Iată un roman atît de bine scris, încât am simțit nevoia să cumpăr zece exemplare și să le trimit prietenilor – The Independent
Subscriu...acesta este sentimentul cu care am încheiat lectura. Cartea de față – deși o carte de debut – este scrisă in tradiția școlii clasice ruse, tratând o paletă de teme conexe: arta, cenzura, talentul, trădarea valorilor, ... pe fundalul anilor comunismului rus.
Alegi să îți urmezi talentul și creezi picturi cu o viziune proprie, dobândită in urma studiului clandestin al clasicilor, știind că regimul nu va fi de acord cu picturile tale, fiind absolut imposibil să îți promovezi arta, muncind ca zilier pentru a-ți câștiga pâinea? Sau alegi cei treizeci de arginți și astfel îți trădezi principiile (și marii maeștri), dar te alegi cu o slujbă bine plătită de redactor șef, un apartament spațios urmat de alte beneficii, o sticlă de coniac fin, haine bine croite aduse din Occident...
Mai mult de atât, cum vezi alegerea ta după 25 de ani?

„În ciuda nedreptății, ororilor și prostiei, frumusețea supraviețuiește întotdeauna și nu va exista niciodată o misiune mai nobilă decât aceea de a face lumea mai bogată și mai pură adăugându-i un strop de frumusețe ..”

Best book I've read in a long time. Olga Grushin is my new favorite contemporary writer.

I loved this book.
Wrenching and beautifully poignant... It's been too long- must read this one again.

Beautifully written, strangely confusing, classic tradgedy of a man lapsing in and out of sanity.

The fall of a Russian artist who sold out to become part of the repressive soviet government.

This book changed my outlook on life about 4 times over the course of 350 pages oooof

The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2005, 2007) by Olga Grushin

I don’t know about you, but as I grow older, I rarely read a book with the total abandonment I used to experience as a child or a teenager. Olga Grushin, a young(ish) American writer who emigrated from Russia at eighteen, must have some special powers in order to cast this spell with both her novels, The Line and The Dream Life of Sukhanov.

The first thing that separates Grushin’s novels from those written by her American contemporaries is that, unlike them, she is still interested in something called “the human condition.” I am always puzzled by the fact that, while apparently political, most (relatively) young American writers, don’t integrate this interest into something one might call “our universal condition.” But then, how could they, when those of them who are in academia, are taught to run away from notions of the “universal” as if they were plague? On the other hand, many writers who integrate a contemporary political experience into their writings—usually poets—do this in such a righteous, sloganeering way that one is instantly tempted to become apolitical. I am thinking here of the numerous bad poems simmering with righteous indignation at W. Bush that I had to listen to during endless poetry readings.

All this to say that it may take a writer who has actually lived in a country where one couldn’t run away from politics, where every gesture ended up being political whether one was aware of it or not, to write in a mature way about the individual versus the collective, the singular versus the universal, fate versus will, and the relationship between the individual destiny and history. One cannot deal with such subjects when one has that nihilist ironic tone many contemporary American writers feel obligated to exhibit.

The historical background of The Dream Life of Sukhanov is that of Russia between the 1930s and the 1980s. The protagonist is the director of the main arts magazine in Moscow, and son-in-law of the most famous painter of day. Both titles implied a privileged position under communism, since one couldn’t get them without bowing to the Communist Party, and they came with numerous perks: access to special stores of the nomenklatura, a private chauffeur, etc.

Little by little, the reader is drawn into the hero’s dream life, and finds out that he had grown up in poverty and fear, having witnessed the killings of the Stalinist era and his father’s suicide. As a young man he fell in love with surrealism, and despised the official rhetoric and the socialist realist paintings depicting optimist laborers singing the beauty of their tractors. And then, one day he had to choose between continuing to be a poor, unrecognized painter, faithful to his ideals, and selling out to those in power in order to provide for his family.

At the heart of the novel is the choice, or rather, the question: what would you do if you had to choose? Sukhanov has to choose between killing the artist in himself and collaborating with the regime, on one hand, and keeping his artistic integrity, but having to survive by doing hard, low paid jobs, on the other hand. But choosing the latter also means committing suicide as an artist, since he wouldn’t be able to exhibit his paintings, and what good is a painting without a viewer?

In appearance, the novel gives us the story of a man who has betrayed his youth, but the closer we get to the end, the more we realize that the novel doesn’t have any easy answers, and that whatever the man would have chosen, he would have failed. At the end of the novel, a character introduced in the very first pages reappears: Sukhanov’s friend, Belkin, who had taken the opposite path, that of artistic honesty and everyday misery. Belkin, who is poor and whose wife has left him, finally gets his first show when he is in his mid-fifties, but then he realizes that he is a mediocre painter.

Until his world suddenly unravels, Sukhanov is rich, happily married to a gorgeous woman, respected (or rather, feared) by those in his profession. In the end, his entire world falls apart, and although as readers we know that he is justly punished, the author doesn’t give us a straight answer regarding the better choice. As Sukhanov’s wife says during their younger (and poorer) days, “There is more than one way to lose one’s soul.”

This is an extremely mature novel, and it is amazing that a writer who left Russia at such a young age can recreate so well not only the people’s daily lives and the country’s atmosphere, but the existential choices communism imposed on people. As rooted as the novel is in a particular time and place, this very anchoring makes it universal insofar as in many ways we are all products of our choices. Last but not least, Olga Grushin is a great stylist, and her paragraphs on art are among the best in the novel.

Still in it...so far, pretty dreamy...

Some of the very best writing I've read.

THIS IS EASILY IN THE TOP 5 BOOKS I'VE EVER READ, PROBABLY TOP 2, POSSIBLY EVEN THE BEST.

10/10
I can't recommend this enough. I'm gonna have to write a more comprehensive review when I've processed the book for a few days, but know that it's supremely well-written with lush prose, has seamless transitions between the present-day and past, and has one of the most in-depth delve into a character's mind in any novel I've ever read.

It's a slow-moving book, but it's full of characterization. Like the title implies, there are a lot of dream-like elements, which is partly what make this story so interesting as Sukhanov grasps with reality and the surreal.

I know I'm gonna have to check out all the other books this author has written.

"For what would you sacrifice yourself - and not just yourself, may I remind you, but your mother and your wife as well? For some notion of Art with a capital A?"

I loved this book, particularly the way that every time I thought it had resolved, she would suddenly turn the tables and surprise me. A very good book.