Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay

I've spent today, the last day of the Easter holidays and a beautiful spring day at that, scooped up inside with first one and then another book. Yes, I should have at least gone for a walk. Yesterday I did in fact plan, if somewhat halfheartedly, to go running today, but actually I do not feel quilty for not venturing out today. Both books I finished reading today were very nice reads and after taking part in a dance competition in Tallinn, Estonia on Saturday and taking the boat back home yesterday I felt like being compately lazy today was the right thing to do! :)

The first book I finished today was Ever After by Sandra Freeman, a sequal to her earlier novel The Other Side which I read back in March. I'm planning on reviewing both novels in a later post. Today, however, I would like to talk about the other novel I spent most of today reading: Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay.

What drew me to reading this book in the first place was the fact that it was about a ballerina. Though dance sport became my thing, the first dance style I ever loved was ballet. And even though I stopped taking ballet classes when I was 15-16 years old and moved over to dance sport, to standard and latin american dances, I've always kept my interest in ballet, too. I love watching ballet and I love reading novels about the world of ballet. Thus, it was with high hopes I requested Russian Winter from the library.

Russian Winter tells the story of Nina Revskaya, a former star of the famous Bolshoi Ballet. Now old and ill, forced to spend her days in a wheel chair, she decides to auction her remarkable jewellery collection. During the process her past starts to catch up with her.

I liked this novel very, very much. The story moves between the past (mostly late 40s - early 50s Stalinist Russia) and the present and is told not only by Nina's reminiscences, but also from the point of views of Grigori Solodin, a Russian professor who owns a piece of amber jewellery that seems to belong to a set owned by Nina Revskaya and who's own history may be intertwined with the famous ballerina's, and of Drew Brooks, a young associate director at the auction house about to auction the Revskaya collection. Drew's Russian-Finnish ancestry was a nice surprise for me as a Finn, although it also provided the one bit of the narrative I found hard to believe. In the novel Drew's Russian grandfather, after he's released from a forced labour camp somehow manages to enter Finland unnoticed. Drew's future grandmother then finds him walking along a road and offers him a lift and a place to stay. That something like this would have happened in Finland just a short time after a war against the Russians seems very unlikely, but I do give the author her literary freedom of course. :)

I loved all the stories told in this novel. Though I must say, I might have liked Grigori Solodin's story even more than Nina Revskaya's. All in all this was a great read. It was also refreshing to read a partly historical novel about Russia that was not about the revolution or the second world war, but set in the years before and after WWII.

Here's a picture I took from my hotel room balcony towards the city centre in Tallinn.