From Publishers Weekly
Even for a man on "the very best terms with the very best people," the Soviet Union on the eve of glasnost is a precarious place. So it goes for bitterly compelling antihero Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov, richly crafted in this debut novel by Russian émigré Grushin. After starting out as an avant-garde artist, Sukhanov marries the daughter of an iconic Soviet painter, becomes a critic and quickly rises to editor-in-chief of Art of the World, an influential journal devoted to disparaging the Western art that once inspired him. An enviable Moscow apartment, a dacha and a personal driver follow, but 12 years later, Sukhanov can no longer write, his wife and son know him for the sellout he is, and Gorbachev's ascension may mean the end of his sinecure. When a man claiming to be his long-lost cousin comes to visit, Sukhanov finds himself sleeping on his couch, where, as dreams of his former life haunt him, his past may catch up with him for real. Grushin, who has served as former President Carter's personal interpreter and as an editor at Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, offers a powerful and richly detailed examination of late Soviet society's harsh confinements—even for those who have all the right connections. (Jan. 5)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Anatoly Sukhanov showed talent early, and his daring, brilliant art captured the hand of beautiful Nina Malinin, daughter of a famed Russian artist. But then he opted for prestige and comfort, hiding his controversial paintings and becoming critic rather than creator as editor ofArt of the World, Russia's leading art magazine, which condemns whole schools of Western art. Suddenly in 1985, at the age of 56, Sukhanov's life unravels and he loses everything he holds dear--job, son, daughter, possibly wife--but through the pain, in a series of dream sequences in which he confronts his past, he gains truth about his father's life and death and about young Nina's wrenching decision between art and love. In well-honed prose with vivid imagery, Grushin provides a portrait of a culture, interplaying art with politics in twentieth-century Russia, and dealing throughout with the universal subjects of love and truth. Sukhanov lingers in memory as a child stunned into silence by the beauty of Botticelli's paintings and as a middle-aged adult finding his way. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
In Olga Grushin’s remarkably poised first novel, Anatoly Sukhanov is a fifty-six-year-old member of the Soviet nomenklatura in the pre-perestroika years of the mid-1980s. Editor of the prestigious magazine Art of the World, he enjoys all the marks of outward success-opulent apartment, chauffeured car, country dacha-not to mention a beautiful wife who’s the daughter of one of the country’s most lauded establishment artists. But his enviable lifestyle has come at a price: the abandonment of his younger artistic self. Now, it seems, that abandonment is catching up with him as he finds himself descending into a private hell of dreamlike and nightmarish visions from the very past he’s been so adept at ignoring.
That brief summary suggests a dark story, yet the genius presiding over The Dream Life of Sukhanov is Marc Chagall, he of the cows, violins and lovers flying through starry skies. Grushin studied art history at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and the novel sometimes feels like the literary equivalent of one of Chagall’s whimsical, dreamlike paintings. Grushin manages the tricky feat of moving between dream and reality without undermining her novel’s realistic political and social setting, achieving her effects partly through language and partly through structure. She is very good, for example, at using impressionistic techniques to evoke character. In the opening paragraphs, Sukhanov sees his chauffeur purely as a function-“the pair of suede gloves on the steering wheel”-while his wife Nina is described in terms of her makeup-a “peach-colored pillar of lipstick,” a compact that is a “small convex pool of glittering blackness.”
These early scenes suggest both the opulence and the superficiality of Sukhanov’s marriage and world. But this glitter is quickly undermined. Sukhanov is attending the opening of a retrospective show in honour of the eightieth birthday of his father-in-law, the famous painter Pyotr Alekseevich Malinin, whose social-realist works Sukhanov privately despises. A painting of Nina done by her father that has always hung in Sukhanov’s study (reassuring him, though it’s a bad painting, that his choices in life have been correct) has been loaned for the show. Sukhanov knows he’s going to miss the painting; he doesn’t know that its departure foreshadows the loss of all of his cherished assumptions about his family, his work, and his status. As in a fairytale, three confrontations-with a critical young journalism student, a former friend who’s remained an impoverished artist, and a young man who seems to be a mugger but turns out to be harmless-suggest that Sukhanov’s carefully constructed life is about to come crashing down.
It’s then that Grushin does something audacious with structure. Sukhanov’s mother’s acquisition of a canary leads to a chance comment about birds-his mother tells Sukhanov he was interested in birds as a child-and as Sukhanov subsequently wanders through the neighbourhood of his childhood, he sees a flock of pigeons fluttering above a statue of Gogol. Here, as the pigeons remind Sukhanov of an earlier flight of birds, Grushin switches from a third to first-person point of view: “. . . barely reaching the sad man’s feet on the pedestal, I stand with my head tipped back-a three-year-old who has just chased a flock of pigeons and is now watching their circling flight in open-mouthed fascination.” Yet, significantly, the statue of Gogol seen by that three-year-old was a different one; the mournful appearance of that other statue was declared “misrepresent[ative of] Soviet reality” and was replaced in 1952 by a more appropriately confident Gogol. The child’s reality has been literally substituted, just as the old statue was replaced by the new, false one.
The birds’ flight is significant for another reason; the dream of flying without machines, we discover, obsessed Sukhanov’s father to the point of madness, and the father’s early disappearance left a huge void in Sukhanov’s young life. Later it’s Nina herself whom Sukhanov imagines flying when her portrait is replaced by a painting of Leda and the swan, given to them as a wedding present by their impoverished artist friend. “With a startled cry, he rushed toward her, to prevent, to stop, to catch . . . He was too late. Already, with that maddening fluid grace she possessed, she glided into the black translucence of the night, leaving behind a solitary feather fluttering slowly to the floor-and although he wanted to shout, to protest, to implore, no words came to him, none at all, and silently, knowing she would never return, he watched as she flew farther and farther away, melting amidst the cold stars above the fairy-tale city of Moscow. . . ” It’s only towards the end of the novel that Sukhanov understands his own destiny in terms of flight, realising that he’s a man who “obligingly shed his own wings and then spent decades listlessly watching ugly, atavistic stubs sprout in their stead.”
Again and again Grushin uses the device of an actual event in the present to tip Sukhanov into a vividly relived memory of a similar event in the past, while characters from the past turn up in the present and vice versa. A man claiming to be a long-lost cousin appears, although his mission seems to be, in league with Sukhanov’s colleagues at the magazine, to undermine Sukhanov’s authority, apparently on orders from high up in the Ministry of Culture. Struggling to deal with the erosion of his work life, Sukhanov also begins to realise that his cosy vision of his family is completely false. After losing his wife to what looks like permanent residence at their dacha, his corrupt and conniving son to life with Nina’s equally corrupt father, and his daughter to her married rock-star boyfriend, Sukhanov embarks on a nightmare train journey back to Moscow, a journey that forces him into a still-closer examination of his past. He discovers that he has made the same choice as the father-in-law he despises-to make those around him happy rather than pursue artistic immortality. “I was still certain of the road I myself would take if offered the choice between comfort and immortality,” he remembers thinking at age thirty, “even happiness and immortality-but did I have the right to choose it for others, for those I loved?”
Sukhanov’s journey turns out to be a redemptive one, although the final vision leaves unanswered the question as to whether Sukhanov can, after all, become the great artist that his wife and friend always believed he could be. Grushin has a tendency at times to overexplain, reiterating links and connections rather than trusting the reader’s ability to make them, and she relies too heavily on certain favourite tropes (“stars” is one of them). Yet these are quibbles. Although English is not her first language, Grushin seems surprisingly at home in it while making liberal use of the non-naturalistic techniques shared with fellow Russian writers such as Gogol and, more recently, Tatyana Tolstaya. Her magical, inventive novel has brought its author fully justified acclaim, and makes this reader’s mouth water in anticipation of her next.
Patricia Robertson (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
That brief summary suggests a dark story, yet the genius presiding over The Dream Life of Sukhanov is Marc Chagall, he of the cows, violins and lovers flying through starry skies. Grushin studied art history at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and the novel sometimes feels like the literary equivalent of one of Chagall’s whimsical, dreamlike paintings. Grushin manages the tricky feat of moving between dream and reality without undermining her novel’s realistic political and social setting, achieving her effects partly through language and partly through structure. She is very good, for example, at using impressionistic techniques to evoke character. In the opening paragraphs, Sukhanov sees his chauffeur purely as a function-“the pair of suede gloves on the steering wheel”-while his wife Nina is described in terms of her makeup-a “peach-colored pillar of lipstick,” a compact that is a “small convex pool of glittering blackness.”
These early scenes suggest both the opulence and the superficiality of Sukhanov’s marriage and world. But this glitter is quickly undermined. Sukhanov is attending the opening of a retrospective show in honour of the eightieth birthday of his father-in-law, the famous painter Pyotr Alekseevich Malinin, whose social-realist works Sukhanov privately despises. A painting of Nina done by her father that has always hung in Sukhanov’s study (reassuring him, though it’s a bad painting, that his choices in life have been correct) has been loaned for the show. Sukhanov knows he’s going to miss the painting; he doesn’t know that its departure foreshadows the loss of all of his cherished assumptions about his family, his work, and his status. As in a fairytale, three confrontations-with a critical young journalism student, a former friend who’s remained an impoverished artist, and a young man who seems to be a mugger but turns out to be harmless-suggest that Sukhanov’s carefully constructed life is about to come crashing down.
It’s then that Grushin does something audacious with structure. Sukhanov’s mother’s acquisition of a canary leads to a chance comment about birds-his mother tells Sukhanov he was interested in birds as a child-and as Sukhanov subsequently wanders through the neighbourhood of his childhood, he sees a flock of pigeons fluttering above a statue of Gogol. Here, as the pigeons remind Sukhanov of an earlier flight of birds, Grushin switches from a third to first-person point of view: “. . . barely reaching the sad man’s feet on the pedestal, I stand with my head tipped back-a three-year-old who has just chased a flock of pigeons and is now watching their circling flight in open-mouthed fascination.” Yet, significantly, the statue of Gogol seen by that three-year-old was a different one; the mournful appearance of that other statue was declared “misrepresent[ative of] Soviet reality” and was replaced in 1952 by a more appropriately confident Gogol. The child’s reality has been literally substituted, just as the old statue was replaced by the new, false one.
The birds’ flight is significant for another reason; the dream of flying without machines, we discover, obsessed Sukhanov’s father to the point of madness, and the father’s early disappearance left a huge void in Sukhanov’s young life. Later it’s Nina herself whom Sukhanov imagines flying when her portrait is replaced by a painting of Leda and the swan, given to them as a wedding present by their impoverished artist friend. “With a startled cry, he rushed toward her, to prevent, to stop, to catch . . . He was too late. Already, with that maddening fluid grace she possessed, she glided into the black translucence of the night, leaving behind a solitary feather fluttering slowly to the floor-and although he wanted to shout, to protest, to implore, no words came to him, none at all, and silently, knowing she would never return, he watched as she flew farther and farther away, melting amidst the cold stars above the fairy-tale city of Moscow. . . ” It’s only towards the end of the novel that Sukhanov understands his own destiny in terms of flight, realising that he’s a man who “obligingly shed his own wings and then spent decades listlessly watching ugly, atavistic stubs sprout in their stead.”
Again and again Grushin uses the device of an actual event in the present to tip Sukhanov into a vividly relived memory of a similar event in the past, while characters from the past turn up in the present and vice versa. A man claiming to be a long-lost cousin appears, although his mission seems to be, in league with Sukhanov’s colleagues at the magazine, to undermine Sukhanov’s authority, apparently on orders from high up in the Ministry of Culture. Struggling to deal with the erosion of his work life, Sukhanov also begins to realise that his cosy vision of his family is completely false. After losing his wife to what looks like permanent residence at their dacha, his corrupt and conniving son to life with Nina’s equally corrupt father, and his daughter to her married rock-star boyfriend, Sukhanov embarks on a nightmare train journey back to Moscow, a journey that forces him into a still-closer examination of his past. He discovers that he has made the same choice as the father-in-law he despises-to make those around him happy rather than pursue artistic immortality. “I was still certain of the road I myself would take if offered the choice between comfort and immortality,” he remembers thinking at age thirty, “even happiness and immortality-but did I have the right to choose it for others, for those I loved?”
Sukhanov’s journey turns out to be a redemptive one, although the final vision leaves unanswered the question as to whether Sukhanov can, after all, become the great artist that his wife and friend always believed he could be. Grushin has a tendency at times to overexplain, reiterating links and connections rather than trusting the reader’s ability to make them, and she relies too heavily on certain favourite tropes (“stars” is one of them). Yet these are quibbles. Although English is not her first language, Grushin seems surprisingly at home in it while making liberal use of the non-naturalistic techniques shared with fellow Russian writers such as Gogol and, more recently, Tatyana Tolstaya. Her magical, inventive novel has brought its author fully justified acclaim, and makes this reader’s mouth water in anticipation of her next.
Patricia Robertson (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
Book Description
Stepping out into the dusk of a warm Moscow evening, esteemed art critic Anatoly Sukhanov feels on top of the world: his career is glittering, his wife is beautiful and his children are clever. But the year is 1985 and the air is heavy with change. Sukhanov's future will be haunted by doubt. Beset by heartbreaking visions of a past he gave up, he questions his choices: in swapping a precarious life as a brilliant underground artist for comfort and security did he betray his dreams? And if his dreams are lost, what does he have left? One of the most highly acclaimed debuts of recent years, "The Dream Life of Sukhanov" is a work of demonic energy and startling imagery: a new classic.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Olga Grushin was born in Moscow in 1971. Her family left for Prague in 1976 and returned to Moscow in 1981. She studied at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow State University and Emory University. The Dream Life of Sukhanov was shortlisted for both the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Orange Prize for New Writers 2006. Olga Grushin now lives in Washington DC with her husband and son and is currently at work on her second novel.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
