Hybrid Interview: Elyse Durham
Essay by Sonja Srinivasan •
Russian writers never shy away from penetrating insight into all facets of the human psyche: we read Russian novels precisely because they “go there.” There is also a strong dramatic element to much of Russian literature. Think of Anna Karenina’s affair that destroys her marriage and scandalizes society, or the heartbreaking unrequited romance and reversal of fortune of the debauched Eugene Onegin and the innocent Tatiana. These works are mesmerizing because they raise deep moral and emotional questions that hook the reader—how they will be resolved? Tragedy, love, betrayal, and manipulation are not-infrequent themes in Russian literature, not to mention that elusive, inexplicable characteristic known as “Russian soul.”
Maya & Natasha, the debut novel by Elyse Durham, is admittedly American, but its sensibility is Russian. Set in the former Soviet Union just as the Germans are encroaching upon Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), Kirov Ballet dancer Elizaveta gives birth to fraternal twins Maya and Natasha and then takes her own life. The orphaned babies are immediately spirited away and raised by their mother’s closest friend Katusha. When they return to Leningrad in 1944, the twins attend a performance by the Kirov Ballet for the first time and find the art form dazzling. The narrator implies it is also propaganda: “Proof of the superiority of its people…You could fall in love with [a ballerina] and not know you were falling in love with Russia.” The specter of the Cold War and anti-American sentiment will form the backdrop of the book.
Fast forward to 1958, where the novel begins. Aged seventeen, the twins are in their final year at the Vaganova Ballet Academy in Leningrad. We are privy to their physical and emotional closeness, every detail of their bodies, and are able to forgive any jealousies and rivalries given their unbreakable connection since conception. Maya is introverted and dances like “a quiet fire…a stronger sort of fire than a flash.” Natasha is outgoing, prettier, and the more confident performer. The girls are told by the ballet master that the legendary Kirov Ballet can only accept one of them next year; the reason is that a new government law forbids groups of siblings to be hired together due to the risk of defection when the company tours America. This introduces the first threat to the tight bond between the sisters, who will see their once-intimate sisterhood unravel painfully.
One twin wants to go to America and become a famous actress. She begins to hang out with the stilyagi, young rebels who adopt the habits and dress of Americans. The other twin, by contrast, improves her dancing skills when partnered with a stronger male dancer at the Academy, trying to outdo her sister in order to get into the Kirov. At the end of the school year, the students put on their spring graduation gala performance. And then comes the great tragedy that is the point of no return: one twin engineers a disaster to sabotage the other during the performance in order to take her place at the Kirov and tour America. The author has proven our assumptions wrong: the closest of kin can become one’s worst enemy.
To reveal more of the plot would spoil the pleasure for the reader. What is discussable, then, is how the novel unfolds in terms of craft. The reversals of fortune—and power—that continuously unfold are shocking and heartbreaking. Often, when one twin is doing well, the other is in a difficult situation and vice versa. We learn that the injured twin becomes a pampered actress, finding love and living well in Russia. The Kirov dancer finds that life in the West and travel can be quite lonely and challenging. Neither has had the life she expected. The constant ping-ponging between the opposing lives of the twins is the engine that drives the tremendous narrative tension throughout the book.
The twins’ life experiences raise many deep emotional questions that hook the reader. Who will end up more successful, Maya or Natasha? Is success better in the US or USSR? Will the twins ever be reunited? If so, can they ever be as close as they once were? And where will they be reunited, when one is still in the USSR? Defecting means consequences for those left behind, but to live in the Soviet Union means a life of continued repression and kowtowing to the agendas of government officials like Yekaterina Furtseva and their propaganda. Here, too, there is a ping-ponging between opposing answers to questions.
There is a wide cast of supporting characters that support the titular protagonists over the course of a decade. We feel the immediacy and physical sensations of being a dancer and the spaces they inhabit. We get deep inside the psyches of those in power who have the ability to manipulate citizens ruthlessly. The supporting cast plays important roles in the twins’ lives, both while dancing, and also in life, enabling their desires. To associate with the wrong person can endanger one’s life, but the right person and connections can bring about a life of tremendous privilege that other Russians don’t enjoy.
As Americans, we have our own perceptions and misconceptions of the Cold War. The novel gives us insight into life behind the Iron Curtain, such as how individuals reacted to the values of the regime and how they found their freedoms where they could. History is interwoven with fiction very skillfully and organically—we never feel it is a history lesson, nor do the characters give monologues or “info dumps” to inform the reader. We see fictionalized scenes with the legendary George Balanchine, but also scenes with a classmate who defects to the West (which is fictional but has strong echoes of Nureyev). This is historical fiction at its best, showing us the past through individuals’ experiences.
Elyse and I overlapped for one residency during my MFA program at Warren Wilson. When I learned that she had a novel coming out, I was very happy for her and also excited that the book was set in the Russian ballet world, as I am a Russophile (maybe because my name is Russian?) I was very curious to know more about the process by which Elyse wrote such an extraordinary and gripping novel. Much like ballet, where the dancers have spent grueling hours in their pointe shoes but are all elegance and grace onstage, a great novel does not show the seams of the technique and craft behind it.
Sonja Srinivasan: This book was so enjoyable, I couldn’t put it down! I have been a ballet lover since I was a child and even took classes in college and after. It’s never easy to write about a different art form, especially a nonverbal one. Could you tell us this translation of the nonverbal into verbal? The physicality of what the dancers experience is so vital to the novel.
Elyse Durham: Thank you so much for your kind words—I’m really glad to hear you enjoyed reading this novel. I’m also glad you’ve asked about capturing the physicality of ballet, because that was one of the most important things to me about this book. I fell in love with dance as an adult, taking ballet classes in my late twenties, and was so enraptured with the experience that I had to write about it. Dance demanded the attention of my mind and my body. I’d never experienced that kind of concentration before. I also knew the book wouldn’t work unless its depiction of dance and dancers’ lives felt totally authentic, especially on a physical level.
You’re absolutely right that this is tricky, though. Part of the problem is that it’s just not interesting to read descriptions of how somebody’s moving their body: “she lifted her foot,” “extended her arm,” etc. But I had a huge breakthrough when talking with a friend who was trying to figure out how to write about music. My friend realized the key was capturing how music made you feel. That’s what I decided to focus on, too: how it felt to dance. It meant I was writing about dance from the inside out.
SS: Yes, and the result is a very sensory, visceral novel. One of the challenges of writing this novel must have been that it is set in a different time and place. Could you tell us about your research across multiple topics such as Soviet Russian culture, the Cold War era—a time fraught with fear and terror for many artists, or ballet?
ED: When I start a new project, I’ve been compiling information and anecdotes and research of all sorts for a long, long, time—usually years—just because a certain subject has fascinated me. I’m usually a few years into this process before I’ve even recognized I’m working on a novel. That was the case for this project, too: I fell so deeply in love with ballet that I had to learn everything I could about it, from taking classes to watching performances to reading about dance history. Ballet, and Jennifer Homans’s dance history Apollo’s Angels in particular, was my entry point into the Soviet world. The way she described the Soviet government using dance and dancers as a form of cultural diplomacy was really interesting to me.
As far as research methodologies, it was a bit of everything. I watched documentaries; read tomes on Russian history, the history of ballet, and Soviet ballet, cinema, and the arts; interviewed dancers, teachers, historians, pointe shoe saleswomen, accompanists, etc.; observed dance classes and rehearsals; combed through archives of Soviet ballet ephemera at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the list goes on! One of the strangest things I did was read a declassified CIA manual on KGB interrogation tactics during the Cold War. And I got fitted for pointe shoes myself—you don’t forget pain like that!
I should note, too, that I did a lot of research before I started writing, but also kept learning more as needed during the writing and editing process itself. With a project like this, you don’t know what you don’t know until you have to write about it. At some point, I had to accept that I was never going to know enough about Russian history or ballet to feel like an expert—I just had to trust I could learn how to tell this story. But I took accuracy very seriously. I was even in my local university library during the final stages of copyediting, checking minute details for errors.
SS: That is a good lesson for writers to research from a wide variety of media and sources, including untraditional ones. The choice of narration is critical here, because you could’ve chosen to alternate chapters from each of the protagonists’ points of view, but instead, Maya’s and Natasha’s are constantly going back-and-forth within the chapters. Occasionally, we shift to the point of view of another character. How did you arrive at this decision?
ED: Omniscience is such a powerful tool, and learning how to use it was one of the most fun parts of the entire process for me. When I was a kid, I often picked up books with these wry, opinionated narrators who could not only pop into everyone’s heads, but often offered little bits of commentary here and there, and I loved that. I chose to do that in Maya & Natasha both because I thought it was fun and because there was so much context to share that I wanted to include as many perspectives as possible. The characters live in a world where moral and ethical boundaries are very gray and constantly shifting, and each person perceives them differently. I wanted as complete a picture of that as I could get.
SS: I recently read a novel by Daniel Tam-Claiborne, Transplants, about two women who are not sisters but alter egos. How did you decide to make the characters twins, as opposed to just sisters, friends, or classmates? I can imagine that twins naturally have a greater sense of intimacy, which ups the stakes of the plot when either Maya or Natasha decides in her self-interest.
ED: The twin motif is a direct lift from the ballet Swan Lake. The White Swan/Black Swan double role in that ballet is one of the most challenging in classical dance. I loved the idea of the good sister/bad sister binary and wanted to see what would happen if I tried to dissolve that binary. Making them twins also smoothed out the timeline of the story: there’s a lot going on in the first few chapters of the book, and it was much easier to have them both enter the story at the same time.
SS: I didn’t realize it was from Swan Lake, though I sensed echoes of Aronofsky’s film Black Swan and dualities between similar women! Just as in that film, betrayal is a huge theme of Maya & Natasha, and it works on two levels here. One is in Soviet Russia, where people’s decisions (such as defecting) could lead to serious repercussions for family members. The other is on a very personal level, where a character knowingly does something that will hurt another person. Perhaps would it be more accurate to say that we see examples of the former through the latter? Could you talk about this more?
ED: One of the things I find most interesting about human nature is our incredible capacity to deceive ourselves. It’s actually really difficult to fully understand why you do what you do. I wanted to see what happens in a person’s head when they do something terrible and convince themselves they’re actually acting righteously.
To return to the subject of Maya & Natasha in particular, though—people who lived in this time and place faced incredibly difficult choices about everyday life. You had to compromise something just to survive, and then you had to live with the choices of that compromise—or deal with the loss of life or freedom, in some cases. I wanted to reflect the impossibility of life in this era by giving my characters similar choices.
SS: You do something incredibly unexpected at the beginning of part two: you switch to a new country—the US—and the POV of George Balanchine! Tell us about this.
ED: That leap first appeared in a funny way. I was sending my graduate advisor chapters from the novel and forgot to include an intervening chapter that included someone traveling from one country to the other. My advisor wrote back and said, “This leap is magical! You just expanded the world of the book.” And I liked that so much that I decided to keep it.
Eventually, obviously, the world of the book just was big. On a craft level, I wanted to switch perspectives both to signal the bigness of that world and to keep suspense heightened after what happens at the end of the Part One of the novel. I wanted people to turn the page and yell, “What!”
Balanchine was a vitally important character to me, even though he plays a smaller role, because he shows the life of someone who defected from the Soviet Union. One of the twins dreams of defecting, and Balanchine actually does it. A historian I talked to spoke about the huge gap that existed between the America in Soviet dissidents’ imaginations and the actual America. Balanchine’s role was, in part, to show that gap. Balanchine looms so large in ballet, especially in this era, and his work was part of what I fell in love with in the first place. I just couldn’t imagine writing this book without him (though trying to embody his voice was a little terrifying).
SS: It would be hard to talk about defection and ballet without including him. And also, it is important to keep the reader engaged and always throw her for a loop!
There is a supporting cast of minor characters who are quite significant as well. What can you tell us about “ranking” them or creating a hierarchy? This is something many writers struggle with, how to juggle multiple characters but still be clear on who is most important.
ED: That’s a great question. I’m a very visual person, so one of the things I did was make a chart of all the moving parts in the novel, and how and when they appear in each chapter: the main characters, major elements, minor characters, even the weather, etc. We’re talking about a huge chart, one that took up an entire wall in my office. Maya and Natasha were at the top of the column, and the more important a character was, or the more often they appeared, the higher up the list they were. So it was a very literal ranking in my case.
I wanted a large cast of characters for the same reason I wanted many points of view: to create as kaleidoscopic a world as I could. I should add, though, that some of those characters got way more pages and scenes in earlier drafts of the book. I cut a lot when working with my agent and even more when working with my editor. Both of them encouraged me to keep the book centered around the girls. Even with POVs like Balanchine or (my personal favorite) the Minister of Culture, Furtseva, I couldn’t spend too long away from the girls, or the tension just started to unravel. Even those other characters only belonged because they were further fleshing out the world and context that the twins belonged to.
SS: Your novel really feels like a Russian novel: there is beauty, tragedy, passion, longing, and that quintessential yet undefinable characteristic of “Russian soul.” The Russians are also great writers of psychological realism. There is an emotional intimacy that reveals many truths about human nature. How did you capture this Russian aesthetic in the novel?
ED: That’s maybe my favorite thing anybody has said about this book! I wanted it to feel very much like a Russian novel, so what you’ve said means a lot to me. From the outset, I knew that if I was going to try to write a book like this, I needed to steep myself in Russian literature, so I read as many classic Russian authors as I could: all the usual suspects like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, but also Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vasily Grossman, et cetera. This, of course, was endlessly entertaining and instructive, both for what I was trying to do and, I don’t know, being a human?
A huge turning point in this novel’s life also came when Yiyun Li started her Tolstoy Together read-through of War and Peace with A Public Space during the pandemic. Every day, I got to not only read a little bit of the novel but read Li’s killer insights on how and why Tolstoy does what he does. It set the bar for what I wanted to do.
SS: Ball or dance scenes are quite pivotal in novels or text-based art forms. We see this starting with Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina, or even (yes, I love musicals!) Grease. The actions in them launch something very vital to a plot. For example, Elizabeth Bennet first meets Mr. Darcy at the ball in Pride and Prejudice, and her life will never be the same. In Maya & Natasha, the young women are paired off with the young men as dance partners by the ballet mistress, Karinska, and this has repercussions that play out through the rest of the novel. Please tell us a little about this choice.
ED: What an interesting question—I’d never thought of that scene in the context of the ball scene motif, I guess you’d call it. I should say that this pairing-off scene in Maya & Natasha is in the context of a class at the ballet school, not a dance or a social setting, though it does have repercussions in the girls’ social lives.
The biggest reason I wanted the girls to get paired off in class was that I read about the practice of learning to partner in dance, and that it’s a hugely important thing for classical dancers. Duets are everywhere in classical dance, and physical chemistry is a big part of that. Come to think of it, that’s something this scene does have in common with the ball scenes you mention in literature, like Pride and Prejudice. There’s a level in human relationships, especially romantic ones, that’s entirely dependent on physical chemistry, and dance lets you test out that chemistry—or discover the lack of it. Dance requires a ton of discipline, but it also requires being in touch with your intuitions.
SS: People criticize literary fiction for emphasizing character and narration over plot. Maya & Natasha, however, is literary fiction that is highly plot-driven. Each section or chapter ends with a real cliffhanger, an issue to be resolved, and then in the following section or chapter you take us to an equally intriguing plot line and do the same at the end. Can you give us some advice on how to make literary fiction gripping and plot-driven?
ED: Story is what interests me most about fiction, and narrative entertainment in general. I often find myself on Wikipedia, reading the plot summaries for movies or TV shows I have no intention of ever watching, just because I’ve heard something about them and I want to see what happens. That’s the kind of suspension I want to create for readers, too.
I had to work really hard to build that narrative tension muscle for this book. One of the things I really struggled with at first was learning how to stretch out tension over time. You can’t just set up an expectation, or make readers ask a question, and then immediately answer it in the next chapter or page. That’s an annoying thing to do. On the other hand, you can’t just set up arbitrary cliffhangers that don’t tie into the story, either. This is another place where charting out the plot really helped me: I got to see how I could stretch out a particular line of tension over time, or see when I’d dropped it altogether and needed to pick it up again.
For somebody who’s looking to get better at generating narrative tension, I’d take a look at some genre fiction that does this incredibly well, like mysteries or thrillers (I loved Robert Harris’s Conclave so much that I refuse to read the last five pages so I can always return to it!). You can learn a lot by seeing the methods those folks use to keep you hooked. When I was writing Maya & Natasha, I knew this was the book I’d be using to query an agent, and I knew agents often requested portions of novels before asking for the full manuscript. So I made sure to insert a cliffhanger at the end of every typical request length—ten pages, fifteen pages, fifty pages, etc. It actually worked really well on a narrative level too.
ELYSE DURHAM is the author of Maya & Natasha (Mariner). A graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, her fiction has appeared in the Cimarron Review, the Cincinnati Review, Image, and elsewhere. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
SONJA SRINIVASAN holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson college and degrees from Stanford and Columbia universities. A Pushcart-nominee, she has published stories (including a commission for the Ann Arbor Bicentennial), a novella, and a novel excerpt. Non-fiction works include an interview with Daniyal Mueenuddin in The Rumpus and an upcoming essay in World Literature Today. When she is not revising a novel, she is an opera singer/classical musician and enjoys being a polyglot.
