Moscow

Moscow enters the novel chiefly as the city Dan Gregory left behind: the setting of his childhood and the starting point of a life that would later make him a celebrated, wealthy artist in the United States. Recounted by Rabo Karabekian through Gregory’s story and his own family’s memories, it is both a real place and a measure of the ambitions and constraints that shaped the people who came from it.

Gregory’s Origins

An article Rabo’s mother read in 1927 described Gregory as born in Moscow, where his father worked as a horse trainer. The article also said that Gregory had been apprenticed to the chief engraver of the Russian Imperial Mint. His beginnings in the city thus joined a family trade to an early encounter with skilled visual work, though his later success would take him far beyond the circumstances of his birth.

Gregory’s account gave those origins a harsher personal dimension. His father, he said, had been only a year older than Rabo was when Gregory was born. His parents had come to Moscow after his father took Gregory’s mother from her community, promising that they would become rich and famous there. Instead, Gregory’s father found that the horse trade was controlled by Poles and that even a capable trainer could rise no higher than the lowest stable position. Moscow appears in this telling not as a promised route to prosperity but as the place where an ambitious immigrant’s hopes met a rigid occupational hierarchy.

Childhood and Apprenticeship

Gregory said that the wife of Beskudnikov, an engraver of plates for Imperial bonds and paper currency, rescued him from his parents when he was about five. She did not raise him as a cherished son; she handed him to the household servants, who were responsible for his care. He compared their attitude toward him to the way servants later regarded Rabo: a further task among their duties. The city’s workshops and households formed the practical environment in which Gregory learned to survive and make himself useful.

He watched the animals around Beskudnikov’s workshop and imitated their strategies for getting by. The workshop’s apprentices and journeymen fed and petted the animals, so Gregory sought their attention too. He already knew Polish and Russian, learned the other languages used in the shop, and became a translator when Beskudnikov gave orders in English or French. He also mastered the shop’s crafts and developed a talent for quick likenesses. At ten he became an apprentice; by fifteen, he said, his ability had become so apparent that Beskudnikov assigned him a test meant to be impossible: draw a convincing one-ruble note, front and back.

Gregory and his coworkers considered the note perfect after six months of work, but Beskudnikov dismissed it as childish and tore it apart. The episode gives Moscow’s artistic formation a double edge: the city offered Gregory access to training and demanding craft, yet recognition remained controlled by authority. His eventual departure did not erase that education; it began with skills acquired in the city’s workshops and with an early experience of talent being tested, judged, and denied.

Departure and Retrospective Meaning

Gregory came to the United States in 1907 as an ordinary immigrant, not as a refugee from a massacre, and changed his name from Dan Gregorian to Dan Gregory. He became an illustrator of magazine stories, advertisements, and books for young people. Rabo’s mother understood his success as evidence of an Armenian connection when she saw him pictured on a yacht named Ararat, but the article’s account placed his birth in Moscow and his rise within the American art market. The contrast makes the city a point of origin rather than the final explanation of his identity or achievement.

For Rabo, Gregory’s Moscow childhood also supplied a cautionary parallel. Gregory had arrived in America after discovering that his father’s promise of fame could not overcome the limits of the local horse-trading world. Years later, when the seventeen-year-old Rabo came to seek an artistic future, Gregory used his own father’s story to challenge the young man’s expectations. Moscow therefore belongs to the novel’s account of artistic ambition as a history of migration, labor, and unequal opportunity: the place where Gregory’s family sought advancement, where Gregory acquired his earliest practical education, and from which he eventually carried those abilities abroad.