MAYA & NATASHA, Elyse Durham: EXCERPT

MAYA & NATASHA, Elyse Durham

Maya and Natasha are twin sisters born during the Siege of Leningrad in 1941 and abandoned by their mother, a prima ballerina at the Kirov Ballet who would rather die than not dance. Taken in by their mother’s best friend at the Kirov, the girls are raised to be dancers. The Vaganova Ballet Academy—and the totalitarian Soviet regime—is the only world they know.

In 1958, now seniors at the Vaganova, all Maya, Natasha and their classmates want is to dance with the Kirov, to join the company on its tour to America. But a new law from the Kremlin upends the twins’ plans: due to fears of defection, family members may no longer travel together. The Kirov can only accept one sister.

Maya resigns herself to living in Natasha’s shadow until a new dance partner inspires her to dream bigger and practice harder. Just in time for Kirov auditions, the sisters are equally matched. When one sister betrays the other, their lives are altered forever, splitting them apart—though neither will stray far from the other’s orbit.

As the Cold War heats up, Maya and Natasha must confront their loyalties: East versus West, the government that saved them versus their dreams of freedom, and, of course, one another.

Elyse Durham’s stunning debut novel MAYA & NATASHA (Mariner, February 18, 2025, Hardcover, eBook) explores the world of dance, Russian literature and culture, and the complicated bond of sisters. In compelling prose, she deftly shows how those who love us best can be the ones who hurt us most.

We are delighted to feature this excerpt!

From MAYA & NATASHA by Elyse Durham. Reprinted courtesy of Mariner Books, HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2025 by Elyse Durham.

C H A P T E R ON E

LENINGRAD , SEPTEMBER 1 9 5 8

Maya and Natasha sat in the back of a cramped red trolleybus, trying not to look at their watches. They were seventeen years old, and they were very, very late—which, as usual, was Natasha’s fault.

It was the first day of their last year at the Vaganova Ballet Academy. Half an hour before, they’d left Katusha’s apartment with plenty of time to catch the 4:30 trolleybus, which would have put them at the Vaganova early enough to claim their favorite room in the dormitory, which would have settled the nerves that had cost Maya sleep since June. But Natasha turned back at the last minute to repack her suitcase for the third time. Though the bus trip was only twenty minutes long, Natasha was convinced it would permanently wrinkle everything she owned.

The bus was crowded, and the two girls shared a seat, both to save room and because closeness was their usual attitude. When they were little, they’d pushed their beds close enough together that they could sleep holding hands. Katusha had reminded them that morning to stick together and care for each other during this last year of school,

but her words were unnecessary. For Maya and Natasha, being close was less a preference and more a biological necessity, as if each held some source of energy the other couldn’t live without.

“Pinky,” Natasha said. “His name was Pinky.”

“It was not!” Maya said. “I never would have fallen in love with someone named Pinky.”

“You were six!”

“That didn’t make me an idiot.”

They were constructing an oral history of Maya’s unrequited loves, a list so long that its beginning was apocryphal. Neither of them could remember the name of Maya’s first love, a freckled boy from their first year at the Vaganova. He’d dropped out after a semester, at which point Maya fell for him. (Maya specialized in falling for unattainable people.)

“What is it with you and names that start with P?” Natasha said. “Pinky, Petrov, Pyotr . . .”

Maya shushed her. “Don’t be so loud!” Pyotr, their quietest and slenderest classmate, was her latest obsession. But he lived in his own little world, one that did not include Maya, and her infatuation served no purpose except to give Natasha something to rib her about. Every time the trolleybus accelerated, it pressed Maya into the hard vinyl seat. On an ordinary day, the bus’s mechanical rocking calmed and soothed her, but today all she could think about was keeping her hair in place. Though they wouldn’t have any classes until tomorrow, she’d twisted her hair into its usual position—a high bun that must, no matter what, remain aloft and intact—in an effort to feel more like herself. That is, more like the self she longed to be. That is, more

like a dancer.

Natasha put her suitcase on her lap and peeked inside as if it car- ried kittens instead of clothes.

“I will never understand,” Maya said, leaning forward so as to

spare her bun from smooshing, “how you can care so much about such ugly clothes.”

Despite Khrushchev’s mania for material goods—“Every Ameri- can has a toaster and refrigerator,” he’d complained in a recent speech, “and why not us?”—everyone still wore the same shapeless, lifeless garments they had under Stalin, the same stiff shirts and itchy wool trousers, the same dresses of various unflattering shapes and prints. For all the attempts at modernization, fashion had not improved, and no amount of repacking would have kept Natasha’s wardrobe from looking shabby.

“It’s important to take good care of our things,” Natasha said. She handled her worn cardigans like they were precious imported goods purchased from Passage, the grand department store on Nevsky Pros- pect that they sometimes glanced into but never patronized. “Be- cause someday, we’ll have nice things. Maybe even someday soon.” She was convinced that when they joined the Kirov company next year—for her, this was always a “when,” not an “if ”—they’d suddenly have every luxury they could imagine, and that, more than anything, was what Natasha wanted.

Maya and Natasha did not look much alike. None of the other pas- sengers, tied up in their own troubles, had even realized the two slender girls were sisters, let alone twins. Natasha had her mother’s face—the full, round cheeks and lips, the blue eyes that were as quick to clear as to cloud over. Maya’s long face and slightly beaky nose looked nothing like her mother’s or sister’s. But both girls had the same dark hair, the same clear skin, the same wide, eager smile. They looked like cousins— both pretty, both young, but only distantly related.

Their life together was a dense construction of secrets—like Pinky and Pyotr—and shared preferences—summer over spring, pirozhki over pelmeni—and inside jokes, like their penchant for referring to themselves in the plural as “Matasha” after an elderly teacher jumbled

up their names. Chief among their pastimes was a nameless, word- less game, the sort of game you could only play with someone you’d known before words were necessary. The game consisted of putting your foot on top of the other person’s foot without their noticing and pinning their toes to the ground. The key was to do it sneakily, when the other person’s attention was elsewhere. They’d been playing it for so long that they did it without thinking.

Natasha was easily distracted, which meant Maya almost always won this game. She’d snuck her foot on top of Natasha’s nearly as soon as they sat down and left it there, a sensation so familiar it was comforting to them both. But when the bus rolled to its next stop, Natasha gasped. “Look!” she said. “Pyotr’s getting on!”

“Where?” Maya leaned toward the window. “I don’t see him.”

Natasha freed her toes from underneath her sister’s and clamped down on Maya’s foot. “My mistake,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe it was actually Pinky.”

“You cheated,” Maya said. “And his name wasn’t Pinky.”

“It was too. And sometimes you have to cheat to win.” Natasha pointed out the window again, this time with genuine enthusiasm. “Look!”

The bus had stopped beside the Kirov Theatre. Though Maya and Natasha had seen the Kirov in every light and every season, they’d never seen it quite like this—a majestic layer cake in aquamarine and white, the early autumn sun shining on it just so.

“Soon, we’ll dance there every day,” Natasha said, “Just like Elizaveta.”

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Elyse Durham is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Wigleaf, Image, and elsewhere, and she has received support from The Elizabeth George Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Glen Arbor Arts Center. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband, who is a Greek Orthodox priest. MAYA & NATASHA is her first book.

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