A Gentleman in Moscow

All poetry is a call to action.

All poetry is a call to action

Why did you write the poem?

COUNT ALEXANDER ILYICH ROSTOV

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Given Russia’s long, heartless winters, its familiarity with famine, its rough sense of justice, and so on, and so on, it was perfectly natural for its gentry to adopt an act of definitive violence as the means of resolving disputes.

However, audacity and steadfastness—entirely contrary means—have sometimes served to produce the same effect

By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.

In point of fact, Emile Zhukovsky began his days in a state of the blackest pessimism. The very moment he looked out from under his covers, he met existence with a scowl, knowing it to be a cold and unforgiving condition. Having had his worst suspicions confirmed by the morning papers, at eleven o’clock he would be waiting at the curb for a crowded tram to rattle him to the hotel while muttering, “What a world.”

But as the day unfolded, hour by hour Emile’s pessimism would slowly give way to the possibility that all was not lost.

was in September of 1905 that the members of the Delegation had signed the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese War. In the seventeen years since the making of that peace—hardly a generation—Russia had suffered a world war, a civil war, two famines, and the so-called Red Terror.