Osip Ivanovich Glebnikov

Osip Ivanovich Glebnikov is a former Red Army colonel and Party officer whose position gives him a view of Soviet power from within, while his longing for eastern Georgia keeps his attention fixed on what that power cannot supply. He approaches Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov for discreet instruction in Western languages and customs, but their recurring lessons become more than a curriculum: they offer a setting in which both men can examine political change, personal judgment, and the motives behind another person’s words.

Identity and Background

Glebnikov introduces himself as a former colonel of the Red Army and an officer of the Party. His account of his life turns on a geographical reversal: as a boy in eastern Georgia he dreamed of Moscow; at thirty-nine, living in Moscow, he dreams of eastern Georgia. The contrast makes him at once a man who has arrived at the center of power and someone who remains emotionally oriented toward the place he left. The narrative gives no further account of his family or military career, but his self-description establishes both his institutional standing and the private distance between his present life and his remembered home.

His ambitions are practical as well as intellectual. Glebnikov tells Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov that the country is approaching a new role on the world stage: after years of admiring Western ideas and fashions, it expects to export more grain and manufacture more steel than any European country, while advancing its own ideology. He believes that this change makes careful listening and clear speech newly important. His interest in foreign languages is therefore not presented as an ornamental accomplishment. He wants to understand the people who speak them, particularly the privileged classes who remain influential, including what they regard as moral duty and what they value or disdain. Because a man in his position must cultivate such skills discreetly, he asks for private rather than official instruction.

The Monthly Lessons

Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov accepts Glebnikov’s proposal to dine together once a month in the Count’s room, speaking French and English and discussing Western society. From 1930 onward, their dinners take place on the third Saturday of each month. The regularity turns their arrangement into a durable feature of both men’s lives: a private seminar maintained inside a hotel, at a time when political and economic plans are being made on a national scale.

For their first several years of study, they concentrate on France. Their topics range from idioms and forms of address to Napoleon, Richelieu, and Talleyrand; from the Enlightenment and Impressionism to the French aptitude for je ne sais quoi. They then turn to Britain, considering tea, the rules of cricket, foxhunting etiquette, Shakespeare, and the importance of the pub. The sequence gives Glebnikov not merely a vocabulary but a set of cultural practices and reference points through which to interpret the societies he hopes to understand.

When their attention shifts to the United States, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov selects Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America as their starting text. Glebnikov is intimidated by the book’s length, but takes the assignment seriously: he studies for three weeks, working late, and arrives at dinner prepared and eager to begin. His insistence that they turn from the wine and steak to the book shows how actively he directs the lessons. He is not a passive recipient of the Count’s knowledge; he comes with questions and expects the conversation to do work.

Intellectual Exchange and Judgment

Glebnikov’s respect for Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s judgment is particularly clear when the Count distinguishes resignation from reconciliation. Glebnikov laughs, lightly slaps the table, and says that this is precisely the sort of nuance that brought him to the Count. His response makes the lessons reciprocal: the Count supplies distinctions and interpretations, while Glebnikov recognizes their value and draws them out. What he seeks is not simply fluency in French or English, but a way to perceive the assumptions beneath speech and behavior.

That purpose becomes especially evident when a lesson is interrupted by the Count’s distress over his friend Mishka. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov has described Mishka’s views on Moscow’s burning, the toppling of statues, the silencing of poets, and the slaughter of cattle. Glebnikov listens attentively, nodding as the Count recounts those criticisms. Rather than dismissing Mishka’s position or treating the Count’s anxiety as a language exercise, he asks whether Mishka could be right in his opinions while wrong in his sentiments. The question separates the truth of a claim from the emotional state in which it is expressed, extending their study of how people think into a test of how one friend should understand another.

Historical Setting and Narrative Role

The lessons unfold against a state project that Glebnikov describes in terms of national ascent. The First Five-Year Plan is intended to turn an agrarian society into an industrial power, and the government demands greater agricultural output to feed growing cities. The later account of collectivization exposes the human costs beneath that plan: the exile of a million kulaks, resistance to imposed agricultural methods, too few tractors, poor weather, and falling harvests met with higher quotas and armed requisitions. In 1932, those pressures contribute to widespread hardship and mass starvation among peasants in Ukraine. Read beside Glebnikov’s confidence about grain, steel, and international standing, this account places his hopes for diplomatic understanding within a history in which official ambitions and lived consequences diverge sharply.

Glebnikov’s political office also sits uneasily beside the hotel’s quieter forms of administration. During the confrontation with Bishop Leplevsky, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov discovers files on members of the staff, including Glebnikov, arranged among records of guests and filled with accounts of personal failings. The narrative does not disclose the contents of Glebnikov’s file, so it cannot establish what has been recorded about him. Its presence nevertheless places the Party officer within the same apparatus of institutional scrutiny as the hotel’s other employees. His private education in interpreting other societies thus takes place alongside a system that reduces individuals to documented faults.

Glebnikov’s narrative importance lies in the combination of these roles: homesick Georgian, Moscow-based Party officer, diligent student, and attentive interpreter of other people’s feelings. His recurring dinners give the novel a sustained encounter between political knowledge and personal judgment. The lessons move from the customs of foreign societies toward a more intimate question—how to hear a friend clearly when grief or anger may complicate what he says—and preserve a private space for inquiry within a world increasingly shaped by plans, quotas, and files.