Fiction: "For here, in a cramped storage space, separated by a thin partition from monstrosities and non-entities, a few dozen outlawed canvases leaned haphazardly against the walls. Canvases by Malevich, Filonov, Kandinsky, Chagall - the legendary Russian artists whose works I had never seen, whose names I had heard pronounced only rarely, and always with a self-righteous lilt of accusation."
Secreted in the depths of the Tretyakovskaya Gallery, the paintings of the outlawed surrealist artists of Russia moulder, while the acceptable "shoddy Soviet paintings" are on public display in the main exhibition areas. This is a key image in this magnificent novel, which celebrates surrealistic painting by being surrealistic itself, and makes the moral point that artistic integrity, at any cost, is ultimately more rewarding than compromised celebrity. In the context of Soviet Russia, where insistence on the right to freedom of artistic expression could have fatal consequences, this theme is particularly dramatic. But freedom of expression is constantly threatened everywhere, by all kinds of forces, some overt and some subtle, so this specifically Russian story has universal resonance.
It traces the fortunes of its eponymous hero, Anatoly Sukhanov, a 56-year-old cultural fat cat and writer for a very prestigious art journal, who enjoys the luxurious life of a high-ranking Soviet apparatchik: a fabulous apartment, lots of caviar and champagne, a chauffeur-driven Volga to take him to his dacha at weekends. His beautiful wife is the daughter of one of Russia's most successful artists; his son, the ghastly Vasily, is on his way to being an important diplomat; his more subversive daughter is a talented artist.
But at a lavish art event Sukhanov encounters a friend of his youth, who he would much rather forget, and whose fate has been very different to his own. Soon after this meeting the disturbing dreams and memories begin, triggered by chance encounters and strange events: he often finds himself in a world similar to Chagall's "childlike universe of flying fiddlers, green-faced lovers and mysteriously smiling cows".
Entering this unruly universe, we gradually learn about Sukhanov's troubled past, from his childhood onwards. A brilliant artist, devoted to the surrealists and following in their footsteps, at the age of 33, after Khruschev condemns a group exhibition in which his first great painting is included, he decides to toe the line, and sells his artistic birthright. The terrible irony for Sukhanov is that his betrayal of himself is now going to be worthless, even from a mercenary point of view. It's 1986 or thereabouts (one assumes). The political tables are turning. The Chagalls and Kadinskys will be taken out of their cellar and hung with pride on the walls of the great galleries and the shoddy Soviet pictures will be dumped in the dusty store rooms - and so will Sukhanov, unless he can redeem himself even at the age of 56.
Olga Grushin is a Russian writing in English - such astonishingly beautiful English that it is almost impossible to believe that it is not her first language. Is this, one wonders, how the works of Tolstoy and Chekhov and Gogol (who she invokes) and of the 19th-century Russians she most resembles) would read if one could read them in Russian? The writing of angels.
Her brand of postmodern magic-realism can be daunting, and even irritating - magic can so easily get out of hand. But here is an author who makes even the works of, say, the wonderful Japanese writer Murakami look ever so slightly contrived. Grushin never overplays her hand. The work blends reality, memory and fantasy seamlessly, so that the book emerges as an inevitable, essential thing, wholly realised, totally "there". Whatever one feels about its politics (old Soviet bad, western individualism good, in an over-simplified nutshell) this is an outstanding novel. It's a first one too, from the author, a graduate in fine arts from Moscow University who now lives in Washington DC - with it she raises the bar for first novels. Like all excellent works, it does one unusual enough thing: it fills one with joy, because it works on every level.
And that, she seems to be saying, in a book in which the medium is the message, is what art can do.
The Dream Life of Sukhanov, By Olga Grushin, Viking/Penguin, 354pp. £14.99
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist and short story writer. Her novel in Irish, Hurlamaboc, has recently been published by Cois Life