Tuesday’s classes were canceled due to snow, which made it a perfect day to stay home, sit at the window, and read all day. I opened Russian Winter on my Kindle, and the book starts at a window, in Boston, on Commonwealth Ave, looking at the falling snow.

In the wee hours of Monday morning, the blizzard that had been making its way across the country blew into the Commonwealth. White tufts fell in great busy swirls, a big billowing curtain of lace; by Tuesday the storm had been declared Boston’s largest on record. Grigori arrived at the department later than usual, hindered, like everyone, by the snowdrifts everywhere.

This novel jumps around, through Nina Revskaya’s long life, revealing her story in patches.  Nina’s past life as a principal in the Bolshoi Ballet Company is much more interesting than the present-day storyline about her auctioning off her jewelry collection in Boston, but there were so many sharp insights about Boston, and about teaching in Boston, that I didn’t mind. Since we know from the very beginning that Nina is going to end up in Boston, there’s kind of an undercurrent in all the Russian scenes, wondering if she was going to defect,  how she’d do it, and who she’d go with.

The novel shows Nina moving up through the ballet company,  from a little girl auditioning for the state ballet troupe with her friend Vera, to a soloist invited to VIP dinners after performances, and then to successful lead dancer. The scenes are all engaging, but the story isn’t chronological so the scenes are a bit disjointed at first and the overall narrative takes a while to take shape.

Ballet is fascinating for the way hardcore athleticism looks effortless in performance, and there’s a simmering parallel where the characters are all performing state loyalty, too. The unspoken rules of communist Russia are constantly present, and there’s a quiet cognitive dissonance. Nina’s uncle is imprisoned, but her mother is sure that if comrade Stalin only knew, he’d straighten out the misunderstanding right away. This pattern is repeated with other “misunderstandings”, state punishments and disappearances. (Is that a spoiler? I think if you’ve read anything about Stalinist Russia, it’s not really a spoiler.) The constant worries about surveillance and loyalty make this even more compelling. 

In the Russian storyline, there are wild intersections of loyalty, ambition, friendship and love, with layered secrets. Meanwhile in the Boston sequence, two people who are single, fond of work, and not looking for romance meet through work and decide they do have time for romance. It’s fine, but a bit obvious and definitely not the page-turning complexity of the Russian scenes and secrets.

The ending is a little bit abrupt. The resolution is more hinted at than explicitly stated, which I guess makes sense in a book that more hinted at the plot than revealed it. The theme of the jewels throughout the book worked really well, because it forces readers to ask questions about where they came from, and want to investigate more.

This post is my submission for this month’s Booknificent Thursdays.