THE DREAM LIFE OF SUKHANOV
by Olga Grushin
Viking £14.99, 368 pages
Born in Moscow in 1971, Olga Grushin was apparently the first Russian citizen to enrol, in 1989, for an American college degree course following the end of the cold war - a minor claim to fame that has been eclipsed, spectacularly, by her emergence as the next big thing in American literary fiction.
Grushin now lives in Washington D.C. English is her third language. Yet so accomplished are her skills - so hauntingly assured - that more than one US critic has greeted her as the next great American novelist.
Her debut novel, The Dream Life of Sukhanov, is a superbly realised depiction of the claustrophobia and madness of Soviet communism as the contradictions within the system spiralled towards collapse.
Moscow, 1985. Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov has much to be grateful for: large, central apartment; beautiful, high-born wife; two intelligent, ambitious children. Above all, Sukhanov basks in the acclaim deriving from his position as a member of the privilegentsia.
He is editor-in-chief of The Art of the World, an exquisitely named state organ in which he lauds the socialist-realist role of Soviet art while providing conclusive evidence of the way sick western “isms”, such as impressionism and surrealism, show capitalist insolvency.
Grushin has much fun with the absurdities of late-Soviet art appreciation. Sukhanov, for example, learns from his assistant editor that an article on Dali on which he has been labouring is being pulled from the magazine to make room for one on Chagall.
This horrifies Sukhanov. “The difference between Dali, outrageous by virtue of his foreign birth and viewed therefore as a mere curiosity... and Chagall, who had come from Russia’s own backyard, been appointed Commissar of Fine Arts after the Revolution, taught in a Soviet art academy and then chosen to leave Russia... in order to become foreign and outrageous, was [simply] impassable.” To publish such an article would be an act of rebellion.
Sukhanov realises that this challenge to his authority follows a faux pas he committed at the opening of an exhibition to celebrate his esteemed father-in-law’s 80th birthday, an act of mere unthinkingness that swiftly starts the unravelling of his career, his life, his sanity.
Present and past collide. Dream and nightmare converge. Yet all the time, Grushin’s virtuosity - especially sensuous descriptiveness, iron control of structure and immaculate pacing - carry her past one challenge after another.
A wonderful example of her skill occurs towards the end, when Sukhanov starts to observe the other passengers on his train: people in drab clothes with stony faces, vacant eyes, features devastated by grotesque deformities, sunken mouths, broken noses, monstrous warts.
His unease becomes fear when he notices freakish objects protruding from baskets or draped in yawning bags - a severed bovine leg, a bird’s neck, a rusty cemetery cross with clumps of reddish earth still attached - and it strikes him he has stumbled on some alien, nocturnal world, the unseen bowels of Russia.
To write a novel as good as this you need to be very talented. And Grushin is.
