In A Gentleman in Moscow, change is compared the turning of the glass shards of a kaleidoscope: with “the slightest turn of the wrist, the shards begin to shift and settle into a new configuration—a configuration with its own symmetry of shapes, its own intricacy of colors, its own hints of design” (174). This reconfiguration occurs “in the city of Moscow in the late 1920s” (174) and also at the Metropol. This reconfiguration also occurs in the Count himself. His adherence to the Russia of the past is evident during his first meeting with Osip, who notes the Count was born in Leningrad, to which the Count replies, “I was born in St. Petersburg” (208)—the city’s name before it was renamed after Lenin in 1924. The Count accepts the inevitability of change by moving with the times while keeping the past alive in discreet ways.

When the novel opens, Russia is transforming after a political upheaval. Characters who support the Bolshevik Party indicate that the Bolsheviks seek to separate from the past, in which privileges were for the fortunate few. When he visits the Count in his room, Mishka, a member of the Bolshevik Party, looks around at the items that “had been culled from the halls of Idlehour” (81) and believes them to be “reminders of Elysian days” (81).