Bishop Leplevsky

Bishop Leplevsky is the Metropol’s manager, a figure whose language of perfection and discrepancy steadily reaches into the hotel’s daily life. He asks staff to abandon the honorific Your Excellency when addressing Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, directs the Boyarsky Restaurant’s operations, and presents the Count with a letter concerning Sofia’s assignment to an orchestra in Stalingrad. Through these encounters, managerial order becomes more than a matter of service: it presses against inherited manners, professional judgment, and family attachment.

Identity and Authority

Leplevsky’s position gives him responsibility for the hotel as a whole, not just for a single department. When the Count raises a concern about the Boyarsky Restaurant, Leplevsky answers that every aspect of the hotel must meet a standard of perfection and that this requires vigilant attention to eliminating discrepancies. The breadth of that claim is important: a restaurant’s service, staff conduct, and arrangements all fall within a manager’s remit, and the language of correction can extend well beyond an obvious practical fault.

His authority is paired with a manner of formal welcome. At a daily meeting, he arrives after business at the front desk has detained him, apologizes for keeping the others waiting, then instructs them not to congregate until he has arrived in future. The small correction establishes the order of the gathering: the meeting is not to begin on the colleagues’ own time, but on the manager’s. Leplevsky’s courteous phrasing does not soften the directive; it makes the exercise of authority sound like ordinary procedure.

Manners and the Hotel’s Changing Order

Leplevsky addresses the Count over staff continuing to call him Your Excellency. He says that he has little choice but to insist that the staff refrain from using such terms because the times have changed. His explanation trails off before identifying the particular pressures behind the decision, leaving the appeal to historical change to do the work. The Count reassures him that changing times are a fact of life and that gentlemen must change with them. Their exchange makes the honorific a compact test of adaptation: Leplevsky is charged with enforcing a new public idiom, while the Count accepts the correction without treating it as a personal insult.

The Count’s response also draws a distinction between changing outward conduct and surrendering the habits of civility. The manager seeks compliance from his staff; the Count turns the same premise into a maxim about how a gentleman should behave. Neither man disputes that circumstances have changed, but the exchange leaves open what adaptation should preserve. In this brief negotiation, the hotel’s post-revolutionary order is expressed through a form of address rather than a dramatic confrontation.

Regulation at the Boyarsky Restaurant

The practical consequences of Leplevsky’s managerial approach become visible when a new regimen is put into operation at the Boyarsky Restaurant. A clerk sits behind the maître d’s podium, and papers move around the room like instruments in a stock exchange. The procedure creates an immediate cost: cutlets of veal and asparagus arrive cold. The Count sees Leplevsky pause at the restaurant door during the second seating and follows him into the hall to raise the problem directly.

Rather than present the matter as a personal grievance, the Count appeals to Leplevsky’s responsibility for the hotel and to the restaurant’s shared purpose of satisfying customers. He praises the written word, invoking the couplets of Pushkin, the paragraphs of Dostoevsky, and the transcriptions of Socrates and Jesus, before arguing that pencils and pads threaten the Boyarsky’s romantic elegance. His joke imagines a marriage proposal processed by an agency and recorded in triplicate. It is a deliberately social argument against administrative paperwork: a procedure capable of documenting an exchange may still destroy the grace that gives the exchange its meaning.

Leplevsky does not answer by denying the Count’s concern. He acknowledges that the Count and his colleagues have distinct responsibilities, but places those duties beneath his own wider obligation to ensure perfection throughout the hotel. His language recasts the Count’s complaint as a discrepancy to be eliminated. The difference is not simply between a manager who likes paperwork and a waiter who dislikes it. The Count is defending a particular kind of service, in which timing and atmosphere matter; Leplevsky’s standard gives the manager authority to correct the system even when its formal neatness makes the meal worse.

At a later meeting with the restaurant’s chef and maître d’, Leplevsky makes his oversight concrete. He studies Emile Zhukovsky’s menu and proposes beets with pork instead of apples, noting that a bushel of beets remains in the pantry. Zhukovsky responds with a furious glance. Leplevsky then examines the reservation book, turns through its pages to the current week, gives Andrey seating instructions, and points out that the centerpiece flowers have begun to wilt. Andrey replies that the flower shop has not been carrying enough stock for frequent replacements. Menu, pantry, seating, and flowers all receive the manager’s attention; the scene shows his perfectionism operating through specific, small decisions, while also recording its friction with the specialists whose work he supervises.

Conflict with the Count

Leplevsky’s relationship with the Count becomes more threatening when he presents a letter welcoming Sofia to the Youth Orchestra of Stalingrad, an industrial city six hundred miles away. The Count reads the technical language with nausea. Leplevsky names the orchestra and addresses the Count with a show of congratulation; the Count then sees spite in the manager’s smile. Nausea and bewilderment give way to cold fury, and he rises with the intention of seizing Leplevsky by the lapels or throat.

The moment reveals the personal stakes behind the manager’s administrative reach. A letter can present a consequential change in Sofia’s life as a matter of official wording, while the Count experiences it as a threat to his daughter. The scene does not establish that Leplevsky created the assignment; it does establish that he delivers the news and meets the Count’s reaction with apparent spite. Before the confrontation can become physical, Anna Urbanova enters the room, crosses to the Count, and places a hand at the small of his back. Leplevsky’s control of the encounter is interrupted by her arrival, which redirects the charged exchange without erasing the conflict.

Narrative Role

Leplevsky connects the hotel’s everyday systems to the wider authority that can shape the lives of its residents. At the restaurant, his emphasis on eliminating discrepancies collides with the Count’s defense of atmosphere and with the chef’s professional judgment. In the staff-addressing episode, the same capacity to regulate behavior appears as an attempt to make public manners conform to changed times. In the Stalingrad scene, administrative language bears on a family relationship and provokes a response that procedure cannot contain.

The contrast is not between order and chaos so much as between competing ideas of what order is for. Leplevsky treats consistency and oversight as duties of management; the Count insists that service also depends on tact, timing, and human consideration. The cold food produced by the new regimen gives that disagreement a material consequence, while the letter about Sofia raises its emotional stakes. Across these episodes, Leplevsky’s authority is most revealing when its apparently tidy systems encounter people whose needs cannot be reduced to the elimination of discrepancies.