Review: Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay

Sometimes I get a hold of a novel that doesn't strike me as that alluring at first.  I don't have difficulty putting it down to do something else, I don't really "get into" the story.  And then all of a sudden, something happens, and I fall headlong into it, and wind up loving it.  That happened with The Pillars of the Earth, it happened with The Hunger Games.

And it happened with Daphne Kalotay's Russian Winter.

Boston, present day.  Nina Revskaya, a former ballerina and star of the Russian Bolshoi Ballet, now confined to a wheelchair, is auctioning off her priceless and legendary collection of jewels to benefit the arts.  In doing so, she hopes to finally close off the painful past, memories of the years before her defection from Stalinist Russia, once and for all.  Drew Brooks, the curious young woman who is in charge of setting up the auction, is fascinated by Nina's jewels and the history behind them, and wonders why she can't figure out Nina or her motives as she sets up the final sale of these priceless gems.  And when Grigori Solodin, a middle-aged professor of Russian studies, produces an amber pendant that appears to belong to the collection, all three are intrinsically linked in the uncovering of a mystery that changed the course of Nina's life -- and Grigori's.

First of all, this book has everything in it that I love.  Russian history.  Ballet.  Jewelry.  Poetry.  Boston.  There was really no way that I wasn't going to love it.  But the writing style was what sealed it for me.  Everything was so beautifully written, so well described.  My favorite parts were Nina's flashback episodes, which take up the majority of the book.  Kalotay really paints a vivid picture of life as a ballerina during the Stalinist regime -- living as one of the elite in a period where so many people were poor and had nothing, the balance between being fortunate and being afraid of the fall.  There is so much that we in the West still don't know about life in the Eastern Bloc, behind the Iron Curtain of communism, during the reigns of Stalin, Kruschev, etc.

Although Nina is not overtly made a sympathetic character, I had to pity her so many times throughout the novel.  She has made mistakes and lived to regret them, but feels that now, fifty years later and across the ocean, it is too late for her to redeem herself.  I love novels with a theme of redemption, and I loved Russian Winter.  Another five-star, and one of my favorite books of 2011.

Rating: *****