Read "A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
As the Count approached the Shalyapin at 12: 15, what emanated from this onetime chapel of prayer and reflection was a sound that would have been unthinkable ten years before. It was a sound characterized by fits of laughter, a mélange of languages, the bleat of a trumpet, and the clinking of glasses-in other words, the sound of gay abandon.
What development could have brought about such a transformation? In the case of the Shalyapin, there were three. The first was the rather breathless return of the American musical form known as jazz. Having squelched the craze on the grounds of its intrinsic decadence, in the mid-1920s the Bolsheviks had begun to countenance it again. This was presumably so that they could study more closely how a single idea can sweep the globe. Whatever the cause, here it was zipping and zinging and rat-a-tat-tatting on its little stage at the back of the room.