Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Your young men shall see visions, 19 Jan 2006
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 from some highly respected publications. 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 twig 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.
|
|
|
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A great work of art about art under oppression, 23 Feb 2007
The year is 1985: Gorbachev has just become leader of the Soviet Union, and the rigidities of art establishment are beginning to weaken. Anatoly Sukhanov has worked himself up from the most wretchedly poor conditions in the 1930s to the editorship of `Art of the World', the most prestigious Soviet art magazine. To get to this position, he has slavishly followed the official line, suppressing his early creativity and ruthlessly deserting art teachers and artist friends whose originality might have compromised his orthodoxy. He has also adopted the wealthy life-style and all the arrogance (towards servants, for instance) of the Soviet nomenklatura. His wife Nina has already become distant from him because of this behaviour (and because of something else that I must not reveal) and his awareness of her coldness has already started to make him feel uneasy.
And then there comes a hint from On High that it would be welcome if the magazine published articles recognizing the contribution of some avant-garde artists, initially of Salvador Dalì, then of Marc Chagall. Sukhanov had become particularly well known because had in his magazine ceaselessly denounced the Surrealists as decadent, disgusting, and bourgeois. Devastated, he sees that he has to revise his ideas; and he plunges into dreams which are mostly horrifying but sometimes blissful in their surrealism and which (as the best surrealist art does) throw a symbolic light on his life. With extraordinary virtuosity, dreams and long-suppressed memories of his past are made to alternate or meld, as do third person and first person narratives: memories of the fear-haunted Stalin years; of the brief Thaw in which Sukhanov participated, only to slip back (his motives not entirely unworthy) into orthodoxy after Khrushchev lashed out at modern art; of his betrayals of himself and of his own youthful artistic gifts, of his teachers and of his friends. Historic Russian themes emerge: the role of the artist (writers then, painters in this novel, with a brilliant little aperçu on page 303 about the difference ) to keep the imagination free under tyranny; discussions of artistic theory; questions about God in this process; the revolutionary rejection of existing norms by the young, who create a world of their own.
Sukhanov's professional and famiy life disintegrate, and together with them, of course, his view of himself. He had been insufferable at the beginning of the book, but we feel compassion for him at the end. And although Sartre rightly insists that we should be authentic in our choices even under cruel regimes, we should, I think, not sit too harshly in judgment on those who fail the test. At the end (page 344) that, in half a dozen words, is also the absolution given to Sukhanov by his oldest friend. And his last surrealist dream is one of joy and liberation.
The author was born in Russia in 1971 but has lived in the United States since 1989. She has dual Russian and American citizenship, and this book was written in English. She has acquired an eloquent mastery of the language: sounds, smells, light, sights are sensuously described. A wonderful book.
|
|
|
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Artistic creativity on a knife point, 29 May 2007
Anatoly Sukhanov is a haughty middle aged man; a respected and well rewarded member of the Soviet Nomenklatura. He is arrogant and conceited, self satisfied and out of touch with his friends and family. His wife is growing increasingly frustrated by the intransigence of his Party line rhetoric and his children no longer respect him. He cannot remember the name of his chauffeur and sees fit to fire the maid when he suspects her of stealing his ties. He is so caught up in the status and position he has attained for himself that he has forgotten all that came before; he is suffering from the personal amnesia prevalent across society. But the year is 1985 and things are beginning to change, artists who were once persecuted now have public exhibitions. The climate is thaw and the man Sukhanov has become is being left behind.
Then, at a party one night he encounters a memory from his past, an alternate version of who he could have been had he made a different choice and followed his heart rather than his head all those years ago.
`The Dream Life of Sukhanov', Olga Grushin's debut novel, is a scintillating invocation of society on the brink of change, and a heartbreaking portrayal of a man about to lose everything. As Sukhanov's family scatters his sense of reality begins to be accosted by dreamlike memories of a person he has forgotten he ever was.
It is a great achievement to be able to recreate the half real, half imagined world of Sukhanov's unravelling mind. The prose is dense and inviting and wraps you inside itself like a comfy duvet. While reading it is easy to believe that you are reading one of the great novels of all time. And it is a very good, well conceived and brilliantly realised debut. There is something reminiscent of J.M. Coetzee's Booker winning `Disgrace' in the sense of untameable regret at a life wasted. It is a similar portrayal of a middle-aged man whom history has seen fit to leave behind.
The setting spans thirty years and two thaws in Soviet censorship which Grushin uses perfectly to bring out the artistic temperament of her characters. Khrushchev's thaw is one of the most fascinating periods in Soviet history, a time when all the aspects that made up that system were suddenly unmasked and those who wanted to see began to do so. There will be many more books which take this period as their central premise, but few will be as accomplished and powerful as `The Dream Life of Sukhanov'.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
(13)
£5.99
(8)
£4.74
(1)
£5.99
See all Product Description
(17)
£7.10
(
