Grushin, too, owes a debt to her forebears. She has claimed Nabokov—an exiled aesthete like Chagall—as her favorite writer, and it’s the sheer pleasure of his labyrinthine plots and luminous writing to which she aspires. But unlike Horn, she isn’t telling old stories in a new context. You can almost see Horn straining to find that “heroic past” and “harmonious future” that Malinin prattles on about—only in the service of the victims. By contrast, Grushin’s beautifully constructed puzzle is a triumph of singular yet universal genius, the upside-down green head reasserting itself.
At times literally. Having accommodated himself to the system all too well, Sukhanov is blindsided when his glasnost-inspired colleagues kill his article condemning Dalí and publish a celebration of—who else?—Chagall. Sukhanov’s ruin, like his country’s, is precipitated by the decline of communism. His own children, a social-climber and a sullen punk, are far better suited to the coming capitalist anarchy of post-Soviet Russia.
These days, though, that anarchy is giving way to resurgent authoritarianism. When a group of artists mounted a response to the “Russia!” exhibit—a collection of protest art called “Russia 2,” now visiting Chelsea’s White Box gallery—they were sued by state-allied artists on charges tantamount to blasphemy. Russia’s twin legacies—artistic genius and political repression—continue their uneasy coexistence. But with a difference: Books like Horn’s and Grushin’s are no longer samizdat in Russia, and this generation is not (yet) legally enjoined from absorbing the lessons of its own past.
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