Hotel Metropol (Moscow)

Hotel Metropol, 2015

Hotel Metropol, Piazza , 2017

The Hotel Metropol is a historic in Art Nouveau style built hotel in the center of Moscow . The Metropol was built according to a plan by William Walcot and opened in 1905. It is located near Red Square at Teatralny Proezd 2, opposite the Bolshoi Theater and in the immediate vicinity of the Maly Theater . Today the Metropol has around 350 old and new suites and rooms with a floor area of 40,000 m². It can be visited on a guided tour every Sunday.

history

Anders Zorn : Sawwa Mamontow , 1896

The Metropol was built on the initiative of the Russian industrialist and patron Savva Mamontov , who founded a private opera in 1885. In addition to Italian operas , mainly works by young Russian composers were performed there. a. by Alexander Dargomyzhsky , Modest Mussorgsky , Nikolai Rimski-Korsakow and Peter Tschaikowski . After sluggish beginnings, Marmontow's opera company proved to be extremely successful, both artistically and economically as well as in terms of public acceptance. In 1896 the opera made a profit of 30,000 silver rubles . In 1898 Mamontov bought land on Moscow's Teatralny Projesd for the construction of a hotel to the highest European standards, which was designed as a cultural and business center with a hall for opera performances. The project was put out to tender and the winner was the Russian architect Lev Kekuzhev . However, the British-Russian architect William Walcot was awarded the contract , whose design only took 4th place in the competition. After Mamontov had to file for bankruptcy on charges of fraudulent financial manipulation , the Petersburg insurance company hired Kekuschew as the new owner to manage the construction.

As a result, various changes were made to the original concept and the plan for an opera house with 3,000 seats and an attached hotel and restaurant was abandoned. Operas were never performed in the Metropol. In 1901 the shell burned down and had to be rebuilt from scratch. In addition to Kekuzhev and his two employees Nikolai Lwowitsch Schewjakow (1868–1942) and Vladimir Vasilyevich Wojeikow, other architects were involved in the completion of the house.

The princess of dreams , majolica picture by Mikhail Vrubel

Designers and interior decorators who had been hired by Walcot for the project remained involved, including the painter and ceramist Michail Wrubel in an excellent position . Wrubel, who had already created the sets and costumes for Mamontov's private opera, provided the designs for the large majolica pictures that shape the character of the two outer fronts. The Hotel Metropol was opened in 1905. During the unrest of the Russian Revolution , the house came under fire and suffered damage to the street fronts, but the infrastructure remained intact. In 1917, after the Bolshevik government moved from Petrograd to Moscow, the Bolsheviks took over the hotel. The hotel was u. a seat of the Second House of Councilors , Lenin occasionally made speeches to Soviet citizens from the balcony . The rooms were converted into apartments for the MPs or served as accommodation for people who had to wait here for their trial for political "offenses". The last of the typical communal apartments ( communal kas ) built at that time were only converted back into hotel rooms in the 1960s. Part of the house was continued as a hotel from 1928 under Stalin and his successors and was used to accommodate foreign delegations and well-known foreign guests.

From 1986 to 1991 the hotel was completely renovated. In August 2012, the hotel was auctioned for the equivalent of 219 million euros to the state-owned Azimut hotel group and extensively renovated from December 2012.

The hotel in film and literature

The Metropol served u. a. directors Krzysztof Zanussi , Wladimir Motyl and Todorovsky as scenery for feature films.

In 2017, the novel A Gentleman in Moscow by the American author Amor Towles was published . The protagonist is Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who comes from the Russian aristocracy and who was brought to justice after the Bolshevik seizure of power. His death sentence was commuted to lifelong house arrest at the Hotel Metropol for expressing sympathy for the Russian Revolution in a poem he wrote as a young man. The novel is to be filmed as a TV series with Kenneth Branagh in the lead role and Tom Harper as director from 2020 . Amor Towles is involved in writing the script.

In 2019, Lyudmila Petruschewskaja's book The Girl from the Hotel Metropol: A Childhood Novel (2017) was published in a translation by Antje Leetz. The author was born the daughter of Soviet intellectuals. The family lived privileged in the Metropol, where the narrator spent her early childhood. From the time when relatives fell victim to the Stalinist terror, their parents were considered enemies of the people . Like his parents, the child had to leave the house and since then has struggled through life under precarious circumstances.

Also in 2019 the Rowohlt publishing house brought out Eugen Ruge's novel Hotel Metropol , in which Ruge tells the story of his grandparents. They emigrated to the Soviet Union as communists in 1933 and worked as agents for the OMS , the Soviet intelligence service of the Communist International . From 1936 to 1938, during the Stalin purges , they stayed in the Hotel Metropol awaiting their criminal trial . In cooperation with Argon Verlag, MDR produced an audio book of the novel read by Ulrich Noethen in 2019 , which was broadcast in an abridged version by MDR and distributed in full by Audible .