#5: Russian Winter, Daphne Kalotay

I read Russian Winter in January, just as Natalie Portman won the Golden Globe for her performance in Black Swan; for awhile there, I felt surrounded by mentally unstable ballerinas with starring roles in Swan Lake. The two stories dovetailed quite nicely and I enjoyed a month filled with visions of tutus and sugar plums dancing in my head.

Like Possession and the Lauren Willeg novels, Russian Winter features lonely modern-day scholars try to figure out mysterious historical happenings who in doing so heal their own psychological wounds. In this one, professor and adoptee Grigori Solodin is trying to figure out who his parents are; before the novel opens, he has contacted the now-elderly prima ballerina Nina Revskaya, and although we don't know exactly why, she suddenly decides to auction off all of her jewelry. This jumpstarts Russian Winter's plot and brings in Drew Brooks, a recently divorced young woman who works at the auction house and is trying to unearth Nina Revskaya's biography, in order to firm up the auction catalogue. The novel moves back and forth between the present day, when Drew and Grigori start working together, to Nina's memories in Moscow before she defected. Interestingly, the present-day action is written in past tense, while Nina's memories happen in present tense, flipping perspective on "reality" and importance.

At first, I couldn't get into it. Grigori's only clue to his birth parents is a purse that contains some photos, letters, and an amber pendant. He's sure that the letters were written by Nina's husband, Viktor Elsin, and Nina has launched the auction after hearing from him - so it seemed pretty obvious, despite the book's mystery, that they are his biological parents. But then I realized that was way too easy and figured out who his parents really were - and suprisingly that got me into Russian Winter, because I knew it was going to take some serious drama to make that happen and I was looking forward to the where and the when. And then the end came and I found out I was totally wrong - the real answer was totally out of left field (but a believable left field) and I was really impressed by the actual ending, the believable surprise. It seems like a difficult feat to pull off but Kalotay managed it well.

Russian Winter also reminded me, interestingly, of Atonement and The Joy Luck Club, with the introduction of the subtle idea that the telling of stories can heal wounds, and the release of depressing/scary/embarrassing family stories (ie the truth) can free you from emotional burden. As a writer, I really connect with that message - it seems like one of literature's main purposes and the result is beautiful and powerful when done well.

At the end of the novel, Nina says, "'Who else, after I die, will even remember these people? They were real people.' It sounded silly to say it that way, not what she meant at all. What she meant was that it seemed a crime that their thoughts, their lives -- the very fact of their lives, the truth of their lives -- were lost along with them. No one to preserve the truth of who they were. Who they had been." (p. 427)