Olga Grushin - The Dream Life of Sukhanov

in 1985. He has just been invited to weekend in the Minister of Culture's dacha, no less. Since the texture of the writing is dense with irony so heavy it seems to have been forged on an anvil, it is a foregone conclusion he will have lost everything by the end of the book. The year 1985 is crucial to understanding this story. In its first quarter, Konstantin Chernenko, a Brezhnev protege, was in power, and the USSR apparently as incapable of progress as Lenin's embalmed corpse. Grushin quotes the phrase 'socialism with a human face' early on, and we are meant to remember that this was the slogan of the Czech liberal reformer Dubcek, which inaugurated the fragile 'Prague Spring' and brought Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia in 1968. But at the time this novel is set, Mikhail Gorbachev has been at the helm for a few months. Unknown to the apparatchiks, everything is set to change, including the rules for survival."