A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

How well I remember / When it came as a visitor on foot / And dwelt a while amongst us / A melody in the semblance of a mountain cat. / Well, where is our purpose now? / Like so many questions / I answer this one / With the eye-averted peeling of a pear. / With a bow I bid goodnight / And pass through terrace doors / Into the simple splendors / Of another temperate spring; / But this much I know: / It is not lost among the autumn leaves on Peter's Square. / It is not among the ashes in the Athenaeum ash cans. / It is not inside the blue pagodas of your fine Chinoiserie. / It is not in Vronsky's saddlebags; / Not in Sonnet XXX, stanza one; / Not on twenty-seven red. / Where Is It Now? (Lines 1-19) / - Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, 1913

At half past six on the twenty-first of June 1922, when Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov was escorted through the gates of the Kremlin onto Red Square, it was glorious and cool. Drawing his shoulders back without breaking stride, the Count inhaled the air like one fresh from a swim. The sky was the very blue that the cupolas of St. Basil's had been painted for. Their pinks, greens, and golds shimmered as if it were the sole purpose of a religion to cheer its Divinity. Even the Bolshevik girls conversing before the windows of the State Department Store seemed dressed to celebrate the last days of spring.