Alexander Rostov and Osip Glebnikov's friendship

The friendship between Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov and Osip Glebnikov grows through an unusual shared practice: watching films together and arguing over what they reveal. Beginning as a regular meeting in 1930, it becomes a form of intellectual companionship in which political theory, moral judgment, and comic imitation coexist. Its rhythm eventually falters as life intervenes, but a chance reunion over a film shows that the ease between the two men has endured.

Origins and a changing rhythm

The Count and Osip began meeting monthly in 1930. Over the years, the meetings became quarterly, then semiannual, and at last ceased altogether. The narration gives no dramatic rupture or single explanation for this dwindling contact. Instead, it treats the separation as an ordinary consequence of time: the men remain fond of one another, but the intentions to meet do not prevent life from getting in the way.

Their renewed contact begins by chance in early June, when Osip visits the Boyarsky with a colleague. As he leaves, he approaches the Count to say that it has been too long. The Count agrees and proposes that they get together for a film. Osip welcomes the suggestion, and the exchange might have ended there; the Count’s sudden notion turns their casual promise into a plan. When the Count insists on choosing the film, Osip negotiates the food in return. This small bargain restores their old pattern: a serious occasion made companionable by teasing and shared appetite.

Film as their common language

The film meetings began with an uncensored print of A Day at the Races, projected in the Yellow Room two months after what Osip called the de Tocqueville Affair. From then on, the men set aside their history books and studied America through movies. Osip had mastered English, including the past perfect progressive, by 1939, but he still regarded American films as material demanding close examination. To him, cinema was not merely a window onto Western culture; it was an instrument that could pacify workers, offering entertainment in place of political revolt.

Osip approached each genre as a political analyst. He condemned musicals as fantasies for the impoverished, horror films as distractions from workers’ fears, and vaudevillian comedies as narcotics. Westerns seemed more dangerous still: in his reading, they cast collective action as criminal and the lone defender of private property as virtuous. His denunciation of Hollywood was sweeping, but it was not a reason to stop watching. The films became the evidence through which he and the Count tested his claims.

Film noir unsettled Osip’s earlier verdict. Watching This Gun for Hire, Shadow of a Doubt, and Double Indemnity, he encountered stories in which corruption and cruelty were ordinary, justice weak, and self-interest powerful. He saw in them an unsparing depiction of capitalism rather than a simple instrument for concealing its failures. Humphrey Bogart’s performances particularly absorbed him. Osip admired the actor’s hard appearance, sardonic manner, and lack of sentiment, but valued most the change from apparent indifference to decisive action once indignation took hold. The Count’s presence mattered to these judgments: Osip explained what he saw to him, while the shared screen supplied a continuing subject on which their arguments could turn.

Disagreement, attention, and play

Their discussions could move from a film’s politics to a question about Russian character. During a screening of The Maltese Falcon, the Count asked whether Russians were especially prone to destroy what they had created. Osip, intent on the action, turned in disbelief when the Count raised this question as Sam Spade was dealing with a wounded stranger and a mysterious package. He stopped the projector at the moment Spade reached for his penknife and rebuked the Count for abandoning the urgent scene for metaphysics. The contrast is affectionate but real: the Count draws broad reflections from the image, while Osip insists on the precise crisis unfolding before them.

Their later screening of Casablanca makes their companionship physical as well as argumentative. The Count chooses the film; Osip chooses the food. The opening moves quickly through murders, suspects, a shooting, a theft, the arrival of the Gestapo, and the letters of transit hidden in a piano. Osip becomes so absorbed that he salutes when Captain Renault’s officer does, cashes in his winnings when Ugarte does, and imitates Ugarte’s dash, door-slamming, pistol-drawing, and firing. His response turns the screening into a private performance shared with the Count.

The Count takes particular pleasure in Osip’s reaction at the film’s end. When Renault discards a bottle of Vichy water and kicks it across the floor, Osip, formerly a Red Army colonel and a high Party official, mirrors the gesture from his seat. The joke depends on trust: political rank and past authority do not prevent him from surrendering to the scene, and the Count can enjoy that surrender without interrupting it. Their film ritual accommodates both ideological seriousness and unguarded play.

Affection and what survives

The renewed screening does not erase the years in which the men stopped meeting. Rather, it shows how quickly their shared habits return once they are together again: each chooses part of the evening, Osip studies the film, and the Count watches his friend as closely as the screen. Their friendship is not presented as a bond maintained through constant contact or solemn declarations. Its continuity lies in the familiar exchanges and in their different, complementary ways of paying attention.

That attention also carries beyond their meetings. Almost a year after helping the Count escape, Viktor Stepanovich watches Casablanca and remembers a conversation with the Count in a railway-station café. He notices Rick set upright a cocktail glass knocked over during the disturbance around Ugarte. The tiny gesture suggests that composure need not mean indifference: even amid arrest and disorder, a person can restore a little order through a small act. The film’s meaning here echoes the kind of moral reading the Count and Osip practiced together. Their friendship made movies a place to argue about politics and human conduct, but also a means of noticing what a hurried glance might miss.