THE FEISTY FOOTNOTE

My new novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, tells the story of thirty-year-old aristocrat

who is sentenced to live in the luxurious Metropol Hotel across the street from the
Kremlin for the rest of his life.
In a way, the spark for this story was struck almost thirty years agowhile I was
the assistant to the Curator of English and American Literature at the Stanford
libraries.
One afternoon (when I was probably supposed to be doing something else), I was
standing in the stacks, turning through the pages of Anton Chekhovs collected
letters. Towards the back was a letter that the author had written to his sister in
1904 from Berlinwhere hed travelled to recuperate from a serious illness. In the
letter, he tells his sister that the trip has been a great success. He says that has
enjoyed the city, that his hotel is excellent, and the food delicious. In fact, he says
the bread is so amazing that Russians who have never been abroad dont know
how good bread can be. Chekhov concludes by assuring his sister that he is on his
way to a full recovery. A month later, he died.
Now, at the end of this poignant bit of literary history, there were six footnotes, the
second of which explained that during the Soviet erawhen Chekhovs complete
correspondence was collected into an authoritative editionthis letter from the
authors last days, in which he celebrated the bread of Berlin, was expurgated.
In some ways, my long-standing fascination with Russia began with that footnote.
On the one hand, it provided me with a glimpse into the extraordinary workings of
the Communist government. For here was an apparatus so grand in scale, so
intricate, and so obsessive, that it could ferret out a subversive sentence on the
400th page of a single book. The very notion chilled me to the bone. Yet, at the
same time, it filled me with a sense of elation. Because what this footnote also
showed was how absolutely convinced the Russian people were of the power of the
written word. The Soviet censors donned their spectacles, sharpened their pencils,
and read every manuscript with the utmost care because they believed, quite
deeply, that a single sentence could put an entire government at risk. So, like a
good graduate student, I made a Xerox copy of the letter and stuck it in my files.

Twenty-five years later, having waited patiently at the bottom of a drawer, this
footnote slipped out of my files, climbed onto my desk, and weaseled its way into
the pages of my new novel. For in A Gentleman in Moscow, it is the main
characters oldest frienda devout member of the Party and conscientious lover
of literaturewho is instructed to expunge the offending sentence from the
collection of Chekhovs letters. And like so many of his countrymen, he finds
himself having to decide on the spot whether to compromise his integrity in a
tiny little way, or refuse to do so on principal and face the consequences.
In retrospect, what I find particularly pleasing about this little anecdote is that
when I went into the stacks that day, I wasnt looking for Chekhovs letters, at
all. I was actually looking for a collection of his short stories. But the beauty of a
library is that once weve identified the filing number of a specific volume, as we
go winding through the labyrinth of bookshelves, drawing closer and closer to our
prey, running our fingers along the bindings of the books, we are bound to
stumble upon something unexpected that piques our interest.
Many an observer would define a library as a place you go to get the book you
want; but that isnt quite right. A library is the place you go to get the book you
dont know you want. The book youre going to end up with is the one that
happens to be on the shelf just to the left of the one you came looking for; and
that book promises you an instance of unanticipated illumination.