and sight lines until the room is set to perform. In the kitchen, Emile Zhukovsky begins each day in gloom and ends in exuberance as flame, sauce, and knife-work work their alchemy. Andrey Duras, ever deft, alerts the Count to a private request in the Yellow Room.
There waits Osip Ivanovich Glebnikov, a former Red Army colonel turned Party power. He invites the Count to dine—and interrogate. He knows the Count’s duel, his Parisian exile, his decision to return. The Count parries with dry clarity, even deducing Osip’s Georgian roots from his wine. Osip presses: teach me French, English, and the social codes I will need abroad. The Count agrees, not as a transaction but as service to a guest of the Boyarsky—accepting a fraught pact without surrendering his dignity.
Chapter 18: Absinthe
By 1930, the Shalyapin Bar pulses with jazz, foreign correspondents, and luminous hostesses who report to the OGPU. The journalists, fully aware, plant ludicrous “intelligence” just to see who gets called in. The Count slips in for a final, illicit ingredient: a few drops of absinthe for a long-planned feast. He pockets the vial, skirts a brittle encounter with The Bishop (Manager Leplevsky), and reaches the sanctuary of the kitchen, where he, Emile, and Andrey—the “Triumvirate”—prepare a bouillabaisse three years in the making.
The Bishop barges in, bristling with suspicion. Emile, affronted, brandishes a stalk of celery like a sword and sends him scuttling—an instant of farce that cements their brotherhood. The stew sings of Marseille. Over it, they trade love stories and confessions, and Andrey reveals a secret past: he once ran away to the circus and learned to juggle knives, which he now performs with glittering precision. Later, drunk and ruminative, the Count addresses his sister’s portrait, deciding that Life—like Death—intervenes with sly inevitability. Morning brings a loss: he has misplaced a letter from Mikhail 'Mishka' Fyodorovich Mindich. The letter quotes Vladimir Mayakovsky—who has just taken his own life—shadowing the night’s joy with tragedy.
Chapter 19: Addendum
In June 1930, Nina Kulikova boards a train for Ivanovo, aflame with purpose: she will help collectivize agriculture under the First Five-Year Plan. The narrative steps back to note the coming disaster—kulaks exiled, grain seized, famine to kill millions by 1932. Nina, eyes lifted to the bright fields, sees only hope and a country opening before her.
Chapter 20: An Arrival
By 1938, Stalin declares “Life is more joyous,” and Moscow blooms with stage-managed elegance. In the Metropol’s lobby, the Count recognizes Nina—not as the audacious girl he knew, but a woman in crisis. She married, had a daughter, Sofia, and now her husband, Leo, has been arrested and sentenced to five years of corrective labor. Nina plans to follow him to the camp. She cannot take a six-year-old.
She begs the Count to keep Sofia “for a month or two.” He says yes without hedging. Nina’s goodbye is quick and searing. The Count carries Sofia to his attic room. He fetches a blanket to make a bed on the floor, only to return and find her asleep in his own—an irrevocable reordering. This is his largest act of Parenthood and Sacrifice, a choice that shifts his life from solitary mastery to stewardship.
Character Development
These chapters move the Count from elegant survival to relational purpose, clarifying who he is when other people’s fates depend on him.
- Count Rostov: Finds vocation in service; enters a risky tutoring pact with Osip; chooses paternal responsibility over self-containment; proves grace under pressure and depth of feeling.
- Anna Urbanova: Falls, learns humility, and rebuilds; art deepens as vanity falls away; her intimacy with the Count rests on honesty and mutual regard.
- Nina Kulikova: Idealist in 1930; by 1938, a mother stripped by the state of family security; her arc embodies the Revolution’s human cost.
- Osip Glebnikov: Pragmatic, intellectually curious, and formidable; not merely an antagonist but a complex instrument of state power and a catalyst for the Count’s political education.
- Andrey Duras & Emile Zhukovsky: The Count’s chosen family; their craft, loyalty, and flashes of whimsy (knife-juggling, celery-sabre) sustain a humane enclave within surveillance.
- Sofia: Quiet, self-possessed, instantly central; her presence reframes every choice the Count makes henceforth.
Themes & Symbols
The chapters braid adaptation with intimacy. Careers and identities bend to new constraints: Anna transforms failure into artistic truth; the Count channels aristocratic codes into service, mentorship, and, finally, guardianship. These private reinventions unfold within the inescapable machinery of the state—Stalin’s tastes end a career; the purges unmake a family; a Party official compels the Count into an education of geopolitics. Inside the Metropol, friendship, craft, and ritual meals stage a counterculture of civility, yet the world outside keeps knocking.
Family—both chosen and biological—anchors meaning. The Triumvirate’s feast offers fellowship as resistance; Nina’s fragmented home exposes the regime’s reach into the most intimate bonds; Sofia’s arrival converts the Count’s philosophy into practice. Parenthood transforms freedom from an inward discipline to an outward duty.
Symbols:
- The Confederacy of the Humbled: A condition of clarity earned through loss; stripped of status, its members see value where others see nothing.
- The Bouillabaisse: A stew of rarity and patience; each ingredient a thread to wider worlds; the shared meal becomes culture preserved under pressure and joy wrested from scarcity.
Key Quotes
“Life is more joyous.”
Stalin’s edict reframes repression as celebration, inaugurating state-curated glamour. The line exposes how rhetoric can lacquer over fear, and it cues the irony that Nina’s desperate plea arrives amid this mandated cheer.
“The Confederacy of the Humbled.”
This phrase names a moral fraternity forged by dispossession. Anna and the Count, stripped of trappings, gain discernment and empathy—capacities that make their renewed bond durable and their choices clearer in crisis.
“Life, like Death, is devious.”
The Count’s tipsy confession sharpens into prophecy. The line anticipates the letter lost, Mayakovsky’s suicide, and Nina’s return with Sofia: sudden turns that disrupt meticulously arranged lives and demand new forms of courage.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
Chapters 16–18 establish the Count’s equilibrium: a vocation in service, a renewed love, and a circle of friendship that keeps culture alive behind the hotel’s doors. Chapters 19–20 rupture that calm. Nina’s trajectory—from collectivization’s promise to the purge’s wreckage—carries the outside world into the Metropol. Sofia’s arrival transforms the novel’s stakes; the Count’s art of living now must protect a child. What follows is no longer merely the refinement of a captive life, but the redefinition of purpose, freedom, and home under watchful power.