The Dream Life of Sukhanov
Tamara Beckwith (photograph of the author) New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons [A Marian Wood Book], 2005. Uncorrected Proof for Limited Distribution. Trade paperback. [12],354, [2] pages. Slight cover wear noted. After losing his job and the respect of his family, Russian avant-garde artist Anatoly Sukhanov confronts his past in a series of dreams that reveals the sacrifices he has made to gain material wealth in twentieth-century Moscow. Olga Grushin (born June 1971) is a Russian-American novelist. Born in Moscow to the family of Boris Grushin, a prominent Soviet sociologist, Olga Grushin spent most of her childhood in Prague, Czechoslovakia. She was educated at Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and Moscow State University before receiving a scholarship to Emory University in 1989. She graduated summa cum laude from Emory in 1993. She became a naturalized US citizen in 2002, but retains Russian citizenship. Grushin has worked as an interpreter for Jimmy Carter, as a cocktail waitress in a jazz bar, a translator at the World Bank, a research analyst at a Washington, DC law firm, and, most recently, an editor at Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Her first novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov written in English, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2006, won the 2007 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, as well as a Top Ten Books of 2006 choice by the Washington Post. Olga Grushin’s astonishing literary debut has won her comparisons with everyone from Gogol to Nabokov. A virtuoso study in betrayal and its consequences, it explores—really, colonizes—the consciousness of Anatoly Sukhanov, who many years before abandoned the precarious existence of an underground artist for the perks of a Soviet apparatchik. But, at the age of 56, his perfect life is suddenly disintegrating. Buried dreams return to haunt him. New political alignments threaten to undo him. Vaulting effortlessly from the real to the surreal and from privilege to paranoia, The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a darkly funny, demonically entertaining novel. Derived from a Kirkus review: A Russian artist’s compromise with Soviet bureaucracy provokes a surreal mid-life crisis in this first novel by Russian-born Grushin. Anatoly Sukhanov, editor-in-chief of an official Soviet art magazine, becomes increasingly disoriented following a birthday celebration honoring his father-in-law Malinin, an “approved” artist who—in the fiery words of Sukhanov’s radicalized younger self—had “sold his soul to the devil” for wealth, fame and freedom from political oppression. Now, Sukhanov’s beautiful wife Nina sorrowfully accuses him of having done the same—as they grow ever further estranged. Other disapproving perspectives on his failures as both art’s representative and paterfamilias are offered by teenaged daughter Ksenya, whose liberal beliefs mock his, and adult son Vasily, a suave careerist who’s a far more skilled “operator” than Sukhanov himself. Initially nondescript or neutral, increasingly threatening encounters and incidents begin to unhinge Sukhanov, stimulating fragmentary guilty memories of his childhood and youth. A meeting with a former friend and fellow artist who didn’t “compromise” (and hasn’t prospered); the unexpected visit of an apologetic cousin whom Sukhanov can’t remember having met; a contretemps at his office when Sukhanov’s article on Salvador Dalí is “bumped” by a freelance essay on maverick Russian painter Marc Chagall—all trigger both reminiscences and hallucinations that “bring . . . him closer and closer to the forbidden edge of a personal darkness he had not leaned over in decades.” Grushin has imagined both Sukhanov’s carefully managed life and his richly troubling personal history with a detailed intensity that fruitfully echoes Solzhenitsyn’s best books, Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra. Brilliant work from a newcomer who’s already an estimable American writer. Condition: Very good.
Keywords: Anatoly Sukhanov, Editor, Art, Artist, Oppression, Nina Sukhanov, Careerist, Kzenya Sukhanov, Vasily Sukhanov, Dalvador Dali, Marc Chagall, Dreams, Apparatchik, Censorship, Transformation, Nightmare, Dissolution, Faithlessness, Avant-garde
ISBN: 0399152989
[Book #83954]
Price: $50.00