In 1922 in Moscow, Russia, Count Alexander Rostov wrote a poem by which he is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal. Sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol hotel near the Kremlin, the Count, who has never even worked before, is now the resident of an attic room in the hotel, as decades of tulmultuous times in Russian history occur outside his four walls. Limited in his outer wordliness over the years, his ventures instead bring him surprising inner emotional discoveries about life.