The count, though, is consigned to a tiny room on the top floor, crammed with a few pieces of his fine furniture and a set of porcelain plates. It was constructed at the turn of the century and soon seized by the communists to house bureaucrats and impress foreign guests. After all, the Hotel Metropol is a grand Art Nouveau palace - an actual place, still standing. Towles observes that “the Russians were the first people to master the notion of sending a man into exile at home.” But the count’s sentence is hardly the Gulag.
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