Gentleman in Moscow walks the line between the whimsical and the philosophical, examining the life of a Russian aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution.

As the book opens, Count Alexander Rostov faces a life or death trial: he is suspected of counter-revolutionary sympathies by virtue of his aristocratic birth. Yet a curious poem he published some dozen years before the Revolution, with ambiguous meaning but just enough revolutionary overtones, saves him in the end. Instead of facing the firing squad, he is sentenced to live out the rest of his days in the Hotel Metropol. This magnificent, luxurious old hotel thus becomes the setting for the entirety of the narrative.

Here this book explores the old notion that confinement is its own sort of liberation. And in the character of the Count we have a subject who is ideally suited to his confinement. He is just young enough to adapt to this strange experiment, reshaping his new environment to his own tastes quite readily. Yet he is also old enough to understand the meaning of that imprisonment, and we quickly feel the tragedy of his imprisonment: enmeshed in the center of all the delights that Moscow has to offer to a man of leisure, and suddenly entrusted with a tremendous surplus of leisure time - but unable to enjoy those delights to their fullest.

Through this device, and specifically through the curious character of the hotel itself, we examine what exactly those delights are. The Hotel Metropol gives us a chance to explore Moscow in microcosm, and at a safe remove. Its cafes are a focal point of the city’s social life, its staff and its hidden rooms and passageways a reflection, however imperfect, of the city’s working class. Lest we lose sight of this device, we even get to climb up on the roof at a couple pivotal moments in the plot to see the city from above.

Of course it is not just Moscow that we get to explore. Like any fine Russian novel, this one explores the meaning of Russian identity and history, with a special focus on early Soviet political life. In part the effect is literal: the drafting of the Soviet constitution, as well as a key moment in the post-Stalin era, both occur within the confines of the hotel. And it part it’s pedantic: as the book proceeds we get more and more philosophical ramblings from one character or another about what it means to be a Russian, what is the essence of the Russian character, and so forth. The effect is a little tiresome, really, even if the actual ramblings are kind of interesting.

But the narrative itself is on the whole very enjoyable. Indeed, it’s one of the more enjoyable pieces of literary fiction that I’ve read in quite a while. It is a little tragic, a little dramatic, but first and foremost it is whimsical. Perhaps excessively so; at times the breeziness of the prose gets to be a little cloying. But I think the saving grace is the novel’s many erudite cultural references, covering everything from Rachmaninoff to The Maltese Falcon. More than anything else, the story is inspired by Anna Karenina and Casablanca - which are really two marvelous bookends, historically speaking, on the period of time which the plot covers.

On the whole, I’m quite glad I read this book. It is whimsical enough to be enjoyable, but just philosophical and erudite enough to be challenging.