Russian Winter is part mystery and part love story, drawing on the (overly) familiar tropes of each: the missing jewels, the deceived lovers, and so on. Along the way, he develops a tentative relationship with the auction house associate, Drew Brooks, who is working on Nina’s auction. Slowly, Grigori discovers more about his own past and his connection to the Butterfly. It is only through revisiting Nina’s past, traveling across time and continents in Kalotay’s choppy narrative, that we can put the pieces together. The effect interrupts the reader’s momentum we only follow one thread for so long before we are wrenched back into the past or to another character’s perspective.Īnd so the mystery begins: in Boston, a middle-aged professor Grigori Solodin owns an amber necklace, earrings, and a bracelet that match those in Nina’s collection his own past is somehow linked to Nina’s, but she refuses to talk to him.
The rapid cuts back and forth build a temporally-jumbled narrative, drawing in more characters from Nina’s past and present. Kalotay begins her story with an auction lot description of a piece of jewelry-the first of many that are interleaved in the novel between sections that constantly shift in focus from present-day Boston to 1950s Moscow-from old, arthritic Nina in a wheelchair to young, spry Nina dancing in the Bolshoi Theater and back. When Nina auctions off her jewelry decades later in Boston, she is forced to face episodes from her past that she would rather forget. When she was young, Nina danced with Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet and acquired a reputation as a star ballerina, nicknamed “Butterfly.” Not many years into her career, however, Nina defects from the USSR to France, Britain, and then America, while her husband Viktor Elsin, a well-known Russian poet, ends up in the gulag. We first meet Nina Revskaya as an old woman in her Boston apartment, preparing to auction off the precious collection of jewelry she has accumulated over the years and has brought with her from Europe. Kalotay’s story works with and mimics Swan Lake in much the same way as Aronofsky’s film does, and, in Russian Winter, Kalotay’s Nina (like Aronofsky’s) is both duped victim and vengeful offender, sweet Odette and treacherous Odile. The parallels are odd: apparently we like our ballerinas to have delicate fussy names like Nina and when we think ballet, we think Swan Lake with Tchaikovsky’s haunting, powerful music and a simple iconic story of deception, loss, and love. The same year Darren Aronofsky’s Oscar-nominated film Black Swan swooped in, debut novelist Daphne Kalotay published Russian Winter. It is the year of Swan Lake, of ballerinas called Nina. The material is not original, but it is workable and proffers plenty of Hollywood glamor.
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