The Count is from the Novgorod Nizhny province of Russia. After his parents died within months of each other, the Count was raised at Idlehour, the Rostov family estate, by his grandmother the Countess. In 1914, he shot a Hussar soldier who had jilted his sister, Helena; when the man’s father filed a complaint, the Count’s grandmother sent him to Paris, “as was the custom of the time” (163).

In 1918, following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Count returned to Idlehour to encourage his grandmother to flee the country. The Count himself, however, stayed in Russia, closing up Idlehour and moving into the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. On June 21, 1922, the Count is brought before a Bolshevik court, where as “a member of the leisure class” (5), he is sentenced to lifelong house arrest in the Metropol. He is informed that he would have been executed had it not been for a poem he had written in 1913 that appeared to have sympathy for the Bolshevik cause. Years later, the Count reveals that in fact, his friend, Mishka, a Bolshevik sympathizer, wrote the poem: they had agreed to publish it under the Count’s name because, “[g]iven Mishka’s background” (369), he would have been arrested by the Russian secret police.