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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Your young men shall see visions,
By Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Hardcover)
And your old men shall dream dreams.This biblical prophecy plays out with a vengeance in Olga Grushin's extraordinary first novel, "The Dream Life of Sukhanov". "Sukhanov" has received glowing reviews in both the New York Times and on the cover of the Washington Post's Sunday Book Review. Such advance praise often leaves me with heightened expectations that almost invariably lead to disappointment. In this instance my expectations were not only met but exceeded. The book's publishers claim it is "steeped in the tradition of Gogol, Bulgakov, and Nabokov." To be sure, Grushin has not (yet) attained the mastery of a Bulgakov or Nabokov but it is no small achievement to have the comparison made with a straight face, even if one hasn't quite reached that stature. The fact that English is not Grushin's first language also calls Joseph Conrad to mind. The protagonist of the novel is Anatoly Sukhanov, known as Tolya to his friends and family. It is 1985; Tolya is 56 and an apparatchik (a mid-level party-functionary entitled to many of the benefits of the ruling class) of the first rank. An artist in his youth, Tolya is now the editor in chief of the USSR's leading art magazine, "Art of the World." Tolya's career consists of writing articles praising `socialist realism' (paintings of heroes of labor working in factories and the like) and condemning Western art, be it cubism or surrealism and the like as decadent work of no value to a progressive society. He is seemingly content, has a nice Moscow apartment, a beautiful wife, two children, and a chauffeur to drive him to and from his job and to his dacha outside Moscow. The story opens with Tolya and his wife attending a state-sponsored birthday party for his father-in-law an artist of limited talent but high rank. It is at this party that Tolya's life begins to unravel. Tolya runs into Lev, formerly his best friend back in the days when Tolya was still painting. This encounter sets off some long submerged memories for Tolya. Later, a casual remark by Tolya's mother serves as another pinprick that unleashes another submerged memory. In short order the floodgates have been opened and Tolya's past begins to overwhelm him. We see a childhood where Tolya's father was taken away, presumably a victim of Stalin's purges. We see Tolya develop his skills as an artist in his young adulthood, from 1957 until 1962. Those years are important because they were known in the USSR as "the Thaw", a time when Khrushchev lifted some of the strictures on Soviet art and literature. Solzhenitsyn and Yevtushenko, among others were published and the art world was abuzz with new activity. The thaw ended in 1962 and it was then that Tolya was forced to make the life choice that forms the central event of the novel. Grushin does a tremendous job showing us Tolya's envelopment in dreams of his past. The transformation between his present (the dreams of a middle aged man) and his past (when he was a young man with the vision of an artist) evolve from jarring to seamless as Tolya descends into something approaching a hallucinatory state (It is here that the comparisons to Bulgakov become most apt.) Grushin makes a reference in the book to Dostoyevsky's story "The Double", in which a man's life is taken over by his own ghost and that synopsis sums up Tolya's current predicament. Party functionaries such as the older Tolya are often the subject of withering scorn in Soviet fiction (Voinovich's Fur Hat comes to mind) but Grushin paints a portrait of Tolya that is both insightful and nuanced. He is not the subject of a parody but a human faced with choices in a society that did its best to make ones choices as predictable as possible. The contrast between the lives of Tolya and his old friend Lev creates a framework for the final third of the book and the final exposure of those lives is both compelling and emotionally charge. The reader cannot but help think of the choices they have made in their own lives and think about how those choices, once set in motion, become twigs and branches that when put together can change the course of the rivers of our lives. Langston Hughes once wrote, "Hold on to dreams, for when dream go, life is like a barren field covered with snow." Grushin takes this concept and asks whether dreams, once dead, can be resurrected. It is a question that remains open long after the last page is read and the book is closed. The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a treasure.
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ars Longa, Vita Brevis,
By
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This review is from: The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Hardcover)
Russian emigre Olga Grushin has crafted a fine first novel about the wounds we inflict on ourselves whether we cling to our youthful dreams or turn away from them.The setting is Moscow in the mid eighties. Fifty six year old Anatoly Sukhanov is a prominent art critic and the Editorial Director of a respected art journal. In return for being the Party's first line of defense against the decadence of western art, Sukhanov receives the perks of a mid-level party apparatchik: dacha, chauffeur, fashionable Moscow apartment. But change is blowing through the Soviet system, and it's becoming more difficult for Sukhanov to maintain his ideological footing. At home, his wife Nina seems distant and distracted. His two children have begun to unnerve him because their personalities reflect the split in his own. His son has become a cold-eyed careerist while his teenage daughter believes passionately in the transforming power of art, just as Sukhanov did back when he was a young artist of promise. Sukhanov starts slipping into reveries about his past - the tragedy that befell his father during the Great Patriotic War, his first subversive exposure to Renaissance and modern art, his early days as a painter, when his soul burned with desire to capture what he saw in his mind. Sukhanov's passionate paintings are caught in a Khrushchev-era political crossfire, which gets him fired from his job as an art teacher. With a young family and an uncertain future in front of him, Sukhanov takes the lifeline offered by his father-in-law Malinin, a hack painter with good party connections. Sukhanov puts away his paints and becomes a successful art critic by attacking in the name of Soviet ideology the same surrealist and modernist art he revered as a painter. The supporting characters are uniformly interesting. Sukhanov's wife Nina is both his muse and the reason he walks away from all that he values. She wants the material ease obtained by playing within the system but feels guilty over the lack of integrity this implies. Marrying the poor but talented Sukhanov was her way of rebelling against the type of life she and Sukhanov end up having. His old friend Belkin stayed true to his art and stayed poor and obscure while Sukhanov built his comfortable life. Now in his fifties, Belkin realizes that he lacks the skill and the stamina to make the final traverse from competence to mastery. Past and present collide with increasing force in Sukhanov's mind. By the end of the novel he finally knows who he is, and how he got that way. What's in doubt is whether he'll be able to act on the knowledge. Soviet artists of Sukhanov's generation faced an impossible dilemma. If art's purpose is to serve the needs of the state, then spending your days giving form to insights mined from your subjective consciousness is inherently decadent and selfish. But it's also the process by which all art universally acknowledged as great has been created over the past several centuries. Sukhanov's tragedy is that he's talented, but not courageous enough to go where his talent takes him. Inevitably, critics have compared Grushin to Nabokov, another Russian emigre writing novels in English. Grushin hasn't reached Nabokov's level of artistry - few have. For one thing, the book's pacing bogs down at times. Partly it's all the excursions into Sukhanov's past, partly it's the density of her descriptions. But she writes with wit, warmth and compassion, and this is a novel of many pleasures. A more apt comparison is to Anatolii Rybakov's brilliant novel of the Stalinist era, Children of the Arbat. Through the skill and particularity of their writing, Rybakov and Grushin reveal the real harm done by totalitarian governments. It's not what they do to their citizens, but what they make their citizens do to themselves.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Don't overlook this brilliant debut,
By
This review is from: The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Hardcover)
Despite having received some reviews from tough critics that are unreserved in their admiration, this thoroughly beautiful, original and deeply compassionate novel seems not to have caught the attention of many readers, and this is discouraging. I can only hope it catches on, and (possibly?) another positive review here may help get a few more copies into reader's hands. I find it hard to imagine a sympathetic reader being disappointed.Sukhanov is certainly an "anti-hero", and his character and position, and the choices he has made, are easy to sneer at in the early pages of the book. But the reader very gradually gains a fuller and fuller understanding of the complexity of a man's life as shaped by history, family, and happenstance, and as Sukhanov's sufferings bring him self-knowledge, we are brought to an equally rich understanding. The reader and Sukhanov are gradually brought to full enlightenment at the same pace, and the final effect is deeply moving, as well as unexpectedly elating, at least to me. As others have noted, dream, reality and potential madness are interwoven with an astonishing deftness - the reader is never lost or deliberately mystified. We are in a very concrete, sensuous world here, with a painterly precision that reflects some of the ideals of the artists in the novel. The novel is lavish in its appeal to all the senses, and recreates Moscow as well as some of the greatest novels that evoke "place" do. Grushin has said that Nabokov is an "unattainable" model, and this is apparent in the gorgeous language, and ambitious but clear structure. But she is not imitating anyone - this is an original voice. There is much more to be said (richness of characterization, humor, insight into political realities) but I will just say that this rich and beautiful work needs more readers. An elderly artist notes near the end that it takes a lifetime to learn one's craft. Olga Grushin has gotten off to a great start with a work of full maturity, and if she grows in line with that dictum, she will write books with the strength and beauty of Sukhanov's final visions.
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