This is the story of Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian nobleman who, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, is sentenced to lifelong imprisonment in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. The Count must adjust not only to his new circumstances in a small room in the hotel’s belfry but also to the knowledge that his way of life is disappearing under the Bolshevik regime. As the years pass, the Count witnesses his Country changing outside his window, and he must learn to reconcile these changes with the past he holds dear. However, his time in the hotel teaches him lessons he would not have learned otherwise.