When life makes it impossible for a man to pursue his dreams, he will connive to pursue them anyway

When life makes it impossible for a man to pursue his dreams, he will connive to pursue them anyway names a recurring form of persistence in the novel: people preserve their aspirations by finding workable forms for them inside restrictive circumstances. The principle emerges as the Count observes others making art in altered, partial, or private ways, then recognizes that apparent compromise need not mean the dream has been abandoned.

The Principle in Practice

The Count first considers Viktor Stepanovich, a husband and father of two who must make ends meet. At the Piazza, Viktor waves his baton and appears to have put the classical repertoire behind him. Yet he still teaches a promising young pianist Chopin nocturnes, using a borrowed piano and whatever spare time he can find. The lesson does not restore the life he once pursued; it shows how musical ambition can persist within a changed one.

Mishka, too, has a project. The comparison is not that the two men do the same work, but that each maintains a private creative purpose despite constraint. The young architect the Count notices in the Shalyapin likewise seems to have found satisfaction in drawing hotel interiors, work that fits the skills he cannot exercise by building actual structures. At first, the Count considers approaching him, then decides that interrupting his evident concentration would be a crime. He empties his glass, taps the bar twice, and goes upstairs instead.

A Dream Beyond the Sketchbook

The Count’s judgment that the young architect has adapted his ambitions proves incomplete. The architect is not adding another rendering of a hotel bar to his collection; he is working in a different sketchbook. Its designs range far beyond the interiors that the Count has assumed define his project: a two-hundred-story skyscraper with a rooftop diving board and a grassy park below; a cathedral to atheism whose cupolas could be launched like rockets toward the moon; and a museum of architecture filled with life-size replicas of Moscow’s demolished grand buildings.

The drawing in progress brings the architect’s inventiveness into especially sharp focus. It depicts a crowded restaurant resembling the Piazza, but beneath its floor lies a mechanism of axles, cogs, and gears. A giant crank protrudes from an outside wall; turning it would send the chairs pirouetting like ballerinas on a music box, carrying diners around the room until they stopped at different tables. Above the scene, a sixty-year-old gentleman looks down through the glass ceiling with his hand on the crank, ready to set the diners in motion. The design transforms an ordinary restaurant into an elaborate machine for rearranging its occupants: the architect’s imagination is not confined to the modest subject the Count had presumed.

The Count’s Revised Understanding

After the Count goes upstairs, the narrative widens the pattern beyond what he has witnessed. Viktor sets aside an arrangement for his orchestra and sorts through the Goldberg Variations, looking for one that might suit Sofia. In Yavas, in a rented room scarcely larger than the Count’s, Mikhail Mindich sits by candlelight sewing another sixteen-page signature. The young architect continues working in the Shalyapin. Their circumstances differ, as do their pursuits, but each scene gives concrete form to an ambition carried forward through an available, sometimes makeshift practice.

The expression therefore describes more than persistence in the abstract. Its decisive word is connive: the dream survives through resourcefulness, substitutions, and work that may be invisible to others. Viktor teaches on a borrowed piano; the architect draws what he cannot build; Mikhail sews his manuscript in a rented room. The Count recognizes the pattern, but his misreading of the architect’s sketches also qualifies his insight. A person’s visible accommodation does not necessarily reveal the full scale or character of the dream beneath it.