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The changes were subtle at first: more underground rock bands, more attention paid to the works of previously persona-non-grata writers, more art gallery openings. Olga Grushin was only 14 in 1985 when the landscape started to shift in Moscow, but she remembers that period vividly.

That was especially true when newspapers started to flex their newfound freedom of the press after Mikhail Gorbachev came into power

"That was amazing and exciting," Grushin says. "Every day you'd open the newspapers and you'd read what amounted to revelations. We were so used to reading between the lines back then."

Grushin had good counsel when it came to parsing stories in Russian newspapers: Her grandmother, parents, brother and other relatives worked as journalists.

It's not unnatural, then, that Grushin herself is a writer. Her milieu, however is fiction, and Grushin's first novel, "The Dream Life of Sukhanov," is a striking debut by a woman who made a most unusual journey from art school student to novelist.

Grushin first came to the United States in 1989 to study at Emory University in Atlanta. Acquaintances, she recalls, were apprehensive, not because they feared for her safety but because they thought she would starve.

"We constantly were shown the White House and the homeless and protestors in front of it," Grushin says. "This was supposed to be a representation of what life in America was like in general. You have the rich and the powerful and the politicians, the mansion behind the fence, and then you have everyone else, and they are starving and they are poor and they are sick. They are mad and not well cared for, and it was the most commonly shown image of America."

Grushin reasoned that the images in the Russian media were distorted. She'd traveled to the then-Eastern bloc countries of Bulgaria, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and her parents had spent time in Europe. The Christmas holiday when she was 10 was spent at a friend of her family's who had traveled to the U.S. and brought back some American goods.

"Maple syrup and 'Hotel California' (the Eagles album) ... that was my Christmas in 1981," she says with a laugh.

Grushin was not prepared for the similar distortion of Russian life she experienced in America. People she met asked questions about her homeland that she found laughable: Were Russians really told what career to pursue after high school? Were they told not to believe in God?

Her first American Christmas was spent in a small Tennessee town with her college roommate, correcting perceptions that had been fostered by the U.S. government and media reports.

"I would meet her friends, who'd say, 'You don't look like a Russian. Where are your boots? Why aren't you drinking vodka?'" Grushin says.

One of the charms of "The Dream Life of Sukhanov" is its portrait of life in Russia in the mid-1980s. Anatoly Sukhanov is a middle-aged Russian who has a gorgeous wife, two intelligent children on the verge of adulthood and a comfortable job as the editor of an arts magazine. True, he has to adhere to the party line, but his rewards -- a nice apartment, the use of a government-issued car and driver, a housekeeper -- seem to mitigate the loss of his artistic ambitions.

Sukhanov's life starts to fall apart when the cracks in the Soviet apparatus appear and cause him to question the decisions he made. While the situation seems specific to the emergence of more freedoms in Russia, Grushin thinks there's a universal aspect at the heart of a story that she first conceived when she was still living in her native country.

"The novel is grounded in its time, but I really wouldn't call it a glasnost novel or perestroika novel," she says. "I try to write about a universal problem of doing something you're passionate about and making a living providing for your family, giving happiness to those you love, which is a problem that people are faced with everywhere."

Grushin, who has worked as a researcher and interpreter at the Carter Center in Atlanta with former President Jimmy Carter and as a translator at the World Bank, wrote "The Dream Life of Sukhanov" in English, not her native Russian. One of the things she wanted to explore in the novel was the effect of restrictions on art.

"Does this era, where everything is possible and permitted, ... does that really kill something in art?" she says.

In the 1960s and 1970s, artists who didn't adhere to the Communist Party's version of art were forced to work underground. Exhibits for these artists were limited to apartments or private homes; only the occasional piece of controversial or subversive art was slipped into a major show.

Then came Gorbachev, and suddenly the underground artists were able to work in the open.

"Some people said this was sort of the end of great Russian underground art," Grushin says. "Because, at this point, art became commercial, and people started working for the West and imitating Western trends. Sure, there are still people creating wonderful art, and I sometimes see interesting things in the galleries, but I think with the openness, things didn't necessarily become better.

"Things became a lot more accessible, and some of the spirit has gone. In the '50s and '60s, there was this wonderful spirit; people were creating something new and not permitted necessarily -- in fact, not permitted at all. There was a sense of contributing to a world's culture of creating art, of doing something absolutely vital, and now I think a lot of that has been replaced by selling art, doing something commercial, doing something that you can display in a gallery in the West.

"I'm sure that happens everywhere were art is bought and sold as a commodity," she says, noting that private art ownership in Russia is increasingly popular. "I'm sure there are still people creating wonderful art, but that atmosphere has changed a lot, I think."

Capsule review

Olga Grushin's debut novel, "The Dream Life of Sukhanov" is a complex, intriguing story about an artist who seeks creative and personal redemption after years of sacrifice for his family.

Anatoly Sukhanov's comfortable life as the editor for a Communist Party arts magazine is in peril when Mikhail Gorbachev's cultural revolution allows artists to work without fear of government reprisal. Grushin fashions this story with a distinctive flair, her style a tribute to the Russian classics.

"The Dream Life" is an intricate, complex story that reads like the work of a seasoned veteran, not a first-time novelist.

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