The Dream Life of Sukhanov (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Stop here," said Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov from the backseat, addressing the pair of suede gloves on the steering wheel..." (more)
Key Phrases: two kopecks, Anatoly Pavlovich, Pyotr Alekseevich, Art of the World (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (January 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143038400
• ISBN-13: 978-0143038405
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #82,886 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Your young men shall see visions, January 15, 2006

By	Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (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.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ars Longa, Vita Brevis, April 17, 2006

By	G. Bestick (Dobbs Ferry, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Art For Politic's Sake, March 30, 2007

By	Robert Derenthal "bucherwurm" (California United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Anatoly Sukhanov had it made. He has a beautiful wife, a luxurious apartment, chauffer driven limousine, and is editor of Russia's premier art journal. But what was the status of art in 1985 Russia? Anatoly's job was to extol an art form that portrayed happy mine workers, smiling women holding their babies, gallant soldiers defending Mother Russia. How does a man who was an aspiring artist in his youth stomach the promotion of such dross?

As the novel progresses Anatoly experiences a series of small, quirky incidents that start him on a mental reverie of his life. When you are young, and poor and struggling you are faced with a decision. Do you as an artist stick to your artistic ideals which are contrary to the regime's dictates, and risk living in poverty or worse or do you take the road that provides a decent living for your wife and children? As the pages fly by the current reality of Anatoly's life begin to meld more and more with his dreams of the past. We wonder, as Anatoly examines his past, if he is going to have a spiritual reawakening. Can he finally cast off his self imposed blinders? There has to be the remains of an artistic soul in this man whose job it is to denounce Matisse, and Dali as decadent, corrupt artists.

This is an amazing book. It is truly a literary work of the highest order. The writing is superb. Here is a Russian born woman writing in what is her third language. One immediately begins to compare the writing with that of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, and the comparison is highly favorable. If you love art, as I do, you will find this book to be especially enjoyable. This is truly a "10 star" book.