Why I Love Dance by Daphne Kalotay

Today we are pleased to welcome Daphne Kalotay, author of Russian Winter to the blog! 

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When people ask why I chose to write a novel about a ballerina, I give the simplest answer: I love dance. My mother was a dancer, and I grew up taking classes in both ballet and modern dance, attending performances in New York City and reading ballerina memoirs. And yet if I consider this question more thoroughly, I see that my interest originated in a very personal behind-the-scenes experience of dance.

When I was three years old, we moved to a town in New Jersey where my mother had been hired as the dance teacher at a local university. The classes she taught were contemporary ones, the musical accompaniment her own percussive drumming or—since this was in the 1970s—recordings by Rick Wakeman and Kraftwerk and Chick Corea. Each academic year culminated in a public performance, and the weeks leading up to it were a flurry of preparation. I particularly loved that my mother would buy candy for the dancers to snack on backstage, and that my sister and I were allowed a taste; I recall long strands of licorice from a store downtown….

But the most magical part was being backstage, a dark and cavernous place of booms and ladders and high ceilings hiding wires, pulleys and lifts; to a kindergartner, it seemed other-worldly. I was with my mother once when she met with the person in charge of campus facilities to explain what sort of transformations the theatre required for an upcoming show. She wanted the entire stage and backdrop to be painted black (which I thought radical), and later there was the lighting to discuss, and the cues for when to start the music. In my memory these backstage images are dark and blurry, but their sensual power—the allure of what goes on behind the curtains, behind the control panels and speaker systems—is, I see now, what drew me to that other backstage world, of the Bolshoi Theatre. Yes, I loved learning the nitty-gritty details of ballerina life, but more mysterious were the unseen, offstage manipulations of a Stalinist Russia where star ballerinas could be treated as possible spies, their husbands arrested and convicted, even as these women received accolades and repeated curtain calls and bouquet after bouquet.

When I had already been working on Russian Winter for a few years, I realized that, though I hadn’t consciously planned it, ballet was a very apt metaphor for the totalitarian world I was describing. For there’s of course something very authoritarian about ballet, with its stringent rules, its emphasis on exactitude, and the complete devotion it requires. I began to see the corps de ballet (all those girls working together so precisely, conforming, suppressing their individuality for the greater good) as an analogy for the situation of Soviet citizenry itself.

So it’s ironic that my interest in dance began in those 1970s dance performances my mother put together. I remember, for instance, an entire show set to Beatles music, where for the song “Lovely Rita” (the one about a meter maid) my mother decided to end with all the dancers converging onstage in a chaos of transport vehicles—a bicycle, a tricycle, a skateboard, a pogo stick, a Hoppety-hop ball. (Remember those?) And for her solo, to “Oh! Darling,” my mother dressed like a 1950’s tomboy, with her jeans rolled up to her shins and little white Keds sneakers, and danced with a wad of chewing gum in her mouth so that at the end she could blow a big bubble.

Quite the opposite of the pristine, classical beauty of those Bolshoi dancers. But that introduction to the joyous playfulness of dance is what led me to that other, harsher and more dangerous, world in Russian Winter.

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Russian Winter is now available in paperback, with the UK release (above cover image) being today! 

If you want to know more, you can read Marg's review, read Daphne's previous guest post for Historical Tapestry, visit Daphne Kalotay's website or her Facebook page.

Historical Fictional Factual Actual…

Guest Post by Daphne Kalotay

When I began drafting my novel Russian Winter in 2003 or so, I knew I wanted my main protagonist, a Bolshoi ballerina living during the final years of Stalin’s reign, to defect at some point in the early 1950s. It was important to the timing of my plot that she leave before Stalin’s death, yet I struggled with the knowledge that in reality the era of dancer defections (think Nureyev, Makarova, Baryshnikov) did not begin until the early sixties.

So wedded was I to the idea of factual truth that I even snooped around on the Internet in search of some real-life version of my ballerina, thinking that if only I could find an actual Soviet dancer who escaped during those years (when Stalin’s grip was especially fierce and Russian borders particularly impenetrable) I would have much more confidence in my own flight of fancy. Doing so, I read about Violetta Elvin, the first fully-Soviet-trained Russian dancer to perform in the West—but she left in 1945, legally, as the wife of an Englishman. So that didn’t necessarily help my case.

Yet it was a reminder of the many possible and varied stories that exist in real life—and that, while of the utmost importance to me that I remain true to history, what I was writing was still fiction. So what if there had been no real-life ballerina defection in the early fifties. My ballerina would be the first!

I thought long and hard about how to whisk her out of the USSR. I knew that Bolshoi dancers often toured Soviet satellite countries, and after looking at a map of eastern Europe I settled on East Germany, since the Wall would not yet have been built and my own family knew people who had escaped via Berlin in those years. I read up on the city during that time, mapped everything out in my head, and planned my heroine’s escape.

I completed the manuscript in December of 2008. The following month, reading the New York Times, I spotted the following headline among the obituaries: Nora Kovach, Ballerina who Defected to the West. As my surname too is Hungarian, the name caught my eye, and I read that Kovach and her husband, dancing with the Budapest Opera Ballet in the late 1940s, were so talented that Galina Ulanova brought them to Leningrad to receive Russian training. In 1953, on tour in East Berlin, they noticed that the subway stopped close to their hotel and, taking a chance, hopped on and made their way to the English sector. In doing so, they were the first Soviet-trained ballet dancers to defect to the West.

At that early stage the term “defector” was not yet in currency; newspapers referred to Kovach and her husband as “Iron Curtain refugees.” To me, though, they remain remarkable in another way altogether: as one more example of truth being stranger than fiction, and of life imitating art imitating—unknowingly—life.

Book Description

A mysterious jewel holds the key to a life-changing secret, in this breathtaking tale of love and art, betrayal and redemption.
When she decides to auction her remarkable jewelry collection, Nina Revskaya, once a great star of the Bolshoi Ballet, believes she has finally drawn a curtain on her past. Instead, the former ballerina finds herself overwhelmed by memories of her homeland and of the events, both glorious and heartbreaking, that changed the course of her life half a century ago.

It was in Russia that she discovered the magic of the theater; that she fell in love with the poet Viktor Elsin; that she and her dearest companions—Gersh, a brilliant composer, and the exquisite Vera, Nina’s closest friend—became victims of Stalinist aggression. And it was in Russia that a terrible discovery incited a deadly act of betrayal—and an ingenious escape that led Nina to the West and eventually to Boston.

Nina has kept her secrets for half a lifetime. But two people will not let the past rest: Drew Brooks, an inquisitive young associate at a Boston auction house, and Grigori Solodin, a professor of Russian who believes that a unique set of jewels may hold the key to his own ambiguous past. Together these unlikely partners begin to unravel a mystery surrounding a love letter, a poem, and a necklace of unknown provenance, setting in motion a series of revelations that will have life-altering consequences for them all.

Interweaving past and present, Moscow and New England, the backstage tumult of the dance world and the transformative power of art, Daphne Kalotay’s luminous first novel—a literary page-turner of the highest order—captures the uncertainty and terror of individuals powerless to withstand the forces of history, while affirming that even in times of great strife, the human spirit reaches for beauty and grace, forgiveness and transcendence.

To read Marg's review of this book, click here.

Daphne Kalotay grew up in New Jersey, where her parents had relocated from Ontario; her mother is Canadian, her father is Hungarian. She attended Vassar College, majoring in psychology, before moving to Boston to attend Boston University's graduate program in fiction writing. She stayed on at BU to study with Saul Bellow as part of the University Professors program, where she earned a PhD in Modern and Contemporary literature, writing her dissertation on one of her favorite writers, Mavis Gallant. Her interview with Mavis Gallant can be found in the Paris Review's Writers-at-work series.

At Boston University, Daphne's stories won the school's Florence Engell Randall Fiction Prize and a Henfield Foundation Award. Her first book, the fiction collection Calamity and Other Stories, includes work first published in Agni, Good Housekeeping, The Literary Review, Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner, and was short-listed for the Story Prize.

Daphne has taught literature and creative writing at Boston University, Skidmore College, and Middlebury College. She lives in the Boston area.

Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay

A mysterious jewel holds the key to a life-changing secret, in this breathtaking tale of love and art, betrayal and redemption.

When she decides to auction her remarkable jewelry collection, Nina Revskaya, once a great star of the Bolshoi Ballet, believes she has finally drawn a curtain on her past. Instead, the former ballerina finds herself overwhelmed by memories of her homeland and of the events, both glorious and heartbreaking, that changed the course of her life half a century ago.

It was in Russia that she discovered the magic of the theater; that she fell in love with the poet Viktor Elsin; that she and her dearest companions—Gersh, a brilliant composer, and the exquisite Vera, Nina’s closest friend—became victims of Stalinist aggression. And it was in Russia that a terrible discovery incited a deadly act of betrayal—and an ingenious escape that led Nina to the West and eventually to Boston.

Nina has kept her secrets for half a lifetime. But two people will not let the past rest: Drew Brooks, an inquisitive young associate at a Boston auction house, and Grigori Solodin, a professor of Russian who believes that a unique set of jewels may hold the key to his own ambiguous past. Together these unlikely partners begin to unravel a mystery surrounding a love letter, a poem, and a necklace of unknown provenance, setting in motion a series of revelations that will have life-altering consequences for them all.

Interweaving past and present, Moscow and New England, the backstage tumult of the dance world and the transformative power of art, Daphne Kalotay’s luminous first novel—a literary page-turner of the highest order—captures the uncertainty and terror of individuals powerless to withstand the forces of history, while affirming that even in times of great strife, the human spirit reaches for beauty and grace, forgiveness and transcendence.

As soon as I first saw this book being talked about, I knew I wanted to read it. There is something about Russian history, particularly 20th century Russian history, that makes for compelling reading for me, and this book was no exception. I was however a bit concerned that my lack of knowledge about ballet might be problematic, but in the end, this was a minor issue. Most of the time, I was lost in the world that the author created in both Moscow and Boston.

The three main characters in this drama are Nina Revskaya, a former ballerina and star of the Bolshoi Ballet, Grigori Solodin, a professor of Russian, and Drew Brookes who works in a prestigious auction house.

The story begins when Nina, who is now wheelchair bound due to her physical afflictions gained through many years of dancing , decides to sell off many of the jewels that she has accumulated throughout her years as a famous ballerina and to donate the proceeds to the Boston ballet. Some of the jewels are gifts received since her defection, but there are others that she bought with her from Communist Russia, and it is really those that are the catalysts for the stories that we hear about Nina's life.

We first meet Nina as a young child who is taken to try out for the famous Moscow ballet school. From that time on, Nina lives and breathes ballet, determined to work her way up through the ranks of the competitive and prestigious Bolshoi Ballet.

When Nina meets poet Victor Elsin, she not only falls in love but also loses some of her political naivety. This is the second novel I have read in the last month that is set in Stalinist Russia (the other being The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore). Both books do a great job of showing readers, who in most cases can only begin to imagine, what it is like to be constantly on edge, worried about which ones of your neighbours or friends is informing on you, and knowing that it doesn't take much to lose a person in the notorious prisons of the time.
When Nina agrees to sell her jewels, the auction house sends Drew Brooks to try and garner more information from the famous ballerina - photos, anecdotes, anything that can be used in the auction catalogue. Nina, who has never really learnt to trust anyone, is resistant to sharing those memories, despite the fact that each day she (and the reader) is transported back in time to spend time with her friends: Gersh, a Jewish composer, and Vera and Polina who are also dancers. Drew is devoted to her work, often going above the call of duty, but she is not quite as successful in her private life, much to her mother's consternation.

The third strand of the story is that of Grigori Solodin, a professor of Russian at a prestigious university, and a man who has a strong professional interest in the poetry of Victor Elsin (Nina's husband), for reasons known initially only to him at the beginning of the book. When Grigori decides to also donate a  necklace that appears to match some of Nina's jewels, Brook is left with more questions than answers. Is the necklace part of the same set, but most importantly, what is the connection between Nina and Grigori?

At it's heart, Russian Winter is a story about reevaluating what you think you know about your life,. For Nina, this means reevaluating her life through the lens of her memories of her life with her husband and in the oppressive regime where no amount of success guaranteed safety. For Grigori, it is not only his past as a recent widower and his struggle to move on with his life, but also a search for identity, for belonging, for answers he has been searching for his whole life. And for Drew, questions about her grandfather's life, about her failed marriage, and her future happiness  - about looking back, but also about moving forward.

I love it when story lines are interwoven with each other, and going backwards and forwards in time, but it has to be done well. With all three of the characters looking back at their lives, there could have been capacity for Kalotay to lose some of those strands, but she managed to weave the various story lines together with aplomb.

I also really liked that between each chapter there was a description of some of the items that were going up for auction, and I especially liked it when we got to see how it was that Nina came to own that particular piece.

If I was to make a criticism of this novel, it would only be a small one, and that relates to the way the novel was wrapped up - it was too soon! There was one event that was telegraphed but that the reader didn't get to see, and I really wanted to experience that moment with the characters! The other thing is that, there was one particular relationship that felt too convenient. Without giving too much away, the chemistry was good between the characters, but I am not sure that I necessarily felt that the connection between them was as strong as it was implied to be.

In short, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it, especially if you enjoy reading about Russia, ballet, jewellery or if you are in the mood for a fascinating story that you can get lost in for a few hundred pages.

Once again, I am grateful that by agreeing to participate in a blog tour I was given that extra push to read a book that I would have eventually read, but it would have taken me ages to actually get to. I am almost reluctant to return Russian Winter to the library now!

To find out more about the author and her book, visit her website, her Facebook page, or the reading group guide.

Review crossposted at Adventures of an Intrepid Reader