Olga Grushin - The Dream Life of Sukhanov

Table of Contents

Critics praise for The Dream Life of Sukbanov and Olga Grushin

English is Grushins third language. Yet so accomplished are her skillsso hauntingly assuredthat more than one U.S. critic has greeted her as the next great American novelist.... To write a novel as good as this you need to be very talented. And Grushin is. Financial Times

This magnificent novel celebrates surrealistic painting by being surrealistic itself and makes the moral point that artistic integrity, at any cost, is ultimately more rewarding than compromised celebrity. In the context of Soviet Russia, where insistence on the right to freedom of artistic expression could have fatal consequences, this theme is particularly dramatic. But freedom of expression is constantly threatened everywhere, by all kinds of forces, some overt and some subtle, so this specifically Russian story has universal resonance.... Grushin is a Russian writing in Englishsuch astonishingly beautiful English that it is almost impossible to believe it is not her first language.... This is an outstanding novel. Its a first one, too [and] with it, Grushin raises the bar for first novels. Like all excellent works ... it fills one with joy, because it works on every level. The Irish Times

Sophisticated, ironic and witty, multilayered, intricately constructed, deeply informed, elegantly written.... One of the many marks of Grushins wisdom and maturity is that Sukhanov, whom it would be easy to set up as a straw man, is a deeply complex, endlessly interesting and sympathetic figure. Nobody in The Dream Life of Sukhanov is fashioned out of cardboard. Every character evolves as the book progresses, turning into someone the reader had not quite expected ... all are viewed and portrayed with compassion, as fallible human beings caught in circumstances not conducive to true nobility or true villainy.... Make no mistake, The Dream Life of Sukhanov is the work of a true artist.... In its expansiveness, its refusal to dwell in the tiny palace of self, it harks back to the great Russian masters. In so doing it breathes new life into American literary fiction.

Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

Ironic, surreal [and] Gogolesque in its sardonic humor.

The New York Times

Heres a contemporary novel so good I felt like buying ten copies and sending them to friends.... Reminiscent now of Nabokov, now of Bulgakov [its] a stunning fiction debut, and a book which reminds us of what a superb contribution the Russian tradition has made, and can still make, to literary art, compared with our own fallen and humdrum literary world.

The Independent (London)

a cognizant original v5 release october 08 2010

Olga Grushins haunting dreamscape of her native land is a debut to be cheered here, there and everywhere.

Dan Cryer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Subtle and vertiginous.

The New York Times Book Review

Sukhanov ends the novel as a species of holy fool. In mad times, madness is a perfectly authentic response. But he is true to his vision at last, and Grushin has been true to hers.

The Observer (London)

Brilliant work from a newcomer who is already an estimable American writer. Kirkus Reviews

The Dream Life of Sukhanov is Olga Grushins first novel, although youd never guess it.... Evoking a time and place vivid in its particulars, Grushin draws universal lessons, an achievement made all the more impressive by the fact that English isnt her native language. Bloomberg.com

Sinuous prose that shifts seamlessly from third to first person, between present and past, in and out of dreams and hallucinations ... in Grushins wonderful novel, the incandescent wealth of Russias literary heritage blazes.

Daily Telegraph (London)

Olga Grushins hallucinatory tale of a member of the Soviet privilegentsia discovering the price of his pact with the devil boldly collapses past into present, dream into reality, bitterness into sweetness, rising to heights of artful virtuosity rare in any book, let alone a first novel. Steeped in the tradition of Gogol, Bulgakov, and Nabokov, Grushin is clearly a writer of large and original talent.James Lasdun

The Dream Life of Sukhanov will tower over the majority of what publishers put out this year. Grushins beautifully constructed puzzle is a triumph of singular yet universal genius.

New York Magazine

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in 1971 in Moscow, Olga Grushin did her early schooling in Prague. She returned to Moscow in 1981 and later studied art history at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and journalism at Moscow State University. In 1989, she was given a full scholarship to Emory University.

She has been a researcher and an interpreter at the Carter Center and an editor at Harvard Universitys Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Her short fiction has appeared in Partisan Review, The Massachusetts Review, Confrontation, and Art Times.

The Dream Life of Sukhanov is her first novel. It was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award and for the U.K.s Orange Award for New Writers.

Grushin, who became a U.S. citizen in 2002, lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and their son.

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First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnams Sons,
a member of the Penguin Group 2005
Published in Penguin Books 2007

Copyright Olga Grushin, 2005

All rights reserved

The author is indebted to John E. Bowlts Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory
and Criticism, 1902-1934 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1988) for the quotation from
The Golden Fleece (attributed here to The World of Art), and to Rimma Gerlovinas
three-dimensional poems for the description of the cube-shaped artwork.

PUBLISHERS NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN : 978-1-101-07798-6

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To my parents

I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.