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``The Dream Life of Sukhanov'' by Olga Grushin; A Marian Wood Book / Putnam ($24.95)
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Some of the most profound fiction we read for the experience of catharsis, as Aristotle described it in drama: "through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions" by witnessing the downfall of someone not too unlike ourselves.
We accept that it is virtually impossible to get through life without making one or more Faustian bargains; we hope these will not be noticed by others, and we try to deny them, even to ourselves. Most of the time, we succeed. But the protagonists of the fiction that moves us most deeply do not succeed, and it is their destruction, or self-destruction, that holds our attention.
Olga Grushin's brilliant first novel considers the case of 56-year-old Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov, whose past catches up with him during the last days of the Soviet Union. A painter of great promise as a young man, Sukhanov is seduced by the cultural thaw beginning in 1956 and ending, for him, in 1962, when he agrees to betray all that he believes in, in return for marriage to the beautiful daughter of the leading state-sponsored artist and a prestigious job as art critic and editor of the party organ, Art of the World. A comfortable home, two children and many perquisites follow.
It is not until 1985, when he is asked to write a feature article about Salvador Dali, an artist he has routinely dismissed as the epitome of diseased Western capitalism, that crisis arrives. By the simple expedient of denying his memory ("he was positive that everyone engaged in incidental editing of the past in order to survive"), Sukhanov can masquerade as a successful human being; but that which is denied tends to return as vengeance.
For all that it is not her first language, Grushin writes an English worthy of Nabokov. (Moscow's peeling stucco facades, for instance, have a "vespertine lucidity" at sunset, while in the country "bumblebees hovered with a contented weightiness under a sky as blue as the brightest faience.") And her narrative is structured with consummate skill. Grushin moves effortlessly between Sukhanov's past and his present, between first-person and third-person narration. A resolutely unimaginative character, Sukhanov experiences moments of mental and emotional slippage, at various places in the Moscow cityscape, which return him to episodes from his past and illuminate his history for the reader. The slippages accelerate in frequency as the novel progresses, resulting, not in any narrative chaos, but in a terrifying psychological disorientation. The most innocuous of settings - the landing of an apartment building, for instance - can buckle and warp through the distance of 30 years between one sentence and the next.
Beyond such technical accomplishments, what makes Grushin's novel most memorable is its compassion. No less inexorably than Oedipus is led to understand the ghastly facts of his own history, Sukhanov sees every prop of his comfortable life kicked out from under him. It is not the meticulous ruthlessness of these events that is most moving, however, but the emotional and mental tergiversations by which he tries to keep his life intact. He is a human being like any of us, as likely as we would be to suppress and to forget - as stubborn in his denial and as tenacious in his holding on.
He is also, however, a man in the grip of forces much greater than he - not only of those social and political forces leading to the end of the Soviet Union, but of familial history dating back to the destruction of his gifted and visionary father under Stalin. Seldom has a first novel so perfectly captured a historical moment that seems most real because it resonates with the disaster of an individual life. There is no escape for Sukhanov, and no going back: There is none for any of us. Time sees to that.
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Karl Kirchwey is associate professor of the arts and director of creative writing at Bryn Mawr College. His fifth book of poems, "The Happiness of This World," will be published in January.
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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
