Nina Takes Rostov on an Exploration of the Metropol Hotel

Nina Takes Rostov on an Exploration of the Metropol Hotel marks the beginning of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s education in the place he has called home for four years. At a moment when idleness threatens to become an enduring condition, nine-year-old Nina Kulikova shows him that the hotel contains far more than its public rooms and familiar routines: behind its doors lie the machinery, stores, lost possessions, secret access, and changing perspectives that make it a world within a world.

A guide for the idle Count

After an ill-fated night on the second-floor steps, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov has given up his nightly aperitif, suspecting that liquor has affected his mood. Abstinence does not cure his restlessness. With little to occupy him, he wonders how desultory three weeks might feel after three years. The narrative casts Nina as a guide for someone who has lost his way: she is not simply a companion but a person with a more searching knowledge of their shared surroundings.

On the first Wednesday in July, the Count notices Nina hurrying through the lobby with unusual determination. Their conversation opens a door into her private map of the hotel. She tells him that four women meet every Wednesday at three o’clock to play whist in the seldom-used card room. Someone arriving at two thirty can hide in the cupboard and hear their conversation, which includes considerable cursing; after the women leave, there are cookies to eat. The Count’s interest is immediate. When he asks where else she spends her time, Nina arranges to meet him the next day. This exchange establishes the spirit of the lessons: the hotel is not merely to be passed through but investigated, and its routines offer opportunities to a curious observer.

Nina’s hotel and the Count’s education

The contrast between teacher and student is striking. The Count knows the staff by name, the services from experience, and the decorative styles of the suites by heart. Yet Nina’s knowledge makes him recognize how little he has explored. She has lived at the Metropol for ten months, but her stay has been a form of confinement. Her father, posted to Moscow only temporarily, has not enrolled her in school; her governess prefers that she remain inside, away from the supposed corruptions of street lamps and trolley cars. Although the hotel door spins continuously for the world beyond, it does not open Nina’s way out.

She has answered that restriction by studying the building itself. She knows rooms, their purposes, and possibilities for putting them to other uses. In her experience, the Metropol expands rather than closes in: first into the scale of two city blocks, then half of Moscow, and, if she stays long enough, all of Russia. This imaginative enlargement gives the exploration its governing idea. The hotel’s apparent limits become a field of discovery when attention turns from its public face to the spaces behind and beneath it.

Nina begins at the bottom, leading the Count through basement corridors and cul-de-sacs. In the boiler room, steam escapes from a web of valves. Using his handkerchief, the Count gingerly opens a small cast-iron furnace door and sees the fire that burns day and night. Nina points out its practical use as a place to destroy secret messages and illicit love letters; when she asks whether he receives such letters, he answers that he most certainly does. The exchange turns a piece of hotel infrastructure into a resource for secrecy, and lets the Count play along with Nina’s adventurous way of reading the building.

Hidden machinery and recovered possessions

In the electrical room, Nina shows him a lever that can plunge the ballroom into darkness, offering cover for the theft of pearls. Its danger is suggested by the room’s metallic buzzing and sulfurous smell; Nina’s warning not to touch anything is nearly redundant. As with the furnace, an ordinary service space contains a possibility concealed from hotel guests: the same systems that keep the establishment functioning could also be used to interrupt its public spectacle.

A cluttered basement room reveals a different kind of hidden history. It holds objects abandoned by guests: umbrellas, Baedekers, and heavy novels their owners no longer wanted to carry. The Count recognizes, among them, two oriental rugs, a standing lamp, and the small satinwood bookcase he left behind in his former suite. The discovery makes the storage room more than a miscellaneous collection. It preserves material traces of people’s departures, including the Count’s own, and shows him that what he has left behind has not necessarily vanished.

At the basement’s far end, Nina and the Count reach a narrow back stair and a bright blue door. Nina, unusually flustered, looks around before removing the delicate chain she wears around her neck. The pendant the Count had seen earlier at Piazza is not a charm or locket, but a passkey to the hotel. She hands it to him; he fits it into a skull-shaped opening in the escutcheon and turns it until the tumblers click. Nina gasps when the door opens onto shelves of silver service, polished and gleaming from floor to ceiling.

The banquet rooms and the hotel’s many views

The storehouse contains Sèvres plates marked with the hotel’s insignia, two-foot samovars, imposing soup tureens, coffeepots, gravy boats, and utensils each designed for a particular culinary task. Nina picks up an asparagus server, a delicate implement with an ivory handle and a plunger that opens and closes its opposing blades. The Count identifies it; she wonders whether a banquet truly needs one. The abundance is comic in its precision, but the hidden silver also raises a practical question: why was this valuable collection not carried off by the Bolsheviks? Nina’s plain answer is that perhaps they need it there. The Count recognizes the point. Political power may change hands, and the scale of official celebrations may change with it, but new statesmen will still hold banquets and require the hotel’s service.

In the days that follow, Nina continues her curriculum systematically. After the basement, mail room, switchboard, and other ground-floor spaces, she takes the Count upstairs to the suites. The visits cross the boundary of ordinary decorum, but her purpose is not theft or mere snooping: she is interested in the views. Each room offers a different prospect, shaped by its height and orientation as well as by season and time of day. Room 322 affords a view of battalions marching toward Red Square on November 7; the deep window ledges of room 405 make it suitable for dropping snowballs on unsuspecting passersby. Even room 244, which looks onto a depressing alley, has its uses: from its window one can watch fruit sellers gather at the kitchen door and sometimes catch an apple tossed up from below. Nina’s tour thus recasts suites as vantage points, each with its own relation to the life of the hotel and city. The Count’s education begins with a simple reversal: a building he thought he knew has become legible through the attention of someone who has learned to explore it from within.