Rostov’s aborted suicide attempt

Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s aborted suicide attempt turns a roof poised between city and sky into the scene of a return to life. After years of confinement and exile within his own country, he stands at the Metropol’s northwest parapet prepared to leap. Abram’s interruption, and the taste of honey made by bees that have returned to the hotel, draw him back from an imagined plunge into oblivion. The reversal is neither an argument nor a sudden explanation: it comes through a summons, a spoonful of honey, and the unmistakable flavor of home.

The climb to the parapet

Shortly before midnight, having capped a snifter of brandy with six glasses of vodka, the Count emerges through the attic hatch and crosses the roof. The wind is wild enough, and the building moves enough, to make the roof seem like a ship’s deck on the high seas. He steadies himself at a chimney stack, then picks his way through irregular shadows toward the northwest corner. The physical uncertainty of that crossing gives the scene a precarious, almost maritime approach to its destination.

At the edge, he looks out over a city both his and not his. The Boulevard and Garden Rings are legible from the pattern of street lamps; at their center lies the Kremlin, with all of Russia beyond it. The view makes the distance between the confined man and the country he loves visible. His reflections enlarge that distance further: exile, he thinks, has existed for as long as humanity, but Russia has mastered the distinctive punishment of sending a person into exile at home. A man denied ordinary access to Moscow may dwell on its splendors more intensely than someone free to enjoy them.

A farewell before the leap

Before going to the parapet, the Count retrieves a Bordeaux glass from The Ambassador and sets it on a chimney top. He opens a label-less bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape taken from the Metropol’s cellar in 1924. He judges the wine an excellent vintage, perhaps from 1900 or 1921, and raises it toward Idlehour Estate. The old bottle and the destination of his toast bring a lost past into the present rooftop scene.

He drinks to Helena Rostov, naming her the flower of Nizhny Novgorod and remembering her love of Pushkin, her defense of Alexander, and her habit of embroidering pillowcases. His toast calls her life brief and her heart kind; he empties the glass. Although wine remains, he does not pour another drink or throw the glass away. He places it carefully on the chimney top. That deliberate care stands beside, rather than erases, the death he is preparing to choose.

The Count then stands at full height and places his right foot on the parapet’s edge. He says, “Good-bye, my country.” The city’s lights shimmer into the stars, so that human construction and the heavens seem to spin together. The narration carries his intended fall toward completion by comparing its speed to that of a kopek, a teacup, or a pineapple, and imagining his return to oblivion. The passage’s measured, almost playful account of falling prolongs the moment before the act; then a voice calls, “Your Excellency!”

Abram’s interruption and the honey

Abram is behind him, excited rather than startled to find the Count balanced at the place where the roof meets the ether. He insists that the Count must come and see something for himself, and hurries toward his encampment before waiting for an answer. The Count sighs, assures the city that he will be back in a moment, and follows. That small promise redirects him from the parapet without requiring him to announce a change of heart.

At the brazier, Abram points toward the hotel’s northeast corner. Against the brightly lit Bolshoi Theatre, tiny shadows dart through the air: the bees have returned. Abram seats the Count at the plank that has often served as his chair, then works at a makeshift table. A tray from one of the hives rests there. He cuts into the comb with a knife, spreads honey on a spoon, and hands it over, waiting expectantly while the Count tastes it.

The first impression is the familiar sweetness of fresh honey, described as sunlit, golden, and gay. Given the season, the Count expects hints of lilac from the Alexander Gardens or cherry blossoms from the Garden Ring. Instead, the taste suggests a grassy riverbank, a summer breeze, and a pergola; above all, it carries the unmistakable essence of a thousand apple trees in bloom. Abram identifies it as Nizhny Novgorod. The Count recognizes that the taste is exact: “And it was. Unmistakably so.” Abram adds that the bees must have been listening to them all these years. The two men look toward the roof’s edge, where the bees wheel over their hives, having traveled more than a hundred miles. Their black forms are likened to the inverse of stars, answering the stars that surrounded the Count at the parapet with a living presence rooted in work and memory.

The turn back to life

The interruption does not make the Count’s losses disappear. Earlier, he had traced a chain of choices and consequences back to his absence at Helena Rostov’s deathbed: his satisfaction at humiliating a cad, he believed, helped set in motion events that led to Helena’s pursuit and humiliation, his own shooting of the man, and his eventual failure to be at his sister’s side when she died. The rooftop toast gives that regret a concrete focus, while the honey brings the sensory world of Nizhny Novgorod within reach. The scene places a remembered home beside a city that remains both beloved and inaccessible.

Near two in the morning, after bidding Abram goodnight, the Count returns to his bedroom. He takes the gold coin from his pocket and puts it back on the stack inside the leg of his godfather’s desk, where it remains untouched for another twenty-eight years. The coin’s return marks a practical consequence of the night: it is no longer carried forward as part of the immediate movement toward death. The next evening, at six, the Count is the first through the doors when the Boyarsky opens. He addresses Andrey, the maître d’, and asks whether he can spare a moment. The scene ends not with an account of what follows, but with the Count back among the hotel’s routines, initiating an ordinary conversation.

Narrative significance

The scene’s reversal is built from interruption and attention. The narrative brings the Count to the brink, expands the time of the contemplated fall, and then diverts him through Abram’s urgent but unexplained invitation. The bees’ return matters first as an event to witness; the honey makes it personally consequential. A familiar taste acquires the power to restore a place that the Count has spent years longing for, without pretending that he has physically returned there.

The roof also holds several distances together: the Count’s exile from his country, the separation between Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, and the gap between the stars and the moving bees beneath them. Against the abstract pull of oblivion, the scene sets specific acts of care: preserving a glass rather than casting it away, tasting what Abram offers, putting the coin back, and going to the Boyarsky the following evening. The attempted suicide is aborted not by a grand declaration but by renewed participation in the life still around him.