The Dream Life of Sukhanov

by Olga Grushin

  “It’s a paperweight. Made of Venetian glass,” the kind voice said above me. The old man, unnoticed, had risen from his armchair. “A little trinket from a trip I made when I was young. You can take it if you like.”

  It felt cold and smooth to the touch, and when I lifted it to the lamp, the light filled it with an enchanting, flickering, rosy glow, like that of a distant fire. Then I thought of the narrowing eyes of Sashka Morozov and, hastily shaking my head, set the weight down, on top of a stack of pages.

  “Is this the book you are writing?” I asked sullenly, to say something. “What is it about?”

  “Ah, so you’ve heard about my book,” he said smiling. “Well, you see, it concerns the aesthetic principles of the Italian Renaissance…. But I suppose that doesn’t tell you very much. To put it simply, it’s about art—art and beauty. Do you like art, Tolya?”

  I remembered a teacher who had once read us a snappy Mayakovsky rhyme about pineapples and quails, and how I had not known what it meant until she explained about the fat, overdressed men who had exploited the masses just so they could eat such delicacies and surround themselves with beautiful things. I thought also of the posters in my school—the red-and-black ones lining the hallways, with powerful youths who held enormous hammers in their hands and looked not unlike Anton Morozov, and the others hanging in the cafeteria, depicting nasty bugs and admonishing us to wash our hands before eating. The Professor’s glasses sparkled patiently as he waited for my reply.

  “Beauty is for the bourgeois,” I said disdainfully

  He smiled again, cheerlessly this time.

  “You think so?” he said, and picked up the magazine with the gold-lettered cover, leafed through it, found the paragraph he sought, and read, aloud but in a quiet, thoughtful voice, as if talking to himself: “‘We believe that life without Beauty is impossible, that we must attain a free and brilliant art for our descendants, one that is illumined by the sun and induced by tireless search; we believe that we must preserve for them the Eternal values forged by many generations…. Art is eternal, for it is founded on that which cannot be rejected. Art is whole, for its single source is the soul. Art is free, for it is created by the free impulse of creation….’”

  Not understanding, I stared at him with hostility. When a yawn came, I did not bother to suppress it as my mother had taught me. He glanced at me as if only now remembering my presence and, with a short, embarrassed laugh, set the magazine down.

  “I apologize,” he said quickly. “I just wanted to hear these words spoken. Wonderful publication this was, The World of Art…. No matter. Before you go, Tolya, may I show you something? See if you think it’s beautiful.”

  I might have refused, but without waiting for my reply, he had already pulled a tall volume off a shelf. He opened it at a bookmark, then laid it on the desk and carefully lifted the diaphanous sheet that covered the page. A whiff of mildew fleetingly brushed my cheek. This was to be my last coherent impression before I let my eyes fall to the page.

  In anyone’s life there can be only a few such moments—moments when a long, ringing hush fills your hearing, the world stands still as if under a magic spell, and thoughts and feelings course freely through your being, traversing the whole of eternity in the duration of a minute, so that when time resumes and you return from whatever nameless, dazzling void you briefly inhabited, you find yourself changed, changed irrevocably, and from then on, whether you want it or not, your life flows in a different direction. This was such a moment for me. Had I been thirteen or fourteen, perhaps none of this would have happened—perhaps I would have looked obediently where the old man was pointing and, with the indiscriminate thrill of an adolescent, would have seen merely a picture of a naked woman who, in covering herself with her impossibly long tresses, still left enough exposed to attract a prurient gaze.

  But I was only eight, and I did not see a naked woman. Instead I saw tender ripples of the palest silvery gray, and a green so lush, so full of golden hints it felt like trapped sunshine, and glowing, translucent whites, and the brightest coppery sheen, and a pink that was not pink at all but in truth had no name fitting enough to describe it, so pearly and iridescent it was, more precious than the inside spiral of a seashell—yes, I saw all the brilliant, deep, lucid colors that had visited me before in my dreams, now released for the first time and given the most perfect, most radiant form. Entranced, I watched, for a suspended, breathless span of my private eternity, as the shades and the textures flowed smoothly into one another, creating harmony, creating glory, creating beauty….

  The old man was talking above my head about some man named Botticelli, some woman named Venus, some place named Florence. I heard nothing.

  “Do you have any more you can show me?” I said when I could speak.

  He fell silent and looked into my face, closer than before.

  “Oh yes, plenty more,” he then said gently. “But tonight may not be… Oh dear, this watch can’t possibly be correct! Past four in the morning, is it really? Why don’t you come by again tomorrow, Tolya… er… at a slightly earlier time, perhaps?”

  It was almost light when I finally fell asleep. The torments I was bound to suffer at the hands of the Morozov boys did not force themselves into my dreams even once—I dreamt instead of a glowing, bright-eyed goddess being born amidst a heavenly swirl of shapes and colors. The next morning, I woke up with a smile of absolute happiness upon my lips, knowing that a new, different life lay before me.

  EIGHT

  On Tuesday morning, Sukhanov woke up late and was surprised to find himself smiling; he must have had an especially pleasant dream. Casting around his memory for its fading shimmer, he emerged yawning into the hallway and was surprised again, even more pleasantly, by the delicious smell of fried onions zestfully seasoning the whole apartment. Thinking that his life without Valya’s culinary talents might turn out to be acceptable after all, he sleepily followed his nose into the kitchen—and upon entering, was shocked to see Dalevich bending over the stove, wearing Nina’s apron and flourishing a spatula.

  “You’ve got to try this,” said Ksenya, speaking with her mouth full. “The best omelet I’ve had in my life!”

  Conscious of the ridiculous figure he cut standing in a wide shaft of sunlight, dressed in polka-dot pajamas that betrayed the rotundity of his stomach, with an undulating weave of the sofa’s pattern printed across his cheek, Sukhanov announced that he was not really hungry (Nina’s eyebrows rose slightly), not to mention that he needed to return to work without further ado—and would Ksenya be so kind as to bring him some coffee when it was ready? Then, murmuring unintelligible apologies to Dalevich, he retreated, past his son’s door, which was still demonstratively shut, back to the study. By the time he established himself at his desk, the last traces of his blithe morning mood had melted away like a desert mirage, and a long caravan of tedious, unhappy thoughts plodded across his mind. There was the matter of the room that needed to be arranged for that nuisance of a relative, and Vasily, whose slippery gaze and scoffing remarks had started to trouble him in earnest, and of course, the problem at hand—this insufferable essay on Dali that had been foisted upon him with so little ceremony.

  The essay, at least, was resolving itself, he concluded after reviewing the text from the previous day. He had begun his narrative with a providentially remembered anecdote, which, being not only amusing but also undeniably metaphorical, spared him the unpleasantness of resorting to such harsh words as, for instance, “abnormal.” Once, during an arranged breakfast with a prominent Soviet poet, Dalí had commented in passing on the stunning beauty of an atomic mushroom cloud rising in purple ripeness into the skies. Justifiably outraged by such lack of humanity, the Soviet celebrity, at a loss for a fitting repartee, promptly spat in Dalí’s coffee. The artist remained unruffled. “I’ve tasted coffee with cream and sugar, with milk and various liqueurs,” he observed thoughtfully, “but never before with spittle”—and savoring the moment, he slowly c
arried the cup to his mustachioed lips.

  Setting the emptied cup back into its porcelain nest, Sukhanov fed a blank page into his ancient typewriter. Strangely, in spite of the auspicious beginning, he felt singularly uninspired and for a while sat without typing, lightly tapping his index finger against the space bar and looking at his shelves. He knew the contents of his work library down to the spine. Starting with the subdued yet foreboding drumroll of a short essay collection by Marx and Engels, it continued with the tremulous flutelike notes of Plekhanov and Lunacharsky, then, with a wide, powerful sweep, moved into the avalanchine brasses of the maroon-clad marching band of Lenin’s Complete Works, and finally, passing through an unwavering chorus of the next sixty years of Soviet criticism (his own specimens proudly present in the multicolored glory of all their editions), disintegrated rather incongruously into a random assortment of art books, with the chaotic wheeze and rattle of surrealist castanets, gongs, and cymbals all but drowning out the Renaissance violins. (The surrealist gathering included a perplexing brochure, published in New York, entitled “Safe Surrealist Games for Your Home,” and a catalogue whose cover pictured a man in a bowler hat with a bird in place of his face.)

  He sat gazing at the books for many empty minutes, ostensibly debating the choice of a quotation suitable as commentary on the Dali episode, in reality letting his thoughts wander somewhere far, far away; but eventually the shelves swam back into focus, and sighing, he reached for the most dog-eared volume of Lenin’s Works. It fell open predictably in just the place he sought, so often had he made use of these few thickly underlined paragraphs. Barely consulting the page, he began to type: “As Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said in his famous 1920 speech at the Third Congress of the Russian Communist Youth Union, ‘For us morality, taken apart from the human society, does not exist; it is a fraud. For us morality is subordinate to the interests of class struggle of the proletariat. Morality serves for the human society to ascend higher, to get rid of the exploitation of labor.’” He paused to consider, then went on, much more haltingly: “Without doubt, the same truth applies to art. Any art devoid of its underlying human principle can only lead to moral chaos, and…”

  Each word dragged itself with an effort, like a half-dead prisoner burdened with lead weights at his ankles, and the world around seemed to conspire to make Sukhanov distracted and uncomfortable. The sun, rising higher, merrily danced off the bronze Pegasus at his elbow, tossing handfuls of annoying little flashes into his eyes. The customary piece of toast that Nina brought in at eleven o‘clock tasted vaguely of herring. The robe he wore felt stifling and unclean, but he was forced to perspire in helpless irritation since his clothes were trapped in the bedroom closet and he did not want to risk another awkward encounter with Dalevich. The telephone kept ringing with muffled persistence in the distant reaches of the apartment, making him lose what little concentration he could muster. After a mostly fruitless hour punctuated by sporadic bursts of typing, he pulled the page out of the typewriter and considered his single paragraph with a displeased frown. For a moment his pen hung poised over the lines like a bird of prey ready to swoop down for the kill; then, descending swiftly, it moved across the paper with such violence that a few sharp tears appeared in the text.

  The new version was markedly shorter.

  “In the well-known words of V. I. Lenin,” it read now, “ ‘Morality, taken apart from the human society, does not exist [tear]…. Morality serves for the human society to ascend higher [larger tear]….’ In certain ways, these words may apply to art.”

  Here the paragraph ended, clearly leading nowhere. After some thought, Sukhanov crumpled the page and tossed it away, sending after it the three pages from the previous day. He missed the wastebasket every time. He then rolled a new sheet into the typewriter and banged out angrily: “Salvador Dali was born in 1904 in a small Spanish town. The artist’s father was…” At which point he stopped, and stared at nothing.

  When, another futile hour later, an apologetic knock sounded on his door, he was glad for the interruption. It was his cousin, inviting him to dinner.

  “I’ve taken the liberty to roast a small chicken,” said Fyodor Mikhailovich with a self-deprecating shrug, looking more than ever like a pleasant gentleman from the turn of the century.

  At dinner, Vasily was absent again; he had apparently left sometime before, to spend the day at a friend’s dacha. “Ah yes, those last joys of summer,” said Sukhanov with a short laugh, addressing no one in particular. Nina had wanted to set the table in the dining room, since they had a guest, but Dalevich had implored her not to do anything special on his account. “Please don’t pay any heed to my presence,” he had begged in a heartfelt voice. In truth, it was rather hard to ignore his presence, as the man dominated all conversation. A curator of some northern folk museum, he had come to Moscow, it seemed, for the purpose of researching a book on icons, and now, his beard bristling, his glasses dancing, spoke with an endless, tiresome enthusiasm about egg yolk and cinnabar and what it must have meant for an artist to extract the colors for his masterpieces with his own hands from the world around him, from the earth upon which he had walked….

  Sukhanov soon grew restless. “So, Fyodor,” he interrupted with a thin smile, “what do you think, did Rublev really exist, or is this just another myth of art history?”

  Dalevich looked startled. Then he laughed.

  “The only reason people doubt the existence of Rublev—or Shakespeare, for that matter,” he said, raising a gnawed chicken leg for emphasis, “is that it’s hard for ordinary minds like ours to imagine a genius of such magnitude. It makes us feel safer, wouldn’t you agree, to split a giant into several more manageable, only moderately oversized figures. And yet, however much it may dwarf us, I’m certain that the giants did live.” He paused for a discreet nibble on the chicken leg, then said mildly, “I hear, Tolya, you are writing a book as well?”

  Sukhanov ceased smiling.

  “An article,” he said stiffly. “About Dalí. The surrealist.”

  “Ah, but how fascinating!” Fyodor Mikhailovich exclaimed with delight. “So what’s your opinion of him, if I may ask?”

  Avoiding references to either capitalism or socialism, Sukhanov carefully discoursed on the harmful irrationality of surrealist works, which set out to pervert the sacred purpose of art—that of leading mankind to new triumphs, to the greater and fuller realization of its potential. Fyodor Mikhailovich nodded with polite interest.

  “Naturally, your article must express the official viewpoint of your magazine,” he said when Sukhanov finished. “I was more curious to find out what you yourself thought about Dali. Do you like his paintings, Tolya? Do you think they are good art?”

  Ksenya tried to suppress a snicker and failed—and once again, Sukhanov had the strange, disorienting feeling that his life had made yet another circle, that someone had asked him these very questions before.

  He looked at his cousin with barely hidden hostility.

  “Is it so inconceivable that my own viewpoint actually coincides with that of my magazine?” he said sharply. “What do you think about Dali? You like him, I take it?”

  “No, I can’t say I do,” said Fyodor Mikhailovich thoughtfully. “True, the man once had undeniable talent. His early visions are haunting, don’t you find—those pulpy, dripping clocks, those burning giraffes, Venus de Milo with drawers carved all along her body—great, dark metaphors for our nightmarish century. Unfortunately, after these first brilliant steps, he stopped striving and began to repeat himself—more clocks, more giraffes, more drawers, all those sleek juxtapositions of random objects that seem striking for a moment but are devoid of any real meaning, all those amusing tricks for the eye, like Raphael’s Madonna fitted into an ear, you know it? He managed to trivialize himself completely. True art, in my modest opinion, must uphold a harmonious balance between form and content, and content is precisely what he’s lost. The man is nothing but a trickster now. A pity, really. He allo
wed the surrealist form he once invented to overtake him and thus failed to live up to the demands of his own gift, becoming just another small man cursed with a great talent…. Nina Petrovna, are you all right?”

  Nina slowly moved her eyes away from her husband’s face.

  “I’m sorry, I was just thinking about something,” she said quietly. “Would anyone like more chicken?”

  Late in the evening, Sukhanov went for a walk. Walks were not in his habit, but as the day dragged on sluggishly, moving through the customary time markers of work, dinner, work, supper, its cumulative effect made him long to step outside the confines of the familiar setting, if only for a quick turn around the neighborhood. For the first time in years, being inside the four walls of his home imparted no sense of well-heeled security; rather, it made him feel claustrophobic and helpless, as if he were a minor character in some minimalist novel, sent to travel the corridor between the kitchen and the study forever and ever by a cruel, uncaring author, while he, powerless to break out of the hateful paragraph, dreamt perhaps of being magically transported from a bedroom yawn to a small rented boat on a public park’s pond, with the first summer sunlight warming his face and a girl in a flowing green scarf nibbling on an ice cream cone, and laughing, and looking into his eyes…. Of course, the boat had long since carried the girl away into the mists of the past, thought Sukhanov with an odd pang of regret as he stopped to watch a leaf fluttering through the air. The woman she had become still wore flowing scarves from time to time, but she did not laugh very much and hardly ever looked into his eyes. But perhaps this was as things were supposed to be when one ceased to be young, and it was simply the advent of autumn, both in the world around him and in his own life, that caused him to indulge in such melancholy reflections.