A most interesting part of the film “Window to Paris” was the loyalty to Russia that Nikolai Nikolayevich and his neighbors maintained.
His neighbor is particularly vehement, despite acknowledging that life in Paris seems much better: “We held off the Tartar-Mongols for 200 years while they evolved!” “They got fat at our expense!” Nikolai, originally intending to stay, has a nightmare of becoming destitute if he stays in Paris. In Russia, in the school who insisted that they had no need of an aesthetics teacher, the students demand that he return. It turns out that Nikolai and his music are valued in his native land. He even tries to convince the students at the end to return to Russia, in a rare sort of patriotism. He acknowledges that life in Russia, especially at that time, is difficult for everyone. But it is their country and they should stay and work to make it better. This seems like an unusual, sincere patriotism; none of them try to pretend that life in Russia is easy, or even better than in France. But for some reason, they still love their own troubled country.