The Bishop (Manager Leplevsky)

Quick Facts

The Bishop (Manager Leplevsky) is the Metropol’s ascendant bureaucrat and the primary antagonist to Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. First seen in 1922 as an inept Piazza waiter, he rises—by Party favor rather than skill—to become manager by 1946. Key relationships: a combative foil to the Count; an obstructive presence for the hotel’s true artisans (the Triumvirate); and a petty, coercive threat to Sofia, whom he uses as leverage.

Who They Are

Tall, thin, and narrow-headed, the Bishop cuts the silhouette of a chess piece—the image that gives him his nickname and captures his self-importance and rigidity. He is the joyless face of institutional power inside the Metropol: a man who confuses rules with wisdom, procedure with judgment, and punishment with leadership. His steady ascent charts the encroachment of the new Soviet order into a world of grace, craft, and memory, turning the hotel’s elegance into a stage for bureaucratic performance.

Personality & Traits

Though outwardly superior and composed, the Bishop’s authority is a mask for insecurity. He wields regulations like weapons, mistaking pedantry for professionalism. His ambition is not creative but parasitic: he rises by attaching himself to power, then punishes those with genuine expertise. Class resentment fuels his pettiness, especially toward the Count’s effortless poise and moral steadiness.

• Bureaucratic and inefficient: From suggesting Sauterne with okroshka to imposing a convoluted ordering system as manager, he prioritizes process over service and appearance over outcomes.
• Ambitious and opportunistic: His promotions—from Piazza to Boyarsky to assistant manager and, finally, manager—depend on Party connections, not competence.
• Spiteful and resentful: He orchestrates the stripping of labels from the wine cellar, weaponizes minor incidents to threaten the Count, and later tries to dispatch Sofia to Stalingrad.
• Smug and superior: An “ecclesiastical smile” and lofty demeanor project certainty that his judgment is infallible—even when plainly wrong.
• Insecure when challenged: In his final encounter with the Count, the confiscation of his keys and the exposure of his secret files puncture the facade; without institutional backing, he shrinks.

Character Journey

The Bishop’s arc is a study in expansion without growth. He advances from bungling waiter to manager as the state consolidates power, illustrating the theme of Class, Aristocracy, and Social Change: as aristocratic privilege disappears, an ideology of rules replaces a culture of standards. Yet he remains static—joyless, unimaginative, and vindictive—while the Count, stripped of title and wealth, deepens in generosity and purpose. Their inverse trajectories expose the difference between power and authority, compliance and conscience. By the time geese flap down a marble corridor and secret files pile up in a manager’s office, the absurdity of his orderliness becomes clear: he has built a system that can intimidate but cannot inspire or improve.

Key Relationships

• Count Alexander Rostov: The Bishop is the Count’s foil—process set against principle, resentment against grace. He covets the Count’s innate authority and seeks to unmake it through rules and insinuations. The Count, in turn, reads the Bishop as a necessary opponent: a reminder that true dignity does not depend on rank.

• The Triumvirate (Andrey Duras and Emile Zhukovsky): With Andrey Duras and Emile Zhukovsky, the Bishop wages a slow war of attrition. He questions their methods, clutters their workflows, and overrides their expertise, turning a finely tuned hospitality machine into a proving ground for petty directives. Their quiet professionalism throws his insecurity into relief.

• Sofia: He treats Sofia not as a child or musician but as leverage. By facilitating her “reassignment” to Stalingrad, he tries to wound the Count by proxy—revealing his preference for coercion over care, and triggering the Count’s most daring act of protection.

Defining Moments

The Bishop’s key actions reveal a pattern: reduce complexity to control, and use control to humiliate.

• The Wine List (1924): Telling the Count there are only “red or white” options exposes the vandalism of stripping the cellar’s labels. Why it matters: it flattens culture into categories, replacing connoisseurship with compliance and announcing the new regime’s contempt for nuance.

• The Geese Incident (1946): As manager, he summons the Count to feign a neutral inquiry while hinting at Sofia’s involvement. Why it matters: bureaucratic theater—manufacturing a pretext to intimidate, not to learn or resolve.

• The Requisition of Sofia (1953): He escorts the Red October official who “appoints” Sofia to Stalingrad. Why it matters: his pleasure in the act reveals cruelty as a management style and shows how institutions mask punishment as opportunity.

• The Final Confrontation (1954): The Count ambushes him with antique pistols, forces him to burn his clandestine personnel files, and locks him in the silver service room. Why it matters: without state machinery, the Bishop is powerless; incinerating the files symbolically frees the staff from surveillance and restores moral order inside the Metropol.

Symbolism

The Bishop embodies the new Soviet functionary envisioned by dogmatic ideologues—impersonal, punitive, and convinced that procedure is virtue. He is a living emblem of History, Politics, and the Individual: systems asserting themselves over persons, and persons shrinking to fit systems. His “bishop” likeness suggests long, diagonal influence across the board—subtle, constricting, and rarely creative—while the label-stripping of the cellar enacts the state’s impulse to rewrite memory. As the antithesis of the Count’s gentlemanliness, he proves that power without taste, mercy, or craft cannot command respect, only fear.

Essential Quotes

When the Count took his seat with a newspaper in hand—the international symbol of dining alone—the chap didn’t bother to clear the second setting; when the Count closed his menu and placed it beside his plate—the international symbol of readiness to order—the chap needed to be beckoned with a wave of the hand; and when the Count ordered the okroshka and filet of sole, the chap asked if he might like a glass of Sauterne.

This early portrait fuses comic miscue with thematic purpose: he ignores the tacit codes of hospitality that animate the Metropol. The wrong wine with the wrong dish is not just error but a creed—appear to serve while refusing to see.

"I apologize," he said unapologetically, "if I am not being clear. But for your selection of a wine tonight, there are only two options: white and red."

His flat binary replaces a library of vintages with a slogan. The line crystallizes his worldview: simplify the world until it can be managed, even if meaning and excellence are destroyed in the process.

"Good evening, gentlemen," he said in his friendliest tone. "What brings you all to the kitchen at this hour . . . ?"

The faux geniality, delivered in a space that is not his, signals surveillance disguised as collegiality. He performs courtesy while asserting control, intruding on the Triumvirate’s domain to remind them that authority now flows from office, not mastery.

"Your sort," he sneered. "How convinced you have always been of the rightness of your actions. As if God Himself was so impressed with your precious manners and delightful way of putting things that He blessed you to do as you pleased. What vanity."

Here the mask slips: envy and ideological disdain converge into overt class hatred. He mistakes the Count’s conscientiousness for entitlement, revealing the insecurity that drives his need to dominate—and why, in the end, domination is all he can offer.