Summer in Baden-Baden

Leonid Tsypkin, a leading Russian medical researcher, wrote one novel, Summer in Baden-Baden, before he officially asked the Soviet government for a visa allowing him to go to Israel. He did not get the visa, and for the unpatriotic act of asking to leave the Socialist Paradise he lost his job and shortly thereafter died of a massive heart attack. Dostoevsky would have understood. The great Russian novelist is the major character of the novel, a man forced out of Russia by a veritable horde of creditors while trying to support a new wife and a family of deadbeat relatives that could give parasites a good name. The story follows the narrator, who is never named, a modern day [1970's] Russian Jew who is traveling by train to important Dostoevsky sites and contemplating the writer's importance in modern Russia, including dealing with Dostoevsky's vicious anti-Semitism and the odd fact that most of his greatest modern critics are Jewish, and Dostoevsky himself, as he tries to write, make money, and deal with his humiliating addiction to the roulette wheel.The stories track and intertwine in an unique, almost Proustian, style, involving long sentences that go on for pages at a time and shift from the past to present and back again without stopping or explaining why the shift is occurring. The style, however, allows Tsypkin to make a point in the present and illustrate the point by shifting to Dostoevsky's life. Once the reader gets used to the style; for me I finally felt comfortable with it some twenty or thirty pages into the book; the overall effect is dazzling. That Leonid Tsypkin only wrote this one book is a major loss for Russian literature in particular and for world literature in general. This book displays a massive talent crushed by the brutal needs of a totalitarian society. In an otherwise great book the one objection is Susan Sontag's foreword. She means well, but she is so intent on proclaiming the greatness of this book that she forgets that Tsypkin can do that by himself; reading her forward almost put me off reading the book itself. Read it after you've read the book.

Summer in Baden-Baden is a beautiful and almost too brief masterpiece which tells two intertwined stories seamlessly. The first tells the story of the nameless narrator and Dostoyevsky admirer as he retraces the steps Dostoyevsky and his new wife took in the 1860s--the second story. The narrator's admiration for Dostoyevsky is not strong enough to enable him to conceal the underside of Dostoyevsky's personality--the obsessive gambling, the cruelty to his wife, the anti-Semitism. The narration itself is beautful--the light, almost humorous tone is wonderful and manages to carry off multi-page paragraphs without losing the reader. This is a rich little treasure. Enjoy.

Almost claustrophobic in its intensity, Tsypkin's recreation of the frustration, and even paranoia, of Dostoevsky during one summer in Baden-Baden, in which he attempts to gamble his way out of debt, is a masterpiece, newly published twenty years after its author's death. With sensitivity and a feeling for suffering which may have come from similar frustration, Tsypkin reveals Dostoevsky's inner life, showing us a sensitive but driven man who is also insecure, rude, and arrogant, a man who dominates his wife, a man who suffers from the aftereffects of his imprisonment and his epilepsy, a man virulently anti-Jewish and anti-German and in the grip of compulsive gambling--and a man with whom every reader will ultimately feel empathy, if not complete sympathy. The story line is deceptively simple. An unidentified narrator, a great admirer of Dostoevsky, is traveling by train to various sites associated with Dostoevsky. As he travels, he reads a Dostoevsky novel, musing about characters in Dostoevsky's novels and events in his life, his honeymoon and marriage, his remarkably supportive second wife, and his associations or wished-for associations with other Russian authors, such as Turgenev. The narrator's additional musings on the forces which eventually impel some later authors, like Solzhenitsyn, to seek exile, while other authors remain behind, bring Russian literary history up to date, expanding the novel's scope beyond that of Dostoevsky and his contemporaries and giving some historical context to Tsypkin's own writing. Contributing to the dark and intense moodiness of the novel is its style. Single sentences, full of unique images but sometimes two pages long, drive the narrative and the reader along, with the insistence of the train ride which opens the novel. Because each of these sentences is often a single, extended paragraph, there are almost no visual breaks to provide respite from solid type, which completely fills each page and compels the reader to read every word. The writing is so strong, so energetic, and so fresh, however, that most readers will find themselves speeding to keep up with the narrative, the grayness of the text disappearing as Tsypkin's lively images emerge and his characters come to life. This is a challenging and utterly fascinating novel, a startling new work which has earned a place in Russian literary history. Mary Whipple

"Summer in Baden-Baden" is a wonderful book revolving around a single summer in the life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Only one theme lies at the core of this book: love. The book tells of Dostoyevsky's 1867 summer in Baden-Baden with his bride, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. As such, the book revolves around conjugal love and carnal love, obsessive love and artistic love, a love of words, a love of games and a love of lazy days in the sunshine. Dostoyevsky made this trip to Baden-Baden prior to his spectacular literary successes; "The Idiot," "The Possessed," and "The Brothers Karamazov" all had yet to be published. Dostoyevsky was giving himself up to his vices: drinking, gambling, obsessing and, inbetween, suffering from the epilepsy that would plague him until the end of his life. Like all Russians, Dostoyevsky was "extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering." Seduced by anguish and despair, he gambled away his young, pregnant wife's jewels and finally was himself reduced to wandering the streets of the German resort town in beggar's rags.Besides being an account of Dostoyevsky's summer in Baden-Baden, this book is also a memoir of Tsypkin's journey to St. Petersburg to visit the apartment in which Dostoyevsky died. Supposedly, Tsypkin's aunt, a literary critic, gave Tsypkin an old volume of Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevsky's "Reminiscences," in which Anna details the intimate moments of her honeymoon in Baden-Baden. As Tsypkin travels farther and farther north, he weaves his own narrative into the narrative of Dostoyevsky. Although Tsypkin adores Dostoyevsky's work and, on some level, has come to worship and revere the man, his reverence does have its reservations. Tsypkin, we learn, is a Jew and, as anyone at all familiar with Dostoyevsky knows, the great writer hated Jews. All Jews. Thus, despite Tsypkin's adoration, Dostoyevsky would have hated Tsypkin.Tsypkin writes beautiful prose that is a combination of Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Saramago and Sebald, though any comparison is ultimately unfair to all of the authors involved. Tsypkin's prose is...Tsypkin's prose, though like Saramago and Sebald, one sentence can go one for four or five pages, one paragraph for forty or more. And, again reminiscent of Sebald, Tsypkin is seduced by memory and its connections; one thing leads him to another, which leads him to another, which leads him to yet another. If this puts you off, don't let it. Tsypkin is a wonderfully hypnotic writer and it doesn't take many pages of the book until the reader is drawn into both Tsypkin's world and the world of Baden-Baden during the summer of 1867. If anything, I wish the book would have gone on and on.Although Tsypkin and the Dostoyevsky's take center stage in this novel, it is peopled with many other fascinating characters as well, some real, some fictional: Turgenev, Pushkin, Prince Myshkin, Trusotsky, Fyodor Karamazov and Stinking Lizaveta.This book should be read, first and foremost, because it is