Product Description

One bitterly cold winter in the 1970s, Leonid Tsypkin's obsession with Dostoyevsky leads him to Leningrad by train, so that he can see for himself where his hero died. As the train makes its way across Russia, a journal inspires Tsypkin to conjure up the summer of 1867, when Dosteyevsky and his young wife Anna travelled across Europe to Baden-Baden. The destructive demons that beset Dostoyevsky in his later life were in full force at this time, and man and wife battled for their very souls. Yet in Tsypkin’s hands this elegy to the great Russian writer becomes a glorious and unforgettable love story.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #120397 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Leonid Tsypkin was born in Minsk in 1926 of Russian-Jewish parents. Summer in Baden-Baden is the culmination of a passionate, clandestine literary vocation. A distinguished medical researcher by profession, Tsypkin never had even a measure of ‘underground’ fame. Twice denied permission to leave the Soviet Union with his family, he died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1982.

Customer Reviews

Epic tour of Russian literature
Leonid Tsypkin was a distinguished Russian doctor and medical researcher and a man, you feel, who was imprisoned by his situation and his exposure to history. Several of his relatives would die in the concentration camps, Tsypkin himself would be a virtual prisoner in the Soviet Union. He was denied exit from the country; after his own son left, Tsypkin would be demoted as punishment.

His novel, "Summer in Baden-Baden" is a complex narrative. Written 1977-80, it presents an anonymous narrator, travelling by rail, contemplating his role and his life, paralleling this with a similar journey by Dostoievsky and his wife, leaving Russia to tour the West. This is a journey through time and space, a grand tour of Russian literature.

Tsypkin undoubtedly saw language as a liberating medium: it gave Dostoievsky the freedom to travel the world - it gave Tsypkin the freedom to think, to imagine, but to escape the Soviet Union only in his mind. Language and writing are liberating, but governments can view writing as cause for imprisonment! Dostoievsky, let us not forget, was exiled to a Siberian prison because of his use of language.

Language, however, can be its own prison. Tsypkin presents the celebrated Russian novelist, an icon for writers the world over, and contrasts him with the anonymous narrator, a would-be novelist plagued with doubts and fragile confidence. This is an exploration of the loneliness and egg shell self-confidence of the writer. But the third character, the third dimension in the novel remains Tsypkin himself - demoted, denied the opportunity to continue his medical research, physically trapped within the Soviet state, censored and intellectually neutered, he researches Dostoievsky's life with passion and consummate skill, weaving together an epic novel of depth and complexity.

Tsypkin does tackle the contradictions in Dostoievsky's status - Susan Sontag brings this out in her superb introduction to the 2005 edition. Dostoievsky has a legion of Jewish admirers, yet his writing was often virulently anti-Semitic. Tsypkin can love the man's words without understanding his values; he has too many good qualities to be damned for one failing.

Dostoievsky was also a man capable of such insight into the human condition, yet he was a slave to gambling, could not see into his own life enough to plot an escape from addiction. But this is the ironic theme to "Summer in Baden-Baden" - value the whole person, see the complete picture, don't define and despise a person because of one aspect, one failing.

Tsypkin writes a humanitarian novel with passion and genuine insight. It is a complex piece of work - the many allusions to Russian literature can set your head spinning - and from place to place it is difficult to follow. Is this a weakness? Well, yes, but it would be hard not to press that this is a novel which should be enjoyed in total rather than in parts, even if it may take a second or third reading to fully comprehend Tsypkin's tale.

An intense and quintessentially Russian novel.
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

A Masterpiece
I have just finished Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden and, as at the end of every great novel, feel somewhat overawed by its profundity.
Whoever it was that rated this book as only meriting two stars must have completely missed the point of both Tyspkin and Dostoevsky because it is an undoubted masterpiece. (This is not withstanding the crudeness of 'marking' literature as if it were a school pupil's homework)
It is true that the book will appeal in large part to readers with at least a working knowledge of Dostoevsky's major works, in particular, if anyone is thinking of reading any before they read this work, Crime and Punishment and The Idiot.
The majority of the book takes place in Baden-Baden on a trip Dostoevsky took with his second wife Anna Grigor'yevna after his return from the prison camp. Shattered and traumatised by his internment Dostoevsky has become a passionate neurotic, seeing the face of his gloating Gaolers in every slight or dropped comment and reliving his tortures and his ruined pride with every Franc lost on the roulette tables he gambles his and his wife's money away on.
The novel is written by an unnamed Jewish doctor, a passionate lover of Dostoevsky's who is trying to come to terms with both his works and his profound anti-Semitism. At one point puzzling, "Why was I so strangely attracted and enticed by the life of this man who despised me and my kind."
He (the narrator) is making a train journey from Moscow to St Petersburg in the opposite direction to the journey Dostoevsky will make with his wife on their way to Baden-Baden. Both making physical and spiritual journeys of discovery, like Ahab hunting his whale. Both existing in a splintered 'present' which belongs to the same narrative voice, both at odds, in literature, as well as life, with the country they both love and hate, Dostoevsky having been exiled and Tsypkin told he could never leave. (Tsypkin, a medical researcher in post-war Russia applied for exit visas twice and was turned down and hounded from his post.)
The novel's style both pre-empts and resembles that of W.G Sebald, who could not have known of Tsypkin who was only published seven days before he died from a heart attack in a Russian periodical published in America. There is the obsession with the workings of memory, the long tortuous sentences lasting whole paragraphs and even the use of pictures taken by the author which seem to displace or add-to the narrative rather than illuminate it.
Summer in Baden-Baden deserves a wide readership, rescued from anonymity by the critic Susan Sontag only a short time before her own sad demise from breast cancer, it will fascinate all lovers of classic literature, anyone interested in the psychology of gambling, Dostoevsky lovers or readers of Russian literature.
In Sontag's own words in her excellent introduction, "The principal intensity depicted....is not gambling, not writing, not Christing. It is the searing, generous absoluteness of conjugal love...Anna's all-forgiving but always dignified love for Fedya rhymes with the love literature's disciple, Tsypkin, for Dostoevsky."