Russian Winter (book review)

Russian literature. The wintry weather of Boston, MA. A Hungarian grandmother. An emerald. These are the beginnings of it all, the early glimmerings, the seeds, soil, water, and light to which “Russian Winter” was able to grow into that abstract and lyrical organism that is the novel. Obtaining its roots from a long-ago attempt at a short story, it blossomed into 459 pages of all-encompassing narrative at the urging of Daphne Kalotay’s publishing team, the author beginning the exhaustive passage to its completion in 2003.

The story is as follows: Nina Revskaya is a former prima ballerina for the renowned Bolshoi Ballet, now nearly an octogenarian and confined to a wheelchair due to a debilitating physical ailment. How she came to live in the US is a mystery, one that will slowly but surely unravel when, in the twilight of her life, she decides to sell off her vast jewelry collection, each piece playing an integral part in her early life in Moscow. Cracking the code of her mysterious background is Drew Brooks, a curator for the Boston Museum who has been called upon to assess each piece, a pair of earrings and a bracelet made from Baltic amber of particular interest to her. Enter Grigori Solodin, a professor of Russian who believes he has a pertinent connection to Nina and, much to her dismay, pursues confirmation of it. Both Grigori and Drew become wrapped up in Nina’s past, a triumvirate of personal effects (a love letter, a poem, a necklace) spawning a relentless inquiry that takes them and the reader all the way back to post-WWII Russia and beyond, the majority of the journey made through Nina’s vast and vivid bank of memories.

The book is divided into three parts - Book I tracks Nina’s childhood induction into the Bolshoi, her burgeoning love and subsequent marriage to poet Viktor Elsin, and her reunion with childhood friend Vera Borodina; Book II follows her rising stardom, communist oppression, and a suspected betrayal by Vera and Viktor; Book III her covert journey to the states and the discovery of the origin of the Baltic amber pieces, jewels that end up being the key to the clandestine vault of Nina’s secrets in addition to the discovery of Grigori’s own nebulous past.

For a debut novel, author Daphne Kalotay is off to a magnificent start in her career as a writer of literary fiction (she resigned from her post as a full-time professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University in 2006). “Russian Winter” is chock-full of beauteous language, composed of savory descriptions of the world of ballet and a bygone era of Eastern Europe. I was swept away to another part of the world, something I adore about books (I, like Karen Blixen, have always been a mental traveler), and Kalotay gave me exactly what I was looking for in that department. Her descriptions of Russia are multihued, evocative even; so convinced was I that she had been there before, perhaps many times, maybe even lived the sights and sounds through the stories of her own descendants, that I was very much surprised when I read that she did not make her first visit until after the book was complete. Her perception of the country is born entirely from photographs and reference books, her research on its topography, landmarks and attitudes during the tumultuous Stalin-era time period thorough and persuasive. Her descriptions both emotional and physical regarding ballet, however, come from personal experience as an erstwhile dancer in addition to her readings of several dancers’ memoirs, in particular world-famous prima ballerina assoluta Maya Plisetskaya, who became a principle dancer for the Bolshoi in 1960.

The only area in which Kalotay seems to be lacking is characterization (sadly, her story usurped her players). Nina, forcefully acclimatized to the habit of keeping secrets, is a stiff and intractably reticent character - the young version of her is consumed by the acquisition and sustainment of the spotlight while the old version refuses to let others see her sweat while keeping them at arm’s length, never allowing them any sort of personal connection. The reader gets precious few glimpses of her softer side and after several hundred pages of stubborn restraint, it feels like a lost opportunity for the author to give this crudely cut woman some refinement, to smooth the sharper edges of her personality. The same goes for the rest of the female characters, with the exception of Drew Brooks, a simple personality that with a little more emotional investment could’ve been memorable. The only character that seems to stick out most in this forgettable totem pole of a cast is Grigori Solodin, the curiosity about his past and his mourning over his late wife Christine giving color and feeling to the bare-bones mold of his character (there’s a lovely passage on pgs 173-174 that illustrates the beauty in all the difficult and delicate bonds of their marriage). He’s even given more of a physical description than the rest, a delightful one that allows the reader to see him fully in their mind: “He wore a tailored suit, clean if lightly rumpled, with a handkerchief poking up optimistically from his breast pocket. This costume he had adopted twenty-five years earlier, during his very first semester teaching here, when he had also tried growing a beard and smoking a pipe – anything to appear even a year or so older than his actual age. Even now, at fifty, his face had few lines, and his hair, thick in a way that seemed to ask to be mussed, remained dark and full. Tall, trim, he still possessed something of his youthful lankiness.” (pg. 19)

Kalotay says she adores happy endings and you can expect her to deliver on that front – the book concludes gracefully, new doors and new possibilities opening up, giving the reader a sense that the lives of its characters have been irrevocably altered for the better.

Bottom line: Pick up “Russian Winter” if, like me, you fancy the idea of traveling to distant lands from the comfort of your living room (or library, park bench, barstool…wherever you do your reading), if you want a story that spans years as well as miles, and you don’t really care whether you invest in any of the characters and/or remember them long after you’re finished. Daphne Kalotay may sweep some readers off their feet with her elegance, but true love will tarry if she fails to give them some characters with depth, their dance with her debut just another passionate yet forgettable literary fling.