The Dream Life of Sukhanov

1952, his last year at the Surikov Institute, by the recent recipient of the coveted Stalin Prize, the prominent painter, theorist, and glorified representative of state art, the forty-six-year-old star Pyotr Alekseevich Malinin— proved to be a particularly taxing exercise in patience. In truth, young Anatoly found patience to be one of the two qualities most required of him in the course of his studies; caution was the other. In his first semester, when presented, in the ranks of other eager youths, with a simple anatomical sketch or some suitably patriotic landscape, he discovered to his unease that something was wrong, that sometime previously, perhaps during the drab wartime evenings spent in the makeshift classroom with Chagall’s former pupil Oleg Romanov leaning over his shoulder, he had acquired a dangerous trait it was best to do without—namely, individual style—and maybe a touch of something else besides; for as was quickly becoming apparent, his works differed from those of the others. Anatoly’s paintings suffered from a fault, a twist, an uncommon streak of whimsy, and as much as he tried to follow the prescribed form, something strange, something alien, would always sneak into his renditions of Soviet reality, be it a cloud, above a perfectly ordinary industrial vista, whose shape resembled the spire of a great, sky-wide cathedral, or an incongruous herring skeleton found at the foot of a worker beaming proudly in the act of receiving a medal, or a wild riot of pearly, unearthly colors exploding in the background of an otherwise respectful harvesting scene. And all these absurdities seemed to drip from his brush so freely, so naturally, so completely apart from his conscious will, that it took him long months of diligent application to eradicate them from his canvases, from his thoughts, from the very texture of his being.

Yet gradually his efforts started to pay off, his name was increasingly mentioned among the more promising members of the new generation of artists—and only in his most private moments would he ever dream of painting enormous transparent bells raining music from the skies, or groves of springtime trees whose blossoms turned into twittering birds and flew away, or faces of women so ideal they melted as soon as you looked at them, or…

“I don’t mean to be rude,” said Pyotr Alekseevich Malinin to his son-in-law, “but I do have to finish my packing. Was there something you wanted to tell me?”

Sukhanov looked at the pompous old man standing before him, and suddenly wanted to tell him many things, not the least of them being the story of his recent meeting with Lev Belkin and the news of Belkin’s exhibition. Yes, for one rebellious moment he felt a rising desire to erase the tranquil, self-assured expression on the old man’s face with that name from the past that they had tacitly agreed never to mention again.

After a long pause, he spoke.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’d like to borrow a tie or two. Would you mind?”

TWELVE

The offices of Art of the World occupied the two upper stories of a three-storied eighteenth-century mansion with a once magnificent turquoise facade, which had since become faded, and a cornucopia of frivolous curlicues over the windows, whose precise shape was obscured by years of relentless pigeon deposits. The first floor consisted predominantly of a maze of mysterious corridors and blank doors, which terminated, in somewhat disappointing fashion (as Sukhanov had chanced to discover upon getting lost once or twice in his first year as editor), in a glass partition with the laconic sign “Accounting” over it and a sour-looking woman knitting a sweater behind it. There was also a pet store in a corner of the building, a dark, cramped, sad little place, with somnolent guinea pigs and torpid white-eyed fish languishing in thick-walled aquariums beneath dusty plants; its proximity inevitably caused all sorts of useless, repulsive creatures to gravitate to the cubicles of the more tenderhearted of Sukhanov’s secretaries and junior editors. Anatoly Pavlovich harbored a great dislike for all things scaly, crawling, and gill-breathing, and he navigated the long corridors of his private kingdom at a rather brisk pace, preferring not to look too closely at the surrounding desks for fear of meeting the stony stare of some new clammy monstrosity trapped in a mayonnaise jar or a vase too ugly for flowers.

The dinner hour was approaching, and the girls on the second floor surreptitiously powdered their noses, ready to disperse among the neighborhood cafeterias. Their conversations, swerving in shallow eddies from wall to wall, rolled back like an ebbing tide at Sukhanov’s passage but left single phrases behind, to be picked up by his incurious hearing. “A pair of Italian leather boots, just around the corner!” he heard someone say excitedly. As he ascended the stairs, the chatter faded behind him.

The third floor, a yellow corridor with a stained carpet and two rows of doors whose nameplates read like the magazine’s masthead, was quiet and, it struck him after a moment, oddly deserted. The doors were ajar, the offices of his senior staff empty. Quickening his steps, he walked to the far end, toward a recess presided over by Liubov Markovna, his personal secretary, a marvelously efficient woman of indeterminate years with a penchant for painfully pointy pencils. She was at her desk, whispering into the telephone. Seeing him, she abruptly let go of the receiver and, stretching out her arms as if trying to catch something hurtling toward her, began to prattle in an unbecoming manner, “Anatoly Palych, Anatoly Palych, wait a second!”—but the momentum had already carried him across the threshold.

There he stopped and looked about in puzzlement.

The managing editor, Ovseev, a tall, thin, balding man resembling a praying mantis, was sitting in his, Sukhanov‘s, leather chair, reading some items from a pad with a surprising air of authority, while the diminutive, wide-eyed, skittish Anastasia Lisitskaya, Ovseev’s secretary and rumored mistress, tottered on nine-inch heels by his side, taking notes. Pugovichkin, the assistant editor in chief, his shape as small, rotund, and faintly comical as his name, was there too, consulting with the department heads; a few others meandered about the room. In itself, this gathering was not necessarily remarkable, since editorial meetings always took place in Sukhanov’s office—but no meeting was scheduled for another three weeks, and no meeting had ever taken place without his presence.

“What is the meaning of this?” Sukhanov said in a measured voice.

Startled, the editors looked up from their pads, and a hush fell among them.

“Anatoly Pavlovich,” said Ovseev, hurriedly rising from Sukhanov’s chair.

“Why are you all here?”

“Anatoly Pavlovich, we had to call an urgent meeting to discuss a few last-minute changes to the current issue—and since you were supposed to be out of town—”

Lisitskaya’s heels pattered across the floor as she darted to hide behind Ovseev.

Sukhanov marched to his desk, regained possession of his chair, and opened his briefcase with a harsh snap, all his gestures meant to reassert his momentarily lapsed command.

“What nonsense, I wasn’t out of town,” he said curtly. “How could I be, with that Dali article on my hands? Speaking of which, someone should take it to the printers right away.”

“But,” said Ovseev, “surely you know…” He did not finish the sentence.

“I have it right here, hold on just one… What did you say?” Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a few people gingerly tiptoeing out of the office, while Pugovichkin drew closer and hovered above him. Looking up, Sukhanov found an exaggerated concern wrinkling the man’s kindly pancake of a face.

“Anatoly Pavlovich, I don’t believe it!” moaned the assistant editor in chief. “Could it be you haven’t heard?”

Sukhanov stared at him blankly.

“I’m afraid,” Pugovichkin said, spreading his plump hands outward in a gesture of futility, “the Dali piece has been postponed.”

“We hope it didn’t give you too much trouble,” Ovseev added with an ingratiating smile. “Of course, it will be published soon, if not in the next issue, then in the one after that for sure—”

“And how, I’d like to know, could this decision be made without me?” Sukhanov thundered incredulously. “How can any of this be happening without me?”

Lisitskaya’s heels fled into the corridor with the sound of a frantic drumroll.

“Well, you see,” said Pugovichkin quickly, “we received this phone call the day before yesterday.” He raised his eyes meaningfully to the ceiling, to indicate a far-off, heavenly sphere of influence—their accepted shorthand for communications from the magazine’s Party liaison. “It appeared that a more… more timely subject had come to someone’s attention, and we were to be sent a new article that very afternoon. On Chagall. We were told that,