Olga Grushin - The Dream Life of Sukhanov

“Sophisticated, ironic and witty, multilayered, intricately constructed, deeply informed, elegantly written…. One of the many marks of Grushin’s 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.”

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

“Here’s a contemporary novel so good I felt like buying ten copies and sending them to friends…. Reminiscent now of Nabokov, now of Bulgakov [it‘s] 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.”

“Olga Grushin’s haunting dreamscape of her native land is a debut to be cheered here, there and everywhere.”

“Subtle and vertiginous.”

“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.”

“Brilliant work from a newcomer who is already an estimable American writer.”

“The Dream Life of Sukhanov is Olga Grushin’s first novel, although you’d 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 isn’t her native language.”

“Sinuous prose that shifts seamlessly from third to first person, between present and past, in and out of dreams and hallucinations… in Grushin’s wonderful novel, the incandescent wealth of Russia’s literary heritage blazes.”

“Olga Grushin’s 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.”

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

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 University’s 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. Putnam’s 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. Bowlt’s 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 Gerlovina’s three-dimensional poems for the description of the cube-shaped artwork.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s 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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