Amor Towles

My wife Caroline heard Amor talk about A Gentleman in Moscow at a book signing; she told me he would make a good subject for a photograph. My father was Russian and he served in the Imperial Army and then in the White Army which made a possible meeting with Amor even more of a lure to me.

The approach to his country house is down a mile long drive lined with trees and mass plantings of pachysandra and ferns that rival the mass plantings of pachysandra, periwinkle and bluebells at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

I hardly gave him a moment to say a word of welcome before I burst forth with my Russian stories, which, I thought later, was rather rude of me. But I have so few chances to talk about the last days of Imperial Russia that they must be grabbed, and Amor's politeness allowed me to press on uninterrupted.

I was also aware that telling my stories about Russia might interfere with the photography. But I plunged in. First about meeting the violinist Viktoria Mullova in Moscow in 1981, then the story of my being tracked down by a student at Sacramento University, who was totally unknown to me. He told me he was doing his theses on my godfather Grand Duke Dmitri. He told me that the Grand Duke's diaries are now at Yale being translated, and that there are several mentions of my father in them.

The prospect of finding anything about my father's life in Russia was exciting because he died when I was four. My mother seldom talked about him and she died when I was 15, an age before I had found the necessary resolve to press her about these things.  

After we had finished photographing by the lake he offered us a cup of Lapsang souchong. We sat in his kitchen and I made sure we talked about anything except Russia.