Rostov’s father’s copy of Montaigne’s Essays

Rostov’s father’s copy of Montaigne’s Essays carries family memory into the Count’s life at the Metropol, moving from a place beneath a bureau to the study bookcase and, at a moment of overwhelming relief, into his hands. Its intimate value is made concrete by his father’s underlining, but the book is not preserved untouched: the Count eventually removes the text from two hundred pages, setting inherited reading beside present necessity.

Provenance and changing place

Sofia had liberated Rostov’s father’s copy of Montaigne’s Essays from beneath the bureau. Afterward, it resided in comfort on a bookcase in the Count’s study. Its movement from an overlooked place to a settled one records Sofia’s intervention and gives the volume a quiet history within the hotel’s rooms.

When the Count returned to the attic, he found the door still open and the book on the floor. He picked it up and sat on Sofia’s bed with it in his hand. The familiar object was present at the moment he finally let himself weep: the tears, the narration makes clear, were not grief but the release of a man who felt himself extraordinarily fortunate.

Reading and inheritance

Later, the Count brought the volume from the study to Grand Duke Demidov’s desk. He turned through the pages, pausing over passages his father had underlined. The marks make the book more than a preserved possession: they retain evidence of how his father read, directing the Count toward particular parts of a work he now encounters through that earlier attention.

He lingered over a section titled Of the Education of Children as the twice-tolling clock signaled noon. The scene places private reading beside the hotel’s measured passage of time. The book holds his father’s annotations; the clock registers the hours remaining in the Count’s own calculations.

Alteration and use

After reflecting on the clock’s remaining chimes, the Count sighed, shook his head, crossed himself twice, and used Boris’s razor to remove the text from two hundred pages of the book. The act follows his work on a map cut from the Paris Baedeker, placing the mutilation within a sequence of careful, material preparations. The passage does not specify what use he intends to make of the removed text, but it shows that the heirloom is no longer only something to read or keep.

That change sharpens the object’s double significance. The father’s underlining preserves a past act of reading, while the Count’s razor alters the volume in the present. His care for the inherited book and his willingness to cut into it coexist: memory remains tangible, but it does not exempt a cherished possession from practical use.