There are stories that arrive at precisely the right moment and seem to know something about you before you have even settled into your chair. A Gentleman in Moscow, the Paramount miniseries based on Amor Towles' beloved novel, is one of those rare gifts. I have been meaning to write this review for some time, and I find now that the delay has only deepened my appreciation. Some wines, as Count Alexander Rostov himself might remind us, reward patience.
I want to mention as an aside that I have loved Russian history since my high school days when I first read Nicholas and Alexandra, the biography by Robert Massie of Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra Feodorovna. I was captivated by the romantic charm of the pre-communist Russian era, the true love between the unlikely Tsar and the German princess, the beautiful Russian princesses, and the hemophiliac Tsarevich (prince).
Events moved from peaceful to terrifying. There was the massacre of peaceful protesters in 1905, the reliance on Rasputin to save the Tsarevich, the subsequent rumors and scandals, and the First World War which was disastrous for Russian morale. All these circumstances led to the brief attempt to embrace democracy under Kerensky in the February revolution which was inevitably supplanted in October by the Bolshevik revolution. The “Whites” (Royalists) were eventually defeated by the “Reds” (Communists) as Lenin took control of the country. The Royal Family was executed, and indeed all Russian aristocrats were either killed or fled the country.
In A Gentleman in Moscow, as we will see, Count Alexander Rostov manages to avoid both execution and exile.
Ewan McGregor inhabits the role of Alexander Rostov with a warmth and precision that is nothing short of extraordinary. He plays the Count as a man who has lost everything the world considers important, his estate, his freedom, and his social standing, but paradoxically, loses nothing of what actually matters. If you have not yet seen this miniseries, I encourage you to remedy that. Bring tissues. You will need them.
Let me offer a brief orientation for those who have not yet made the Count's acquaintance.
The story
Spoiler Alert!
Based on Amor Towles' historical fiction of the same name, A Gentleman in Moscow opens in 1922, in the turbulent aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Alexander Rostov, an aristocrat of the old world, is brought before a Bolshevik tribunal. His crime? Being who he is. The sentence, however, is not death but a kind of purgatory. Rostov is placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life within the walls of the grand Hotel Metropol in Moscow. One step outside, and he will be shot.
What unfolds over the course of the series is both intimate and epic. Confined to an increasingly small set of rooms as his fortunes within the hotel diminish, Alexander constructs an entire interior world: rich, ordered, curious, and deeply human. The hotel becomes his monastery, his universe, and his stage. And within those gilded walls, he discovers something the Bolsheviks never anticipated: freedom is not a matter of geography. It is a matter of soul.
The series is populated by a constellation of characters who orbit Rostov like planets around a sun: Sofia, the daughter he adopts, who becomes the great love and purpose of his later years; Nina, the spirited young girl who first teaches him how to truly see the hotel's hidden life; Emile and Andrei, the passionate chef and the dignified maître d' who become his truest companions; Anna, the luminous actress whose love for Alexander is as complicated as the times they inhabit; and Osip, the Soviet agent who is not quite the villain we first assume him to be. Even the hardened hotel manager who is bureaucratic, suspicious, and perpetually irritated is an important part of the system.
It is, at its heart, a story about love. But to understand why it is such a profound story about love, we must look more carefully at what is happening both inside Alexander Rostov and among those gathered around him.
Through a Catholic lens: the interior castle
Saint Teresa of Avila wrote of the soul as an Interior Castle, a dwelling place of many rooms, each leading deeper toward the center where God resides. I thought of her often while watching this series. Alexander Rostov, stripped of every external marker of identity, is forced to journey inward. He has no choice. The hotel is his cloister, and like all good cloisters, it presses the question: Who are you when you have nothing left to prove?
What Alexander slowly, painfully, and beautifully discovers is that the gentleman was never constituted by his title, his estate, or his freedom of movement. The gentleman was always a set of interior commitments: to curiosity, to hospitality, to grace under pressure, and to love freely given. He is, in the truest Catholic sense, a soul being purified. Not through dramatic spiritual crisis, but through the quiet, daily fidelity of an ordered life.
The Catholic tradition speaks often of the via negativa which is the stripping away of “self” as a path toward God and toward the truest self. Alexander's confinement is precisely this. What cannot be taken from him is what is most essentially his. And what cannot be taken from him turns out to be extraordinary.
There is also a profound theology of sacrifice woven through the narrative. The climax of the series hinges on a moment of supreme self-giving: Alexander risks everything when he violates his house arrest and steps outside the hotel for the first time in decades, not for his own freedom, but to save his beloved daughter Sofia.
He sacrifices the only life he has known of 30 years for the sake of another. In Catholic theology, this is not merely admirable. It is sacramental. It participates in the very logic of the Cross. Love that does not cost anything is not yet love. Alexander is willing to pay the full price, and in doing so, he becomes fully himself.
Interestingly, salvation in this story comes from unexpected quarters. Osip, the Soviet agent is a man of the ideological machinery that imprisoned Alexander in the first place but he repeatedly intervenes to protect the Count. He saves his life on more than one occasion.
Here the series invites us into the complexity of moral life that our Christian faith has always insisted upon: grace moves through broken and unlikely vessels: the enemy who shows mercy and the jailer who becomes, in his own way, a guardian angel. These are not contradictions. They are the ordinary miracles of a world in which the Spirit is alive and active.
The series also meditates beautifully on what constitutes a true family. By the final episode, the community gathered around Alexander: Sofia, Anna, Emile, Andrei, and the staff constitute a family in the deepest sense. This family is not by blood, but by fidelity, shared suffering, and mutual love. This is thoroughly consonant with the Catholic vision of the Church as family, and of the domestic church as the fundamental unit of human flourishing. What Alexander builds inside the Metropol is not a prison society. It is a covenant community.
Through a parts work lens: IFS, ego states, and the gentleman within
From the perspective of Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Ego State Therapy, A Gentleman in Moscow offers a remarkably rich portrait of a man whose internal system is forced into a deep and sustained reorganization.
When we first meet Alexander, he carries himself with the polished ease of a man whose parts are well-managed, perhaps too well-managed. His charm, his wit, and his effortless civility are the elegant expressions of what IFS would call a team of managers that has been running beautifully for decades. He is a man who knows his role, knows his world, and knows how to move gracefully within it. His aristocratic bearing is not mere performance; it is a sophisticated adaptive structure that has served him well.
But the tribunal strips all of that away. The Manager parts that organized his life around status, freedom, social ease, and the rhythms of aristocratic existence suddenly have nothing left to manage. What happens to a person when their entire adaptive system is rendered irrelevant?
For many people, this would produce collapse. I am thinking here of a flooding of Exiles that would overwhelm the system, or a desperate activation of Firefighter parts seeking relief through numbing, rage, or even despair. And we do see flickers of this in Alexander. There are moments of profound loneliness, of grief barely contained, and of a man sitting alone in a progressively smaller room and facing the abyss. McGregor plays these moments with stunning understatement, which makes them all the more devastating.
But what is remarkable about Alexander is what IFS would call the presence and accessibility of self, that core of consciousness characterized by the eight C's: Curiosity, Calm, Clarity, Compassion, Confidence, Creativity, Courage, and Connectedness. When Alexander's Manager system is dismantled, what remains is not chaos. What remains is his inmost self.
He meets his confinement with curiosity rather than bitterness. He extends compassion freely to those around him. He brings creativity to his circumscribed life by reorganizing rooms, curating meals, and cultivating friendships. He teaches Sofia to conduct an orchestra with the same attention he once gave to the finest details of aristocratic life.
His confidence is not arrogance; it is a settled quality of presence that does not depend on external validation. This is what the series asks us to understand about what makes someone a gentleman: not breeding, not education, and not title, but the quality of self-leadership that emerges when everything else is stripped away.
From an Ego State perspective, we can observe Alexander's various ego states: the debonair aristocrat, the loyal friend, the passionate lover, the protective father figure, and the grieving exile are gradually integrated into a more coherent and authentic whole. The young Alexander who existed before the hotel was, in many ways, a man whose ego states were organized around external circumstances. The Alexander who emerges after decades in the Metropol is a man whose states are organized around interior commitment. The hotel has done to him what good therapy aspires to do: it has forced integration.
Sofia's arrival and Alexander's unexpected fatherhood are particularly striking from a parts perspective. Here is a man who had perhaps protected himself, consciously or not, from the vulnerability of deep attachment. His relationships with Anna, with Nina, and with his colleagues are warm and genuine, but they carry a certain quality of chosen distance.
Sofia shatters all of that. She is the Exile-summoner: her very existence calls forth the most undefended parts of Alexander's heart. And he does not run. He opens. His love for Sofia is the most unguarded thing in the entire series, and it is no accident that it is also the engine of the story's most courageous act.
Let us take a moment and look at the larger external system. The relationship between Alexander and the Soviet agent Osip repays close psychological attention. In IFS terms, Osip might be understood as a part of the story's larger system that carries an immense burden. It is the burden of ideological certainty, institutional power, and the necessity of ruthlessness. And yet, within Osip, there is clearly something else: a capacity for loyalty, and for genuine admiration, perhaps even for a kind of love.
What Alexander does, through the sheer consistent quality of his self-presence, is provide Osip a relational experience that allows that buried capacity to surface. Alexander does not argue with Osip's ideology or challenge his authority. He simply is himself, steadily and without apology. And this, the series suggests, is perhaps the most subversive force in the world.
This is a profound insight from a therapeutic standpoint. Our parts are not changed by being argued with, overridden, or suppressed. They are changed, unburdened even, by being met with self energy: with curiosity and compassion rather than judgment. Alexander's consistent self-presence transforms everyone around him. It is not strategic. It is simply who he is.
Attachment theory: a hotel full of hearts
John Bowlby taught us that human beings are, at their core, attachment-seeking creatures. We are wired for connection. Disrupted attachment such as loss, abandonment, and inconsistency creates the wounds that organize so much of our inner and outer lives. A Gentleman in Moscow is, among many other things, a masterclass in attachment dynamics.
Nearly every significant character in the hotel carries an attachment wound. Nina, the precocious child who befriends Alexander, is essentially without parents in any meaningful emotional sense. She is brilliant and alive and fundamentally unseen by the adults who are supposed to care for her.
Sofia, left in Alexander's care as a young child, faces the primal wound of maternal absence. Anna, the actress, moves through the world with the seductive ease of someone who has learned that performance keeps people both close and safely at a distance.
What the Hotel Metropol becomes, under Alexander's inadvertent cultivation, is a secure base in Bowlby's terms. It becomes a reliable relational environment from which various characters can venture out and to which they can return. Alexander is the stable and consistent presence at the heart of the hotel. Alexander does not choose this role initially; it chooses him. But as the series progresses, we see him embrace it with increasing intentionality. He becomes, for Sofia especially, the secure attachment figure she desperately needs. He is consistent, attuned, present, and attentive to her needs, and willing to sacrifice himself for her flourishing.
The series is quietly devastating in its portrayal of what happens to children, and to adults, when consistent love is present. Sofia blooms. She becomes a musician of extraordinary gift, partly because of her own talent, but partly because she has been seen and cherished by someone who truly knows how to attend to another soul.
There is a scene, I will not spoil the specifics, in which Sofia performs, and Alexander watches with a face so full of love and pride that it is almost unbearable to witness. This is what secure attachment produces: not dependence, but freedom. Not clinging, but soaring.
The losses in the series are also told through an attachment lens. When relationships are severed by politics, by death, or by the grinding machinery of a totalitarian state, the grief is palpable and true. The series does not sentimentalize loss. It honors it. Grief, the show consistently suggests, is not the opposite of love. It is love's most honest expression when the beloved is gone. This is entirely consonant with what Bowlby understood, and with what the Christian tradition has always insisted: love and grief are inseparable, and both are sacred.
What remains
I began by saying that some stories arrive at precisely the right moment. I think A Gentleman in Moscow is such a story for our particular cultural moment, and I want to say why.
We live in a time deeply anxious about identity, about who we are, what we stand for, and what cannot be taken from us. We live in a time when community is fragmenting, when loneliness has reached epidemic proportions, and when the noise of the world makes it increasingly difficult to hear one's own soul.
Alexander Rostov, confined to a single building for decades, is in many ways a provocation to our age. He has less than almost anyone we know, and yet he is more fully alive than most characters we encounter on screen or in life.
His secret, the series gently insists, is not stoic endurance, nor is it aristocratic pride. It is love expressed in the daily, particular, irreplaceable acts of being present to the people in front of him. The meal prepared with care. The child read to sleep. The friend listened to. The enemy treated with dignity. These are not grand gestures. They are the grammar of a life fully lived.
From a Catholic perspective, this is the life of charity, not sentiment, but charity as the orientation of the will toward the good of the other. From a parts perspective, this is a man living from his spiritual center, his inmost self. He is consistent and joyful even in suffering. From an attachment perspective, this is a man who has become, against all odds and within the most unlikely of circumstances, a source of secure love for those around him.
Alexander Rostov does not escape his prison. He transforms it into a home. And in doing so, he transforms himself into a free man.
That, dear friends, is a story worth watching. More than that, it is a life worth living.
A Gentleman in Moscow is available on Paramount+ and BritBox. It is appropriate for mature viewers. I give it my highest recommendation alongside a fine bottle of something red, should you have one at hand. The Count would insist upon it.
Dr. Gerry Crete is the author of Litanies of the Heart: Relieving Post-traumatic Stress and Calming Anxiety Through Healing Our Parts which is published by Sophia Institute Press. He is the founder of Transfiguration Counseling and Coaching, Transfiguration Life, and co-founder of Souls and Hearts.
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Re-opened today! The Resilient Catholic Community (RCC) is accepting new applications now
The Resilient Catholic Community (RCC) is at the very core of Souls and Hearts. The RCC is where the deepest human formation work with parts is done. And the RCC is all about thriving and flourishing.
If you are a Catholic who sees how important structure is for your personal human formation, if you want to shore up your natural human formation foundation for your spiritual life, if you want to overcome the natural level obstacles to sharing deeply in God's divine nature as his beloved little son or beloved little daughter, and it parts and systems thinking, make sense to you, consider applying to the Resilient Catholics Community
And the RCC opens for new applications three times per year – in June, October, and February.
Join us on an adventure inside. Dr. Gerry offered us a portrait of an integrated man in Count Rostov in this reflection – we seek that interior integration, we seek to come to know and understand and love ourselves in an ordered way, so that we can better love God and our neighbor, as we discussed in IIC Episode 174. That’s what the RCC is all about.
But we are humble enough to start with human formation. Not spiritual formation, not intellectual formation, not pastoral formation. We focus on human formation, which St. John Paul II characterized as “the basis of all formation.” We shore up our natural foundations because as St. Thomas Aquinas said, “Grace perfects nature.” Grace has to have nature to perfect.
Your journey begins with the PartsFinder Pro, a series of 23 measures that helps you to identify the roles and burdens of 12-15 of your parts – managers, firefighters, and exiles, and how those parts interact with your innermost self and with each other. You’ll get feedback on your PFP through a 6- to 7-page report [see these sample PFP fictional reports for a man and a woman].and can discuss it in a 15 minute Zoom interview with a Souls and Hearts staff member – all of that is included in the $499 application fee (contact Pam at office@soulsandhearts.com if there is financial need for a scholarship).
Join hundreds of other faithful Catholic who are serious about flourishing, about loving their parts and loving God and their neighbor, including their neighbor’s parts, all on a pilgrimage to better human formation.
Find out so much more in our information video and on our RCC landing page. Are you ready to apply? Feel free to reach out with questions to office@soulsandhearts.com or you can reach Dr. Peter at 317.567.9594.
Short course on IFS grounded in a Catholic anthropology
If you want to learn the basics of Internal Family Systems grounded in a Catholic understanding of the human person, check out episodes 157, 158, and 159 of the Interior Integration for Catholics podcast!
New IIC episode just released with Dr. Gerry and Mother Natalia
Can Catholics Become Gods? Straight Talk from Mother Natalia. In IIC episode 183, we discuss Catholics becoming Gods. Mother Natalia of the Byzantine Catholic of Christ the Bridegroom Monastery and host of the “What God is Not” podcast discuss theosis (or deification) from an Eastern Catholic perspective, bringing in parts and systems thinking. Join us for a fascinating, rollicking conversation about this most important topic. The audio only is here.
Also, if you missed it, check out the first episode in our two-part series on deification, The Wonder of the Neglected Gift of Deification (with Parts!) with Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas.
For Catholic formators (priests, therapists, coaches, and spiritual directors)
Souls and Hearts offers two upcoming opportunities for Catholic formators who accompany individuals in their personal formation.
- First, on June 10, 2026 from 8:00 PM to 9:30 PM Eastern time, Dr. Peter Malinoski and Bridget Adams are offering an introductory Zoom workshop titled Catholic Parts Work in Human Formation. If you are a formator who would like a very basic introduction to incorporating parts work into personal formation for those you accompany, feel free to register. There is no cost, but space is limited to 100.
- Second, from August 10-13, 2026 Peter and Bridget Adams will be leading a retreat for Catholic formators titled “Authentic Being and Authentic Relating.” This retreat focuses on you finding and loving you in more of your parts, including parts you have not yet encountered – your exiles. Join us for that at the Mother of the Redeemer Retreat Center in Bloomington Indiana. More information is here.
Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts
Dr. Gerry reminds those parts of yourself who are exiled that Jesus calls you to encounter Him in today’s episode of Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts. You can also check out yesterday’s episode from Trinity Sunday as Dr. Gerry and Dr. Peter discuss how we are called to imitate God's love for Himself in the Trinity. Scripture for Your Inner Outcasts, to our knowledge, is the only podcast specifically for parts of us who are exiled and who feel alone, bringing light, love, and hope to our exiled parts. Check it out every day on our landing page or wherever you get your podcasts.