Here are my thoughts on this fantastic novel:
http://tysonwhitney.blogspot.com/2006...

Excellent.

Wow! What a wonderful book. From moment to moment, I didn't know what would happen next but I didn't care. I just needed to continue.

3.5 (ish) rounded up to 4

Review to follow

Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov's life is at a crossroads. Not only is the Soviet Union about to end, but his many years as the editor of an official art publication pushing socialist realism after a fiery youth as an art innovator has led him to a series of disturbing dreams involving his childhood, his family, and his art.

Olga Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a fascinating book about coming to know who and what you are after decades of dissembling. The dreams are so intertwined with the present reality that it is often difficult to pinpoint them as they occur. But it doesn't matter, because author Grushin knows how to keep the reader entranced.

There is a real sweetness about her novel about a Soviet member of the nomenklatura who is at one and the same time trying to save his marriage, his children, and his self-respect. This is Grushin's first novel, written in 2006. Now I am fairly certain to check out her other works.

In the mid-1980's, Sukhanov has reached the top of his career in Soviet arts administration. In the journal he edits he pans the art he loves as capitalist decadence. This editor position has a lot of perks and he holds it by virtue of his wife's connections.

As the novel progresses, Grushin explores whether or not Sukhanov ever had a choice in life. His father's fate in Stalin's Russia is symbolic of many who perished for perceived political crimes or for just being individuals. Sukhanov's life choices may be typical of those children of trauma, whose caretakers felt silence to be golden.

The novel gives us the present, flashes to the past, and whimsical dreams which represent Sukhanov's integration of past and present reality.

I expected Suk's lifestyle with chauffeured car and dacha, but did not expect the relative freedom with which the characters express themselves. This novel depicts a verbally trusting culture. Suk freely describes his formulaic essays ("throw in some Marx"). He candidly tells his staff his reservations about the publication of this new required essay. His rural cousin, from whom I would expect greater discretion in expressing opinions freely spoke to the unorthodox ideas that Suk's journal would never dare to print. Suk, the ultimate apparatchik said out loud that lots of people perished in the 50s, but it just wasn't done in the 60s and 70s.

Earlier this year I read My Name is Red which, although a murder mystery, explores similar themes. In both, the ruling class dictates a repetitive art, and artist administrators are the front line in disciplining artists to produce it. There seems to be either more freedom or daring in 1980s Russia or just more difficulty in enforcement. Also, in Russia, there is pressure from below to produce soviet realism, the population, perhaps exhausted from war and poverty is said to long for images of a dynamic industrial future. In the sultan's of world of "Red", the population is not a factor, only the sultan and his artistically conservative workshop supervisor.

There is a lot here, and while not as acclaimed, I found this book equal to "Red" in its discussion of the role of art in politics.

Excellent antidote to Dostoyevsky!

n  Bettie's Booksn

Olga Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a peculiar novel. It was captivating, then it was tedious, captivating again, and then tedious. It has been compared to the works of Gogol and Bulgakov, but the drifting characters and the impressionistic flavor had the distinctive feel of Chekhov -- laced with a touch of insanity. The references to Chekhov's plays reinforced my perspective. It was very “Russian.”

Grushin traces Sukhanov's life and the Russian art world from the period of Stalinist rigidity, through Khrushchev's “Thaw” in Soviet artistic circles, to the reimposition of ideological orthodoxy that presaged the Brezhnev era. Even though the “Thaw” was more prominent in literature than the visual arts, hopes for a new era bloomed. These hopes for freedom of expression were dashed, as described by Grushin, with Khrushchev's public outrage over the Manezh show in 1962.

By 1985, as the Soviet experiment sped toward its end, the rules that governed existence changed, quickly and irrevocably, ruthlessly exposing the vacuity and moral compromises underpinning many people's lives and careers. The changes wrought emptiness, confusion, and anger. This is Sukhanov's fate. In 1962, he sacrificed his true artistic sensibilities to achieve success within the stultifying world of Soviet artistic conformity. He sold his soul. The disintegration of his comfortable world in 1985 confronts him with his past, but also propels him on a phantasmagorical journey to rediscover his artistic spirit.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov is described on the front flap as “ a novel of rare virtuosity” and Grushin as a writer of “large and original talent.” Both may be true, but only in flashes. Virtuosity must be sustained to be genuine and cannot lapse into pretentiousness. While a respectable start for a young writer, she has a way to go yet. It's a Three Star book to me.

A poignant and slightly surreal tale of an artist in Soviet Russia, and a very impressive debut novel.

More complex and subtle than I thought it would be at first

I have this hankering to learn languages. Problem is, I’m not so good at it. It’s a little like Salieri in Amadeus, born with the desire and some ability to compose music, but unable to reach the moutaintops he can see so clearly and forced to watch an unworthy twit scramble up easily ahead of him. So I’m even more in awe of writers who not only author fine works of literature in English, but do so in English as their second or third language. Conrad and Nabakov are the only two that pop into my mind, but now we have a third candidate--Olga Grushin, a young lady of enormous promise, whose early schooling was in Czechoslovakia, so English may well be a third language for her, yet The Dream Life Of Sukhanov became a 2006 New York Times notable. Maybe if I started writing in French. . .
Grushin has great command of her imagery:
The [street] lamps glowed like tangerine baloons let loose in the soft haze, and in their light the eithteenth-century facade of the old Moscow university shown brightly, as dramatic an familiar as the stage sset of some stately, stale play.
And on the same page. . .
...the elegant perfume of tonight...numerous layers of other fading scents which had accumulated over time in the backseat...like so many sweet, barely discernible ghosts of past outings.
This last passage indicates how important olfactory matters are to Grushin. The text is full of the smells of her characters and their surroundings. Probably no one I’ve read outside of Louise Erdrich creates environments so full of smells.
The novel as whole is a fascinating exploration of the disintegration of a man and a system of thought, politics and art. Without giving too much of the plot away, I can say that the protagonist’s career parallels the rise and fall of socialistic realism in Russia. There’s a great deal of talk about the corruption of surrealistic art, about the necessity of art to serve society rather than mock or alienate it. The action of the book centers around the betrayal of passion and principle--both for an artist and for a society--that such attitudes involve.
As the title announces, we’re inside the protagonist’s mind a great deal, some of the time in memory, some in dreams. Grushin deftly slips back and forth from third to first person so that we’re carried from observing a fantasy or memory to participating in it. Sometimes, it gets tedious. Oh, now we’ve had the present action which we predictably will trigger a memory, which just as predictably will trigger a dream. Yet, sequences build revelations and discoveries which create significant impact for the denouement. As the dream life builds, Sukhanov’s outer life deteriorates. It would be unkind to reveal the ways and reasons for the disintegration to those who might want to read the novel, so I’ll just state the fact of it and let be.
Skillful as Sukhanov is, however, it added up to a disappointment for me. For one thing it took some effort to stick with it. Nothing that I would call a crisis occurred until after the first 150 pages. I don’t think I’m limited to shoot ‘em up’s, but I do like things to happen in a book. Also, the process of event-to-memory-to-dream sequence got transparent after a while. Too, Sukhanov is not a sympathetic character. He’s unlikable be design, which is fine, but I often didn’t even find him interesting. I was often more interested in his family than him and glad for interludes that included them so I could get out his mind.
All in all, a good try at a tough task, but without thrilling results.