The central question of the novel is posed in its opening lines: what is a man's purpose? Forced to abandon his life of leisure, the Count must find a new way to contribute meaningfully to the world from within his small, confined space.
The novel begins in 1922, in the tumultuous aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, an unrepentant aristocrat and man of erudition, is brought before a Bolshevik tribunal. Condemned to death for his subversive past, his sentence is commuted to a life of house arrest in the attic room of the Metropol, the grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin, thanks to a revolutionary poem he wrote years earlier. Un Caballero En Moscu Amor Towles Epub