She greets her Spanish girlfriends in mime and flirts with some of the young men, all the while aware that Stalin is watching–yet even as she makes her sequence of leaps around the square, slapping the ground firmly with her fan, Nina feels fully in control. Nina revels in the leaps and kicks and high jumps her body loves.
We are drawn into Nina’s dancing because Kalotay goes into such detail that we can almost imagine we’re watching the ballet and feeling the magic of live theatre. Kalotay describes ballet with a storyteller’s eye.
I loved reading about Nina’s rise to principal dancer. The Russian scenes are beautiful and captivating. The auction also reveals a mystery in the present - why is Nina so reluctant to meet Grigori Solodin, a Russian professor with an amber necklace so apparently part of a set Nina owns? This dredges up memories she would rather forget, of her life in Stalinist Russia. Now living in Boston, she has decided to auction off her jewelry.
Nina Revskaya is an elderly former dancer from the Bolshoi ballet. It’s farcical, and definitely welcome, keeping the book from taking its heavy subject matter too seriously. Later, a solemn TV interview scene includes a nurse who sneaks into camera view, waves, and scurries back off screen. Take for example a character whose ex-fiance’s new woman had “all her ducks in a row.” The character’s mother “let slip” that the ex-fiance was moving to Seattle with “the woman with the ducks.” It’s a toss away phrase, but one that turns a cliche into an opportunity to giggle. And once in a while, Kalotay injects a cheeky line or two into an otherwise serious scene. The pacing is a bit slow, but that somehow fits with the book’s reflective, nostalgic nature. Long-listed for the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, Russian Winter has been published in 23 foreign editions.Daphne Kalotay’s Russian Winter is a beautifully written book. The literary mystery Grigori sets out to solve-with the help of Drew Brooks, a young associate at the Boston auction house-reaches much deeper: to the cost of making art and trying to live and love under circumstances of enormous repression.Ī national and international bestseller, Russian Winter won the 2011 Writers’ League of Texas Fiction Award, was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel competition, and made it onto a Wall Street Journal “Five Best” list. Decades later, she has decided to auction off her famed jewelry collection-including the rare set of amber that a Boston professor, Grigori Solodin, translator of the works of Revskaya’s late poet-husband, believes may hold the key to a long-kept secret. Set in both modern-day Boston and post-WWII Moscow, Russian Winter tells the story of Bolshoi ballerina Nina Revskaya as she becomes a member of Stalin’s cultural elite before escaping to the West following a terrible betrayal.
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