Olga Grushin
Precocious Soviet schoolgirl turns master of the post-communist Russian novel
WORDS | ALEX RAYNER
Photograph: © Philippe Matsas/Opale
OLGA GRUSHIN BEGAN PUTTING PEN TO PAPER at an age when the rest of us were just about managing to read. “My first writing attempts date from the age of four,” recalls the Moscow-born novelist, “I still have a few sheets of paper covered with block-pencilled letters, a number of them backwards.”
Such precociousness shouldn’t come as a surprise; Olga is the daughter of the late Boris Grushin, a pioneering Soviet sociologist who introduced the unorthodox practice of public opinion-polling into late Soviet Russia. She was first educated at a staunchly Communist school in the otherwise exotic city of Prague.
Grushin remembers “red banners unfurling, Lenin busts towering over marble staircases, mass outings to black-and-white films eulogising Soviet heroes, songs about Lenin’s birthday, and much else in a similar vein… But I was too young to notice, too in love with the magic of Prague.”
Returning to the Russian capital in 1981, she attended a progressive secondary school. “Our literature teacher, my favourite, quite happily ignored the prescribed Soviet curriculum in favour of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Kirkegaard.”
Around the point the Berlin Wall fell, Grushin was awarded a full scholarship to Emory University, and became the first Russian citizen to enroll in and complete a four-year American college programme, graduating summa cum laude in 1993.
Grushin’s unique view of the Soviet disintegration was to give her books a fresh take on the Eastern bloc. Her debut, The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006), detailed the mental collapse of a once brilliant artist who forsook his dreams for success. Her latest novel, The Concert Ticket, tells of the queues that form as rumours circulate that a famous composer is returning to Moscow to conduct his last symphony. Inspired by the real-life episode of Igor Stravinsky’s return to Russia in 1962, The Concert Ticket also works as a guide to the vicissitudes of Khrushchev-era communism and is testament to the allure of art in a time of austerity. www.olgagrushin.com
