Russia & Eurasia

The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin Wednesday, November 13, 2013

This session, focusing on The Dream Life of Sukhanov, was hosted on November 13, 2013 by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. It featured the novel's author, Olga Grushin.

View a recording of the session here: http://cmes.adobeconnect.com/p19rulo7ln6/

The story of Anatoly Sukhanov, who many years before abandoned the precarious existence of an underground artist for the perks of a Soviet apparatchik. But, at the age of 56, his perfect life is suddenly disintegrating. Buried dreams return to haunt him. New political alignments threaten to undo him. Vaulting effortlessly from...

Read more about The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin
The Accompanist by Nina Berberova Wednesday, May 15, 2013

This session on The Accompanist by Nina Berberova was hosted by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies on May 15, 2013.  It featured a discussion with Professor Julie Buckler of Harvard's Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Book description: Written right before the height of Stalin's purges by a Russian émigré living in Paris, this novella explores the tangled relationship between an opera singer, her husband, and her accompanist.  The accompanist of the title is Sonechka, an 18-year-old girl, talented but impoverished and self-deprecating by reason...

Read more about The Accompanist by Nina Berberova
2013 Nov 13

The Dream Life of Sukhanov Webinar (Register Now)

7:00pm

Location: 

Online

Join the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies for a discussion of Olga Grushin's The Dream Life of Sukhanov, featuring the author herself in  conversation.

Published in 2006 and described by the Washington Post as "sophisticated, ironic and witty, multilayered, intricately constructed, deeply informed, elegantly written," The Dream Life of Sukhanov is set in the Moscow of early perestroika, a city on the brink of deep political and cultural change.  It is the story of Anatoly Sukhanov, an art critic and member of the cultural elite who many years before abandoned the precarious existence of an underground artist for the perks of a Soviet apparatchik. But, at the age of 56, his perfect life is suddenly disintegrating. Buried dreams return to haunt him. New political alignments threaten to undo him. Vaulting effortlessly from the real to the surreal and from privilege to paranoia, The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a darkly funny novel.

... Read more about The Dream Life of Sukhanov Webinar (Register Now)