Shadows of Russia

When glasnost collapsed the rigid structures of Soviet art and culture in the 1980s, most attention went to those who had been freed from repression. In The Dream Life of Sukhanov, her ironic, surreal, sometimes stunning and always chaotic novel, Olga Grushin writes about those who had been doing the repressing.

Until his downfall, Anatoly Sukhanov, at 56, was one of the officially privileged and powerful. He had a spacious apartment, a chauffeured limousine and two children with assured futures in diplomacy and journalism, respectively.

In charge of Moscow's principal art magazine, he has enforced the shining-face uplift of Socialist Realism, and dealt out turgidly reasoned warnings about the decadence of Western modernism and postmodernism. An editorial counterpart to Sir Joseph Porter, the admiral in HMS Pinafore, he always voted at the party's call, and would never think of thinking for himself (at all). Not in public, that is, nor even – at least consciously – in private.

Subconsciously, though, he can't help it. An explosive mix of memory and shame short-circuits into hallucinations that creep in and eventually take over. If at the start of the novel Sukhanov's life is partly a repressed dream, then by the swirling end, dreams – mad ones – have become his life.

Writing an English whose only hint of the foreign is a rather elaborate diction, Ms Grushin, a Russian émigré, tells the story of Sukhanov's collapse on three levels.

There is an ironic present, a past that recalls idealism lost in betrayal, and wildly troubled visions that flicker like heat lightning between them. Ms Grushin switches from one level to another without warning; the repeated reversing is a series of shocks. Sometimes they give a galvanising sensation of lift; sometimes they suggest a miswired elevator gone into fibrillation.

The opening, Gogolesque in its sardonic humour, has the protagonist in an ostensibly inflated moment. He is among an assemblage of dignitaries celebrating Malinin, who is the Communist Party's most honored and rewarded painter and Sukhanov's father-in-law. But the balloon is leaking.

Sukhanov's daughter and her glasnost friends regard him as a hack. A young journalist mocks his stereotyped answers in praise of Malinin's Socialist Realism. His chauffeur leaves him stranded in the rain to deliver Nina, Sukhanov's wife, to a suspiciously vague appointment. Distracted, he snubs the culture minister. And a ragged dissident painter, once a close friend, presses into his reluctant hand an invitation to see his work.

These are uneasy presages. Then Sukhanov receives an order to begin publishing regular accounts of Western artists; the first is to be Salvador Dalí, previously anathema to the party and, of course, to Sukhanov. He struggles with writing it. The unheard of demand for objective treatment makes it infinitely harder than his accustomed flush of punitive rhetoric.

Worse follows. In his brief absence, his subordinates are instructed to run a piece on Chagall, an even greater ideological enemy. Still worse, the essay, written by an outsider, is balanced and searching.

Soon Sukhanov's limousine is reassigned. (In true perestroika spirit, his driver proposes a "private" arrangement.) Nina has moved to the country to be alone. His son, Vasily, has become a hard-eyed opportunist who despises his father. His daughter goes to live with friends. Finally he loses his job. A quarter-century of enforcing official cultural policy is a black mark now that official policy has shifted – the irony is telling – to require openness.

Thus Sukhanov, seen from the satiric outside.

But Ms Grushin goes inside. Even as he fights his Moscow retreat, her dismal hero struggles with memory. He recalls an art historian who befriended him as a child, and whose illustrated books gave him a transfiguring glimpse of what art must be. And when the historian was dragged off to prison, it was a transfiguring glimpse of what terror could be.

From there, memory follows a crooked path between idealism and an accommodation that the author treats with complex and not entirely unsympathetic judgment. To submit, she allows, is another word for despair.

An old painter, a disciple of Chagall, sets the young Sukhanov on a course of visionary painting. Admitted to the official art school, he conforms to its requirements while he and a few fellow students practice a painter's version of samizdat.

Under Khrushchev there was a brief moment of tolerance for experimentation. It was quickly followed by a new crackdown. Sukhanov lost his teaching post and faced destitution. Then the rich and powerful Malinin used his influence to establish his son-in-law as a critic – a conforming one – and opened the way for the young man's career of public glitter and repressed desolation.

Malinin's arguments are unctuous, but canny. In ascending effectiveness: Sukhanov may condemn himself to wretchedness, but why should he condemn Nina? Socialist Realism provides real comfort to the masses; only a small elite finds merit in contemporary styles. Finally – and most dangerous to any artist – Sukhanov is led to wonder: how good is the garret painting he has sacrificed so much for, and for so long?

And as present and past tear at the protagonist, phantoms tear at his overheated mind. A figure steps out of a Dalí painting; and another, with plaster in his hair, from a crumbling church mural. There are magical taxi drivers and a train whose passengers are Hieronymus Bosch grotesques.

Gogol has given way to Bulgakov. His 1930's masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, used supernatural phenomena to suggest the disorienting upheavals in Russia just after the Revolution. To the settled life of a Sukhanov, glasnost is likewise the world turned upside down.

The writer, who has done very well with irony and whose excursions into memory are powerful though sometimes lush, doesn't handle her phenomena as well. Bulgakov hurled his like so many clawed and hissing cats into history's overblown arrangements. Ms Grushin's, promising for a while, turn overblown themselves. They acquire an air of spiritual cheerleading.

RICHARD EDER

©New York Times