Rostov returns to Russia and arranges his grandmother's departure

Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s return to Russia in 1918 was an act of family duty that ended in separation: he came back after the Tsar’s execution, arranged for his grandmother, Countess Rostov, to leave the country, and remained behind. The journey brought him home not to restore the life he had left, but to close the family estate and begin a life in a country on the verge of upheaval. Years later, as he prepared to abandon his rooms, the memory surfaced among the possessions he could not take with him, giving the return a double meaning: a homecoming and the beginning of another kind of exile.

The journey back

News of the Tsar’s execution reached the Count while he was in Paris. He set out at once, crossing six nations over more than twenty days and skirting eight battalions fighting under five different flags. On August 7, 1918, he arrived at Idlehour Estate with nothing but a rucksack. The starkness of his arrival measured the distance between the life he had left and the one he was returning to: the countryside was on the verge of upheaval, and the household was in distress.

Countess Rostov met him with composure. She did not rise from her chair; instead, she welcomed her grandson and invited him to join her for tea, assuming he must be hungry after the journey. Her ordinary hospitality stands against the exceptional circumstances surrounding their meeting. The Count had returned not to settle back into the household but to tell her that she had to leave the country.

Arranging his grandmother’s departure

The Count explained the necessity of her departure and described the arrangements he had made for her passage. Countess Rostov understood that there was no alternative. Although every servant in her employ was ready to accompany her, she understood that she must travel with only two. The plan therefore required a second, painful reduction: not only leaving the estate, but leaving behind most of the household staff who had been prepared to go with her.

She also understood why her grandson and only heir, whom she had raised from the age of ten, would not accompany her. The account does not present their separation as a quarrel or a failure of affection. Its restraint is part of its force: the grandmother accepts the necessity, and the Count does not go with her. They part without tears on the docks at Peterhof, a composure connected to a lesson she had taught him long before.

When the Count was seven, he lost a game of draughts to a neighboring boy so badly that he wept, cursed, and scattered the pieces across the floor. His father reprimanded him and sent him to bed without supper. Countess Rostov came to sit at the foot of his bed. She acknowledged that losing was unpleasant and that the other boy was difficult, but asked why the Count would give his opponent the satisfaction of seeing him upset. Years later, the Count and his grandmother part without tears in that same spirit: grief is present, but it is not allowed to dictate the manner of their farewell.

Closing the estate

After the parting, the Count returned to the family estate to administer its shuttering. The work proceeded in practical stages: chimneys were swept, pantries cleared, and furniture shrouded. For a moment the sequence resembled preparations for the family’s seasonal return to Saint Petersburg. But the apparent routine had been reversed. The dogs were released from their kennels, the horses from their stables, and the servants from their duties; the household was not being readied for another season but dismantled.

The Count selected some of the finest family furniture and loaded it into a single wagon. He then bolted the doors and set out for Moscow. That small cargo was all that could be carried forward from the estate, while the people and animals who had given it life were dispersed. The return that began with a rucksack thus became a series of deliberate departures: his grandmother left the country, the estate was closed, and the Count continued alone toward the capital.

Possessions, homecoming, and exile

Years later, while taking inventory of the rooms he was about to abandon, the Count recalled how little had survived the successive winnowings of his possessions. He paused over delicate scissors prized by his sister, then considered what would be left behind. The memory of his return to Idlehour Estate belongs to this meditation on objects and loss: a journey made with almost nothing had become part of a life in which cherished belongings accumulated memories, yet could not guarantee solace when a companion was gone.

The remembered return also acquires a broader significance from the Count’s later reflection on exile. He considers the old practice of expelling people from their homeland, then contrasts it with the Russian practice of banishing a person within the country. Such a person remains surrounded by what is loved but cannot freely begin again elsewhere. The distinction illuminates the shape of the Count’s own life in Russia: his return in 1918 brought him back to his homeland, but it did not restore his former home or family world. In the episode’s quiet sequence—arrival, tea, arrangements, farewell, shuttered doors—the language of homecoming gradually gives way to the reality of loss.