Alexander Rostov and Leplevsky's hostility

Alexander Rostov and Leplevsky's hostility turns the Metropol’s hierarchy of service, protocol, and surveillance into a personal contest. The Bishop has spent decades belittling Rostov and keeping records on the people around him; when he discovers the map that exposes Rostov’s plan to escape with Sofia, Rostov’s careful restraint gives way to a calculated confrontation. Its final reversal is not a killing but a confinement: Rostov locks the Bishop in his office and leaves him to be discovered at a hotel banquet.

A Conflict Built on Status and Observation

The antagonism is rooted in a difference of standing that the Metropol makes impossible to forget. Rostov is a former aristocrat serving as a headwaiter, while Leplevsky is the Bishop, a hotel authority whose habits include the accounting of discrepancies and the removal of wine labels. When Leplevsky enters Rostov’s quarters, Rostov’s first indignation is not abstract: the intruder has entered without invitation and rested his elbows on the Grand Duke’s desk, a surface once associated with arguments to statesmen and counsel to friends. The desk makes the intrusion feel like an affront to the memory and dignity Rostov still tries to preserve within his diminished circumstances.

The hotel’s forms of address and service illuminate the larger pressure exerted by changing social rules. The manager tells Rostov that staff have continued to address him as Your Excellency, then insists that they stop because the times have changed. Rostov accepts the adjustment with a courteous observation that gentlemen must change with the times. That exchange does not itself establish a confrontation with Leplevsky, but it clarifies the world in which their hostility operates: titles are being withdrawn, old rank is treated as an inconvenience, and dignity must be maintained through conduct rather than public deference.

Rostov’s own standards of decorum also persist in his service role. When a solitary diner invites him to sit, he hesitates because he is dressed to wait upon the table; even after accepting the chair, he leaves his napkin off his lap. A hotel employee then brings the diner a bottle for approval. These details show how completely the boundary between service and personal interaction governs Rostov’s movements. Later, at a political dinner, that same service position gives him a different kind of access: while presenting courses and clearing plates, he hears every word exchanged around the table. The narrator describes such attentiveness as part of a capable waiter’s business, not as a breach of propriety. In the conflict with Leplevsky, observation and knowledge become powers the Bishop cannot monopolize.

The Map That Exposes the Escape Plan

The confrontation becomes acute when Leplevsky is waiting in Rostov’s room. Rostov is about to demand an explanation when he sees an open drawer and a paper in the Bishop’s hand. At first he fears that Leplevsky has found the letters expressing friendship and affection. But the document is more dangerous: a Baedeker map on which Rostov has drawn a red route from the Palais Garnier to the American Embassy by way of Avenue George V. The map makes visible a plan that had depended on concealment.

Leplevsky’s response is pointedly personal. He addresses Rostov by his working title, Headwaiter, and lists wine, cuisine, and the streets of Paris as the man’s many interests. The irony is sharpened by what the map actually signifies: Rostov’s apparent range of interests conceals a plan to leave the hotel, and the Bishop has caught him in the act of being exposed. The narrator notes that the shift in Rostov’s expression—from indignation to horror—confirms guilt before Leplevsky has made an accusation. The discovery does not merely threaten Rostov’s own freedom. He recognizes that his carelessness has put Sofia at risk, turning the breach of secrecy into a crisis of responsibility as well as a personal defeat.

Leplevsky’s feelings remain uncertain. The narration proposes several possibilities: pleasure at finally humiliating a man who had belittled him for more than thirty years, political righteousness, or the colder satisfaction of envy. None is confirmed as his motive. What is clear is the history of resentment and the imbalance he believes he has now overturned. His discovery gives him apparent control; Rostov’s horror seems to validate that control before the Bishop has to use it.

The Office Reversal

Once Leplevsky leaves, Rostov has to act within seconds. He reaches the executive offices unseen, uses Nina’s hotel passkey to enter the Bishop’s locked office, and finds the concealed compartment behind a wall panel. The box inside contains two pistols. Rostov removes and loads them, then waits in the manager’s chair, deliberately regulating his breathing and heart rate. The careful preparation contrasts with the emotional confusion that followed the discovery of the map: his initial fury, fear, and self-recrimination give way to a controlled readiness for the Bishop’s return.

Leplevsky enters without realizing Rostov is behind the desk. Even then, his instinct is protocol and command; he tells the Headwaiter to leave the office. The encounter reverses their apparent positions. Rostov is the employee who has entered an official space without permission, but he is armed, prepared, and no longer willing to accept the Bishop’s authority as decisive. When Rostov raises an old pistol with the intention of striking him across the face, Leplevsky throws down his keys. His sudden loss of superiority is rendered through that gesture: authority that had seemed secure is shown to depend, in part, on possession of the means to control the office and its records.

With the keys, Rostov opens the filing cabinets. The first three contain orderly operational reports on revenue, occupancy, staffing, maintenance, inventories, and discrepancies. The remaining cabinets hold files on hotel guests and employees, including Arkady, Vasily, Andrey, Emile, and Marina. These dossiers catalogue specific failings—tardiness, impertinence, disaffection, drunkenness, sloth, and desire. Rostov does not deny that the recorded weaknesses are real; instead, he recognizes how selectively they represent their subjects, since he could make much larger files documenting his friends’ virtues. He removes their files and places them on the desk, then checks the files under R and finds that his own is among the thickest. The discovery reveals that Leplevsky’s scrutiny is not confined to Rostov: it is a system for reducing the hotel’s people to usable accounts of their flaws. Rostov’s response is to bring those records into view and to recognize himself among their targets.

The Locking of the Bishop

Rostov’s final answer is to leave the Metropol and refuse to return. Leplevsky protests that he will be trapped for weeks before anyone finds him. Rostov counters with knowledge of the Bishop’s routine: Leplevsky attends the daily meeting at the Boyarsky Restaurant, and a banquet is scheduled in the ballroom on Tuesday night. Someone will find him then. Rostov closes the door and locks him inside the room where pomp waits.

The ending converts the hotel’s routines into the instrument of retaliation. Leplevsky has relied on schedules, rules, files, and keys to make other people legible and controllable; Rostov uses the Bishop’s own regular attendance and the coming banquet to set the limits of his confinement. The reversal is temporary in its mechanics—the text identifies a future occasion when Leplevsky will be discovered—but decisive in the relationship’s final balance. Rostov leaves, while the authority that had exposed his plan is left dependent on the very institutional order it had wielded against him.