New Novel Maya & Natasha Brings Ballet and Sibling Rivalry Center Stage

From its breathtaking opening to its poignant ending, Elyse Durham’s Maya & Natasha (Mariner Books; $30 hardcover), out February 18, is a page-turning immersion into the Russian ballet world, filtered through the lens of sibling rivalry.

Debut author Durham plunges readers into the action with a prologue: An abandoned, pregnant 19-year-old Kirov ballet dancer—Elizaveta—gives birth as the 1941 Siege of Leningrad is getting underway. A midwife flees Elizaveta’s freezing apartment after delivering twin baby girls, leaving Elizaveta’s best friend and fellow troupe member, Katusha, to discover the tiny babies under a blanket at their mother’s side, their mother dead from slitting her wrists.

Part One follows. The year is 1958 and Katusha has raised the girls, who are in their final year at the Vaganova Ballet Academy. Natasha is portrayed as the leader, an adventuresome girl oozing with talent, who pushes social and political boundaries. Maya lives in her sister’s shadow, an adoring and devoted follower. Both girls have a shot at a permanent position with the Kirov, but it’s made clear to them that the company will not accept both of them.

This setup, against various dalliances and crushes on boys in the company, is the core of the drama. The two sisters could not be closer, and they could not be more competitive.

Twins, when well-rendered, are an intriguing way to tell a story. With two closely connected perspectives, twins allow a writer to play with different reactions to the same set of facts, or to the same scene. Or, in the case of Barbara Quick’s 2022 novel What Disappears, twins can remain connected subliminally across years. Quick presents another set of twins (separated as infants), also involved in the Russian ballet world, also in a deeply fraught relationship. I was tickled by the way the two books spoke to each other.

Maya’s and Natasha’s lives are so deeply enmeshed—kaleidoscoping into each another—that the incident that precipitates their separation almost defies credibility. Fortunately, Durham is a talented and artful writer, who deftly manages the sisters’ individual, improbable journeys, within Russia and across Europe and America.

Cold War politics in both Russia and the U.S. play a critical role in the lives of these two young women. Durham does an excellent job placing readers within the risk that artistic expression posed in post-World War II Russia. Eager to see what was beyond the Iron Curtain, many Russian dancers yearned to expand their repertoire. Although there were cultural exchanges between Russia and the U.S. throughout the 1960s, they posed serious perils to Russian dancers and their families back home, if they dared try to defect to the West.

George Balanchine plays an interesting cameo role in this novel, grouchy and overwhelmed at having to return to Russia, his home country, with the New York City Ballet as part of an American diplomatic effort. He dislikes having his memories replaced with the unpleasant changes he has witnessed.     

Ballet, with its fiendishly difficult physical travails, and ephemeral presentation onstage, is notoriously challengingto get on the page. It is a rare book that does this well. Ballet dancers and balletomanes will appreciate the skill with which Durham renders both class and performance. She has done her homework. The book concludes with an author’s note that cites her many sources; thoroughness is clearly her hallmark.

In the end, however, what is likely to stay with readers is the heartbreaking relationship between these two sisters, from their precarious births to their triumphs and disappointments and betrayals. Their lives unfold separately and unevenly, but never far from the imprint of having started out together in the same womb.