Grushin explained that a certain incident at the end of the Khruschev Thaw, a period when censorship was at a low point in Soviet history, saying, "In 1962, Khruschev remarked at an art installation showcasing three young artists, 'This kind of art is good only for covering urinals. I'm sending you to Siberia.' The implications of this statement were central to my book."
"The book is set in Moscow, in 1985, the year Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Russia is more open due to glasnost," said Grushin. She described her protagonist, Anatoly Pavlovich Sukhanov, as a "hack artist." Sukhanov is a surrealist artist turned apparatchik-a pawn in the hands of the government-and is haunted by his compromises of artistic integrity when he derides artists that he loved in the party journal. Grushin read two excerpts from her book and took questions from the audience.
"The book switches from a third-person narrative to first-person flashbacks," said Grushin. "It depends on what the flashbacks are. I used the more immediate first-person voice if something was really important. Otherwise, I was still inside Sukhanov's head, writing from his perspective in the third person."
When asked about the choice of artwork mentioned in her novel, Grushin explained that Botticelli is one of her favorites. Later in the book, Chagall becomes an important presence with a historical fit to the time period in which Sukhanov grew up.
Another audience member asked Grushin how she wrote her book, since English is her third language. Grushin replied, "I wrote it in English. The book is full of English-specific word plays. For instance, when I say, 'art and craft, the difference is just two letters,' that is not true in Russian. Yet I have been told that the novel reads like a Russian language book in an English skin. I was consciously trying to give it a Russian style, particularly when Russians were discussing soul, beauty and God in the fifties and sixties."
She added, "I started writing when I was four. Until I moved here, I wrote in Russian. Early on, it didn't occur to me to take an extra step and get published. I switched to English because I was here in America, and I wanted to be published here. I try to write straight in English. I took Nabokov's advice, to read the OED cover to cover, but I got stuck in the C's."
One of the more interesting points of Grushin's writing that emerged was her insistence on not reading living authors. The reason, she said, was that she didn't want her writing style to be influenced. Grushin was also asked by a member of the audience whether or not her book would be translated into Russian. "That depends on the publisher," she said. "It is being translated into 12 languages, including Hungarian, Romanian and Polish, but not Russian."
Grushin received an art history degree from the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and a journalism degree from Moscow State University. In 1989, she attended Emory University and became the first Russian citizen to enroll in and complete a four-year American college program. She lives in Washington, D.C.