Daphne Kalotay

A beautiful and engaging novel, Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay will sweep you up in the tragedies of life in Soviet Russia and have you hoping and praying for present-day redemption. There are many narratives in this novel including those of the young Nina Revskaya, ballerina at the Bolshoi and also her ailing modern self, now residing in Boston. There is also Grigoiri Solodin, a professor who was adopted as a newborn in Russia and who believes he has traced his parentage to Nina through show more the few small artifacts he inherited. And finally there is Drew Brooks, a woman who works at the auction house where Nina Revskaya is selling her famous jewelry collection. Though the lives of these people seem to have little in common, we see that there are common human threads that run through each of their lives.

I'll admit to having lost track of time and I started this book a bit late but it wasn't a chore at all to read this almost-500-page book over the course of three days. I got caught up in Nina's story and couldn't wait to find out what had happened to cause her defection from the Soviet Union and to learn if Grigori was really her son. Some readers might be a bit put off at first by the switching of tenses in the novel (the past story is written in the present tense) but after a while it simply becomes the natural rhythm of the book. There were a few slightly redundant parts and it took me some time to care about Grigori and Drew's stories but it all came together nicely by the end. As for Nina, I fell in love with her, as did so many others, and her story slowly broke my heart.

As I was reading this novel, I realized that though I frequently read novels set in Russia, they are never set in this time period of Stalin and Communism. I enjoyed this journey and appreciated the depth of Kalotay's research. The artforms that she chose to include in the story--ballet, music and poetry--are all well-incorporated as well and make this an epic sort of novel.

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My own skills lack to sum up this novel in the way that it deserves. This is one of the most beautifully written books I have read in a while. The story was lovely in its simplicity, every description dripping with meaning without being overly sentimental or pedantic. The whole way through I marveled at the language. Despite its length, the book moved at a swift pace. The plot was not one of action, but still I hardly wanted to put the book down. This is masterful writing.

The portrayal of show more Nina's past in Soviet Russia was fantastic. I have studied the Soviet Union quite a bit, particularly through the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Kalotay did a good job portraying the way Soviet citizens likely felt about their lives. She shows the reverence for Stalin, even in the worst times. Never once does Nina see him as anything but a savior; the problems come from others and he does not know. Shocking though that may be, anything else would probably have been inaccurate. The faith that she had in the country and the small things that lead her to question that are done well. Kalotay confronts rough issues with subtlety, with no overarching need to make her point clear by bashing you over the head with it.

I recommend this one extremely highly (in case that wasn't clear from the above). Do yourself a favor and read this. show less

I am not a musician. When I was in elementary school, I played the viola for a while. I was laughingly banished to the back room of the house to practice so I can't possibly have been any good. That my music teacher called my mother when I quit to tell her that I needed to keep at it because I had perfect pitch was, I suspect, more the desperation of a music teacher long deafened by children drawing screechy bows across out of tune strings than any truth about my potential musical talent. I show more do, however, visibly wince when I hear someone belt out a flat note or have their instrument out of tune so maybe I have squandered untapped natural ability. (Really not likely.) In any case, I do enjoy reading about music, the making of music, and the completely foreign (to me) world of musicians so I was intrigued by Daphne Kalotay's newest novel, Sight Reading, set in the rarified world of classical music.


Composed mainly of a small chamber group of characters, lauded conductor and composer Nicholas Elko, his beautiful and accomodating wife Hazel, and the young second chair violin at the conservatory, Remy, the novel explores the quiet dramas of their changing personal lives from young adulthood to late middle age in an exquisite, extended symphony of lives. Opening with Hazel catching sight of Remy after many years, the novel skips back into the past to the beginning of the story, when Nicholas and Hazel were in the early years of their marriage, traveling around the world for Nicholas' promising career as a conductor and doting on preschool-aged daughter Jessie and Remy was simply a student in Nicholas' new student orchestra in Boston. But life keeps on moving, relationships change, marriages fail, and new formations appear as the novel progresses and each of the characters must adjust to the big and the mundane little things of life. At heart, this is a domestic novel wreathed in music and the musical world but not necessarily about music itself.

Throughout the narrative, Nicholas struggles with writing a symphony based in his Scottish childhood; it's to be his magnum opus. In the same way he seeks to capture the events, sights, and sounds from his past, the novel serves as the symphonic rendering of his, Hazel's, and Remy's lives, movement after movement after movement. And each stage of the novel takes a different tone. There is the desperation of Nicholas and Remy's affair and his falling in love with her against his will forcing him to end his marriage. There's the loneliness and fear of being forever alone, of continuing to hurt and feel unwanted, undesirable for so many years, that pervades Hazel's very being, even to the point of manifesting itself on her skin. There's the stagnation and writer's block that drives Nicholas into a wholly different world than the one he inhabits and there's the feeling of neglect and of being taken for granted, of not being included that Remy must fight even in this marriage she won so many years ago.


Deep and yet still common, everyday emotion underlies the whole of the narrative, this tale of divorce and remarriage, of parenting, of shared lives, of music and devotion. It is a subtle rendering and beautifully written. Kalotay has portrayed the world of professional musicians well and she manages to immerse even the unmusical into sound just through words on the page. Just as Remy strengthens her playing through the challenge of sight reading, playing a piece through without having seen or prepared it beforehand, so too must the characters take the challenge of sight reading their way through their lives. And when they each give themselves over to the unpredictability of this, they are in fact strengthened too.

Remy is perhaps the most fully rounded of the characters, the one whose inner life is most interesting. Hazel is almost too good, too blandly effacing, even when she is hurt. Her reaction to Nicholas' cheating and the fact that any ugliness or recriminations from the divorce either don't happen or are hidden in the undocumented, intervening years not in the book, make her seem as conciliatory and placid as Remy assumes she is. Nicholas' character is careless with other peoples' feelings but he comes off as selfish in a rather good natured and unthinking, absent-minded way rather than a considered and deliberate way, not that this fully absolves him. The notes of each characters' life mingles with the others, sometimes breaking out for a soaring solo and other times sublimating to the whole to create a complex, well-written piece about the very ordinariness of love and relationship. I wish I'd had the foresight to listen to some wonderful music as I was reading along so I could have been completely immersed in the world these characters inhabit. show less

For Christmas my wonderful husband gave me - an avid reader - the perfect gift, a new book to open for each month of the year. This was January's book. He knows how much I love ballet and that's why he picked it. I knew nothing about it going into it.
I ended up really enjoying this book. Although I'm not usually a fan of Russian history I found that the author really brought the setting to life. I felt like I knew the characters and what they were going through in a country where you had to show more be so careful. At first I found the style of the book a bit unusual as the dual timelines that I usually read make it clear which parts are the past and which ones are the present and usually provide dates. But as the book went on I came to really appreciate how the book flowed. I liked both timelines equally and didn't rush through one to get back to the other one. Although the book was sad at parts I didn't find it depressing and I did find that there were hopeful parts as well. I liked how the author gave you bits and pieces of the story and until the end I was left wondering exactly what had happened. One thing I disliked though was the ending. It was VERY abrupt and I thought at first that I was missing a page.
There are a few content warnings: I was very pleasantly surprised that there was almost no profanity there were only two uses of Blasphemy and no other bad language, a character commits suicide and although not graphic the method used is revealed, there are a few mentions of abortions. Two very brief open door sex scenes. They were about a paragraph each. I didn't think they were necessary.
Overall I would highly recommend this book. I would advise that you read it in big chunks. It's the kind of book that you need to take a couple of hours and really immerse yourself in, not one that should be read a chapter here or there. show less