1924

The novel’s 1924 frame connects the Count’s sudden social invisibility with his discovery that the Russia he remembers is disappearing faster than he had believed. A spell cast by Anna Urbanova in 1923 first makes invisibility a figure for exclusion; the Metropol’s cellar then gives that loss a material form in thousands of wine bottles stripped of their labels.

The Year and Its Frame

The section marked 1924 opens with a reflection on invisibility. Folklore usually treats it as a power knowingly acquired, useful for slipping past danger or entering places unseen. The novel turns that expectation around: the more unsettling tale is of a person made invisible without knowing it. The Count, once accustomed to being at the center of battle, conversation, and social life, now finds himself unseen by friend and foe alike.

That condition is traced to Anna Urbanova’s action in 1923, placing the previous year’s personal rupture behind the 1924 frame. In this account, anonymity is not chosen privacy but a curse: the Count’s presence remains, while the recognition that once made him part of the world falls away.

The Cellar of Unlabeled Bottles

In another episode associated with this year, the Count follows Andrey through the dining room and kitchen and down a winding stair to a part of The Metropol even Nina has never visited: its wine cellar. Brick arches and a cool, dark atmosphere give the space the solemn appearance of a catacomb, but its racks hold wine rather than the likenesses of saints. The collection spans a century of European vintages.

Its scale makes the discovery difficult to absorb: almost ten thousand cases, more than a hundred thousand bottles, and not one label among them. The Count’s shocked response gives voice to the magnitude of the change. These wines retain their physical presence, yet the identifying marks that would make their histories legible have vanished.

A Past Erased at Speed

The cellar prompts the Count to reconsider how slowly a way of life is supposed to fade. Songs, recipes, and inherited furniture can make the past seem capable of surviving for generations. But upheaval, political turmoil, and industrial progress can compress that gradual process into a sudden break. The Count recognizes that the revolution has not merely placed his former life out of fashion; it has made its continuation increasingly impossible.

For years, he had spoken lightly of poetry, travel, and romance as things behind him, while privately imagining they still waited somewhere at the edges of his life. The unlabeled bottle in his hand overturns that assumption. The Bolsheviks’ effort to recast the future, he understands, entails uprooting or erasing the remnants of his Russia. He returns the bottle to its slot and goes back to Andrey, but the realization changes the meaning of what remains: nearly everything is behind him, and he has one last duty to attend to.