Olga Grushin

The hero of Olga Grushin’s The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a Soviet artist turned apparatchik whose life unravels as he begins to realize the compromises he has made. How different from Russian-born debut novelist Grushin, who proves uncompromising in her art.

How did you manage to portray so effectively the compromises and eventual reawakening of a middle-aged man?

For me, one of the more fascinating aspects of writing is the freedom to imagine myself as absolutely anyone. In my short stories, I’ve written from the perspective of a little boy obsessed with stamps, a Greek policeman on a remote island, an old photographer, a drunk ballet dancer, even a pair of shoelaces—but only once or twice from the viewpoint of a young woman. Sukhanov is not based on anyone I know, but, of course, in many ways he is born of my early experiences. I grew up surrounded by my parents’ friends—people of Sukhanov’s generation, many of them artists, philosophers, writers, who had to make difficult choices in order to survive. Some of them, like my father and the artist Ernest Neizvestny (a close family friend), did things they believed in and faced harsh consequences. Others bargained with the authorities and enjoyed certain rewards, but always at a price. The questions of courage and weakness, perseverance and betrayal, daily comfort and artistic immortality were very real concerns from my earliest years. I suppose Sukhanov is the fruit of my living with these questions for a long time.

Your novel does not show Soviet life as black and white, as Americans tend to think.

When I was growing up, America was presented to us in black-and-white snapshots as well: the ruthless capitalists and the exploited masses. Even on the surface, life in the Soviet Union displayed countless shades of gray; and if one managed to penetrate the fog, one encountered all the colors of the rainbow. In my novel, I have tried to depict every person as a living being with conflicting, at times ambiguous, motivations, allowing for very different interpretations. There are no heroes and no villains. Even the official artist Malinin, who convinces Sukhanov to betray his ideals, may have done so out of love for his daughter. Of course, there were people who sold out for purely ignoble reasons—but such people would not be very interesting to write about.

How do painting and writing compare?

Painting and writing hold certain similarities: painting creates images, and in writing, too, one can “paint with words,” describing the world in sensual, vivid prose. Of course, at a fundamental level, the two are entirely different. Painting is immediate, affecting one of the five senses first, then reaching the more abstract level of thoughts and feelings. Writing is filtered through the abstract medium of language but, if powerful enough, transforms into images, sounds, smells. I’ve always found the idea of merging various art forms intriguing, and one of my goals was to experiment with re-creating the experience of painting—both the process and our perception of the result—through writing. Incidentally, I myself painted for years, with, shall we say, mixed results. Once when I was 12 I spent a whole day working on an oil painting of a famous church in Moscow. My older brother looked at it for a while, then said with encouragement, “That’s a very realistic matchbox.” I stuck to art history after that.

What are the challenges and pleasures of writing in a second language?

I began writing when I was four, and by the time I came to the United States at 18, I was very comfortable with my Russian style. Parting with it was not easy, though I had before me the (unattainable) example of Nabokov, my favorite writer. In college, I wrote stories in Russian, then translated them into English. Later I began to do this mentally. Eventually, my Russian thinking and writing started to differ from my English thinking and writing. The languages, while both beautiful, necessitate completely different approaches. To me, Russian is the more emotional: nearly every word possesses many forms, diminutive or exaggerated, comical or lofty, and it therefore lends itself to more lyrical, flexible writing. English has a richer vocabulary and, as such, is capable of wonderful precision and fine-tuning; it is perhaps stiffer in its grammar and drier in its expressions, but it has the capacity for profound nuance. Finding the exact way of saying what I wanted to say was both my main challenge and my main pleasure while writing my first novel: a challenge because I had to fight a tendency to fall into whole blocks of words that I had memorized as a foreign student and a pleasure because the language of Shakespeare is full of inexhaustible, delightful surprises.