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Ein Sommer in Baden-Baden
Ein Zug fährt durch die Nacht. Ein junger russischer Intellektueller ist auf dem Weg nach Leningrad. Er liest das Tagebuch von Anna Grigorjewna, der großen Liebe Fjodor Dostojewskis, und ist so gebannt, dass die Figuren zum Leben erwachen: Im Jahr 1867 reist das frisch verheiratete Paar nach Baden-Baden, dem Eldorado aller Spieler. Es folgt ein jahrelanger Grenzgang zwischen Dostojewskis begnadeter Vorstellungskraft und sadistischer Launenhaftigkeit, zwischen kreativem Schaffensrausch und lähmender Epilepsie.
237 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
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About the author
Leonid Tsypkin
7books24followersTsypkin was born in Minsk, Soviet Union (now the capital of Belarus), to Russian-Jewish parents, both of whom were medical specialists.
At the start of Stalin's Great Terror, in 1934, Tsypkin's father, Boris, an orthopaedic surgeon, was arrested on trumped-up charges, but was later released after a suicide attempt in which he broke his back.
Two of Boris Tsypkin's sisters and a brother were also arrested, and were murdered by Stalin's NKVD.
When the war was over Leonid returned with his parents to Minsk, where Leonid graduated from medical school in 1947; despite Stalin's policies of anti-Semitism, Tsypkin became a noted researcher in polio and cancer, and published more than 100 papers in scientific journals in Russia and abroad. While practicing medicine, Tsypkin considered abandoning medicine to become a writer [and in] his early years he had produced some poetry and fiction, but in 1969, after winning a Doctor of Science degree, he was granted a salary increase, which freed him from part-time work and thus allowed him to get down to writing in earnest.
Over the following decade he wrote sketches and stories, and two autobiographical novellas, none of which was published in his lifetime.
After his son and daughter-in-law emigrated to America in 1977, Tsypkin was demoted to the post of junior medical researcher. He and his family were denied permission to leave the Soviet Union on two occasions, in 1979 and 1981. Tsypkin died at the age of 56 of a heart attack in Moscow.
Summer in Baden-Baden is a fictional account of Fjodor Dostoyevsky's stay in Germany with his wife Anna. Depictions of the Dostoyevskys' honeymoon and streaks of Fjodor's gambling mania are intercut with scenes of Fjodor's earlier life in a stream-of-consciousness style. Tsypkin knew virtually everything about Dostoyevsky, but although the details in the novel are correct, it is a work of fiction, not a biographical statement.
While Baden Baden was perhaps Tsypkin's first significant work, at least in the West, his reputation was arguably sealed by the novella Norartakir. The story deals with themes of revenge, some of which, perhaps even all, being metaphorical acts by the author against the Soviet system
At the start of Stalin's Great Terror, in 1934, Tsypkin's father, Boris, an orthopaedic surgeon, was arrested on trumped-up charges, but was later released after a suicide attempt in which he broke his back.
Two of Boris Tsypkin's sisters and a brother were also arrested, and were murdered by Stalin's NKVD.
When the war was over Leonid returned with his parents to Minsk, where Leonid graduated from medical school in 1947; despite Stalin's policies of anti-Semitism, Tsypkin became a noted researcher in polio and cancer, and published more than 100 papers in scientific journals in Russia and abroad. While practicing medicine, Tsypkin considered abandoning medicine to become a writer [and in] his early years he had produced some poetry and fiction, but in 1969, after winning a Doctor of Science degree, he was granted a salary increase, which freed him from part-time work and thus allowed him to get down to writing in earnest.
Over the following decade he wrote sketches and stories, and two autobiographical novellas, none of which was published in his lifetime.
After his son and daughter-in-law emigrated to America in 1977, Tsypkin was demoted to the post of junior medical researcher. He and his family were denied permission to leave the Soviet Union on two occasions, in 1979 and 1981. Tsypkin died at the age of 56 of a heart attack in Moscow.
Summer in Baden-Baden is a fictional account of Fjodor Dostoyevsky's stay in Germany with his wife Anna. Depictions of the Dostoyevskys' honeymoon and streaks of Fjodor's gambling mania are intercut with scenes of Fjodor's earlier life in a stream-of-consciousness style. Tsypkin knew virtually everything about Dostoyevsky, but although the details in the novel are correct, it is a work of fiction, not a biographical statement.
While Baden Baden was perhaps Tsypkin's first significant work, at least in the West, his reputation was arguably sealed by the novella Norartakir. The story deals with themes of revenge, some of which, perhaps even all, being metaphorical acts by the author against the Soviet system
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March 13, 2012
Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden is a novel about one man’s love for the literature of his country and, in particular, for the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Tsypkin, a medical researcher by day, pursued another, more passionate vocation in the evenings. This remarkable day by day regimen is chronicled by Tsypkin son in the book’s introduction:
Tsypkin, who died in 1982, would not live to see Summer in Baden-Baden published. His writing life was clandestine, and his one attempt to obtain an exit visa out of the Soviet Union failed due to the tensions between East and West over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Nevertheless, as Susan Sontag observes in the introduction, Tsypkin predicament and passion didn’t require an audience. Sontag marvels at Tsypkin ability to write “without hope or prospect of being published,� and poses the question attendant to Tsypkin accomplishment: “what resources of faith in literature does that imply?�
The Dostoyevsky that emerges in Tsypkin’s novel is consistent with that represented by other biographers: paranoid, epileptic, anti-Semitic, addicted to gambling, but also a man possessing a great heart and an uncanny prophetic insight into the world to come. The difference, however, is Tsypkin’s Dostoyevsky is Dostoyevsky from the inside out. The key event around which the novel is built is Dostoyevsky’s 1867 trip to the gambling tables of Baden-Baden in Germany.
Accompanying him is his young wife, Anna Gregoryevna, a stenographer who met and worked with Dostoyevsky while the author was writing Crime and Punishment. Anna quickly discovers (they are newlyweds) that life with “Fedya� will not be easy. Yet, going back to their first meeting in a St. Peterburg apartment, she has, from the start, sensed his genius and clings to it like a “mast.� In Tsypkin’s portrayals of the couple’s love-making, the reader observes a mystical union (or feverish dream-scape) easily as surreal as any scene found in Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, or The Possessed:
There are times, however, during the lovemaking (or, interestingly, the gambling), when the “yellow-lynx� eyes of the prison commandant intrudes into Dostoyevsky’s thoughts. The trauma of a beating in Siberia will haunt him the rest of his life, adding further revolutions to the manic engine of the writer, sometimes reducing him to impotence, or even triggering an epileptic fit.
Parallel to Dostoyevsky's story is that of the unnamed narrator. As Sontag points out in the introduction, the novel operates as a double narrative--which, considering Dostoyevsky’s interest in the Double, could be Tsypkin’s inside joke. On the surface, the narrator’s story appears secondary to the Dostoyevksy story. Both stories are linked by the narrator’s imagination, but the link is such that the division between the two stories is ultimately artificial. Though the details are fewer, we know the narrator is Jewish and lives in the modern day Soviet Union--and that he admires Dostoyevsky. Beyond that, we know little more. Family members make brief appearances, and it is a book (Anna Gregoryevna’s Diary) borrowed from an aunt that sets the novel into motion. As the novel progresses, the narrator slowly reveals more of himself, until at last he must address the gnawing issue of Dostoyevsky’s hatred of Jews.
The issue is a paradox and the narrator’s conclusion a question:
The narrator next moves the question to himself, as he speculates whether such an admiration--from a Jew--is, in fact, a “cannibalistic� act or perhaps a shield in a hostile culture: --but it is possible, however, that this special attraction which Dostoyevsky seems to possess for Jews reveals something else: the desire to hide behind his back, as if using him as a safe-conduct--something like adopting Christianity or daubing a cross on your door during a pogrom--
But, in the end, the narrator rejects this interpretation, concluding instead that it is also love for this sometimes hostile--but also great--culture and nation that overrides and forgives.
The model or vehicle for forgiveness in Dostoyevsky’s story is not Dostoyevsky - who falls on his knees at seemingly every other moment--but his second wife, Anna, with whom the narrator clearly identifies. Through the difficult summer of 1867, Anna sees Dostoyevsky at his worst, but she indulges him and gives him space and money, along with her own jewelry to pawn, which he quickly blows at the gambling tables again and again. For, despite Dostoyevsky’s erratic behavior, she also sees the writer of Crime and Punishment and the “mast� of his genius, and how she must cling to this mast. Tsypkin’s Anna becomes so essential, and her appearance comes at such a pivotal time in Dostoyevsky’s life, that it’s difficult to imagine the writer without Anna nursing him through his epileptic fits, depressions, and wild mood swings. Without her, would the great novels to come even have been written?
By novel’s end, we move forward in time (and time is a slippery beast in this novel) toward the end of Dostoyevsky’s life. The reader sees and appreciates fully the love Anna bears for her husband. In one long, beautiful passage, Tsypkin poignantly paints the last scene of a literary marriage. I was struck by the contrast between Dostoyevsky’s death and Tolstoy’s own bitter end. The Dostoyevskys denouement is far sweeter and enduring than Tolstoy’s bitter tramp through the snow:
Summer in Baden-Baden is a difficult book that requires some familiarity with Dostoyevsky’s life and works. Tyspkin moves freely and sometimes confusingly through time, blurring the lines between the narrator’s life and Dostoyevsky’s life. But this is intentional. Armed with some Dostoyevsky basics, and primed with Sontag’s superb introduction, the patient reader will be rewarded not only with a fine modernist meditation on one of Russian literature’s greatest writers but also the story of one writer’s devotion to the writing life.
Every day, he left at a quarter to eight sharp for his work at the Institute of Poliomyelitis and Viral Encephalitis, situated in a distant suburb of Moscow, not far from the Vnukovo airport. He came back home at six p.m., had dinner, took a short nap, and sat down to write--if not his prose, then his medical research papers. Before going to bed, at ten p.m., he sometimes would take a walk. He usually spent his weekends writing as well; for a change he would work at the Lenin Library, gathering materials for his book on Dostoyevsky.
My father craved every opportunity to write, but writing was difficult, painful. He agonized over every word, and endlessly corrected his hand-written manuscripts. Once finished with editing, he typed his prose on an ancient, shiny German typewrite, “Erika�--World War II loot, sold by one owner to the next until an uncle gave it to my father in 1949. And in that form his writings remained. He did not send his manuscripts to publishers, and did not want to circulate his prose in samizdat because he was afraid of problems with the KGB and of losing his job.
Tsypkin, who died in 1982, would not live to see Summer in Baden-Baden published. His writing life was clandestine, and his one attempt to obtain an exit visa out of the Soviet Union failed due to the tensions between East and West over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Nevertheless, as Susan Sontag observes in the introduction, Tsypkin predicament and passion didn’t require an audience. Sontag marvels at Tsypkin ability to write “without hope or prospect of being published,� and poses the question attendant to Tsypkin accomplishment: “what resources of faith in literature does that imply?�
The Dostoyevsky that emerges in Tsypkin’s novel is consistent with that represented by other biographers: paranoid, epileptic, anti-Semitic, addicted to gambling, but also a man possessing a great heart and an uncanny prophetic insight into the world to come. The difference, however, is Tsypkin’s Dostoyevsky is Dostoyevsky from the inside out. The key event around which the novel is built is Dostoyevsky’s 1867 trip to the gambling tables of Baden-Baden in Germany.
Accompanying him is his young wife, Anna Gregoryevna, a stenographer who met and worked with Dostoyevsky while the author was writing Crime and Punishment. Anna quickly discovers (they are newlyweds) that life with “Fedya� will not be easy. Yet, going back to their first meeting in a St. Peterburg apartment, she has, from the start, sensed his genius and clings to it like a “mast.� In Tsypkin’s portrayals of the couple’s love-making, the reader observes a mystical union (or feverish dream-scape) easily as surreal as any scene found in Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, or The Possessed:
That night, when he went to kiss Anya, they swam away again together, rhythmically thrusting out their arms from the water and raising their heads to take in gulps of air--and the current did not sweep him away--they swam towards the receding horizon, into the unknown, deep blue distance, and then he began to kiss her again--a dark triangle appeared, upturned--its apex, its peak, pointing downwards, forever inaccessible, like the inverted peak of a very high mountain disappearing somewhere into the clouds--or rather the core of a volcano--and this peak, this unattainable core, contained the answer both terrible and exquisite to something nameless and unimaginable and, throughout his life, even in his letters to her, he maintained his incessant struggle to reach it, but this peak, this core, remained forever inaccessible.
There are times, however, during the lovemaking (or, interestingly, the gambling), when the “yellow-lynx� eyes of the prison commandant intrudes into Dostoyevsky’s thoughts. The trauma of a beating in Siberia will haunt him the rest of his life, adding further revolutions to the manic engine of the writer, sometimes reducing him to impotence, or even triggering an epileptic fit.
Parallel to Dostoyevsky's story is that of the unnamed narrator. As Sontag points out in the introduction, the novel operates as a double narrative--which, considering Dostoyevsky’s interest in the Double, could be Tsypkin’s inside joke. On the surface, the narrator’s story appears secondary to the Dostoyevksy story. Both stories are linked by the narrator’s imagination, but the link is such that the division between the two stories is ultimately artificial. Though the details are fewer, we know the narrator is Jewish and lives in the modern day Soviet Union--and that he admires Dostoyevsky. Beyond that, we know little more. Family members make brief appearances, and it is a book (Anna Gregoryevna’s Diary) borrowed from an aunt that sets the novel into motion. As the novel progresses, the narrator slowly reveals more of himself, until at last he must address the gnawing issue of Dostoyevsky’s hatred of Jews.
I leafed through, in the slightly wavering circle of light cast by the bulb from beneath the green lamp-shade, the penultimate volume of Dostoevski’s works, containing Diary of a Writer for 1877 or 1878--and finally I stumbled on an article especially devoted to the Jews--‘The Jewish Question� it was called--and finally I should not have been surprised to discover it because he was bound after all somewhere or other to have gathered together in one place all those ‘Jews, Jewesses, Jew-boys and Yids� with which he so liberally besprinkled the pages of his novels--now as the poseur Lyamshin squealing with terror in "The Possessed," now as the arrogant and at the same time cowardly Isaiah Fomich in Memoirs from the "House of the Dead" who did not scruple to lend money at enormous interest to his fellow-convicts, now as the fireman in "Crime and Punishment" with that ‘everlasting sullen grief, so sourly imprinted on all members of the tribe of Judah without exception�. . .
The issue is a paradox and the narrator’s conclusion a question:
and it struck me as being strange to the point of implausibility that a man so sensitive in his novels to the sufferings of others, this defender of the insulted and the injured who fervently and even frenetically preached the right to exist of every earthly creature and sang a passionate hymn to each little leaf and every blade of grass--that this man should not have come up with even a single word in the defence or justification of a people persecuted over several thousands of years--could he have been so blind?--or was he perhaps blinded by hatred?--
The narrator next moves the question to himself, as he speculates whether such an admiration--from a Jew--is, in fact, a “cannibalistic� act or perhaps a shield in a hostile culture: --but it is possible, however, that this special attraction which Dostoyevsky seems to possess for Jews reveals something else: the desire to hide behind his back, as if using him as a safe-conduct--something like adopting Christianity or daubing a cross on your door during a pogrom--
But, in the end, the narrator rejects this interpretation, concluding instead that it is also love for this sometimes hostile--but also great--culture and nation that overrides and forgives.
The model or vehicle for forgiveness in Dostoyevsky’s story is not Dostoyevsky - who falls on his knees at seemingly every other moment--but his second wife, Anna, with whom the narrator clearly identifies. Through the difficult summer of 1867, Anna sees Dostoyevsky at his worst, but she indulges him and gives him space and money, along with her own jewelry to pawn, which he quickly blows at the gambling tables again and again. For, despite Dostoyevsky’s erratic behavior, she also sees the writer of Crime and Punishment and the “mast� of his genius, and how she must cling to this mast. Tsypkin’s Anna becomes so essential, and her appearance comes at such a pivotal time in Dostoyevsky’s life, that it’s difficult to imagine the writer without Anna nursing him through his epileptic fits, depressions, and wild mood swings. Without her, would the great novels to come even have been written?
By novel’s end, we move forward in time (and time is a slippery beast in this novel) toward the end of Dostoyevsky’s life. The reader sees and appreciates fully the love Anna bears for her husband. In one long, beautiful passage, Tsypkin poignantly paints the last scene of a literary marriage. I was struck by the contrast between Dostoyevsky’s death and Tolstoy’s own bitter end. The Dostoyevskys denouement is far sweeter and enduring than Tolstoy’s bitter tramp through the snow:
--‘I shall die today, Anya,� he said quietly, continuing to look at her in the same way-- and she went up to him and, taking his hands in hers, began trying to convince him that things would turn out all right and that the doctors did not consider his condition dangerous, but pushing her hands to one side and continuing to whisper, because he was unable to speak loudly, he asked her to pass him the copy of the Gospels given to him by the wives of the Decembrists when he had been in penal servitude and which he always kept with him, covering it with many pencil marks in the margins - and opening it at random without looking down at the page, he asked her to read out loud the third verse from the top, and she read: ‘And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness�--‘You see,� he said, � “Suffer it to be so now� so I shall die�--and he shut the book, and Anna Grigor’yevna, kneeling down beside him, took his hand in hers once again and he put her hand to his lips, kissing it, and then he fell asleep, breathing peacefully and evenly, and she stayed there kneeling, afraid to move in case she should wake him up, and when he did wake up, it was already late morning, and he wound up his watch himself, then he asked her to let him clean his teeth and to help him get dressed, and when he began to comb his hair, attempting to make it cover his bald patch, and Anna Grigor’yevna, fearing that it would cost him too much effort, took the comb from him and tried to do it for him herself, he became irritable and started to ask very loudly, even shouting why she was doing it from the wrong side, so that, although, she was afraid that this loud display of temper might not be any good for him, at the same time she was glad to see his irritable reaction, which gave her hope that he might recover since it was so characteristic of him, but when, with help, he had nearly got himself completely dressed and was about to pull on his socks, blood appeared on his lips, and chin once again--
Summer in Baden-Baden is a difficult book that requires some familiarity with Dostoyevsky’s life and works. Tyspkin moves freely and sometimes confusingly through time, blurring the lines between the narrator’s life and Dostoyevsky’s life. But this is intentional. Armed with some Dostoyevsky basics, and primed with Sontag’s superb introduction, the patient reader will be rewarded not only with a fine modernist meditation on one of Russian literature’s greatest writers but also the story of one writer’s devotion to the writing life.
January 14, 2024
Susan Sontag enthuses over this one in her introduction and, indeed, it’s a beautiful book. Touching on the lyrical at times. It helps to have read some Dostoyevsky, but that’s not essential. Translated from the Russian.
April 28, 2023
This is a strange feverish novel all about Dostoyevsky. Susan Sontag describes the author’s unique style in the introduction perfectly :
Each paragraph indent begins a long, long sentence, whose connectives are “and� (many of these) and “but� (several) and “although� and “and so� and “whereas� and “just as� and “because� and “as if� along with many dashes, and there is a full stop only when the paragraph ends�. A sentence that starts with Fedya and Anna in Dresden might flash back to Dostoyevsky’s convict years or to an earlier bout of gambling mania…then thread onto this a memory from the narrator’s medical student days and a rumination on some lines by Pushkin
The narrator is unnamed but it's Leonid Tsypkin himself who is interweaving his own pilgrimage to Petersburg to visit Dosto sites with mostly agonising scenes from his hero’s anguished life. So you get 1) Leonard’s travels; 2) Dosto and Anna’s travels and misadventures; 3) flashbacks to Dosto’s early life; and 4) comments on Russian literature all weaving in and out of each other, all written in a breathless helterskelter rush where � dashes � have replaced the humble full stop as if the author had been told he only had three hours to live. So as the prose rushes forward the poor reader has to slow down all the time to try to figure out what is going on. This produced in me a form of travel sickness.
As well as all that, the re-imagining of scenes from Dosto’s life are kind of spurious if like me you happen to have read a couple of years ago Joseph Frank’s magnificent Dosto biography. As Bob Dylan said
And me I wait so patiently, waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice
So I ditched it half way.
Each paragraph indent begins a long, long sentence, whose connectives are “and� (many of these) and “but� (several) and “although� and “and so� and “whereas� and “just as� and “because� and “as if� along with many dashes, and there is a full stop only when the paragraph ends�. A sentence that starts with Fedya and Anna in Dresden might flash back to Dostoyevsky’s convict years or to an earlier bout of gambling mania…then thread onto this a memory from the narrator’s medical student days and a rumination on some lines by Pushkin
The narrator is unnamed but it's Leonid Tsypkin himself who is interweaving his own pilgrimage to Petersburg to visit Dosto sites with mostly agonising scenes from his hero’s anguished life. So you get 1) Leonard’s travels; 2) Dosto and Anna’s travels and misadventures; 3) flashbacks to Dosto’s early life; and 4) comments on Russian literature all weaving in and out of each other, all written in a breathless helterskelter rush where � dashes � have replaced the humble full stop as if the author had been told he only had three hours to live. So as the prose rushes forward the poor reader has to slow down all the time to try to figure out what is going on. This produced in me a form of travel sickness.
As well as all that, the re-imagining of scenes from Dosto’s life are kind of spurious if like me you happen to have read a couple of years ago Joseph Frank’s magnificent Dosto biography. As Bob Dylan said
And me I wait so patiently, waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice
So I ditched it half way.
January 21, 2025
Excellent and strange. I'll be a mouthpiece for Susan Sontag, whose foreword says it all (and, without Sontag, we would probably never have chance to read this). Tsypkin never saw a single page of his work published in his lifetime; he was born in Minsk to Russian-Jewish parents and lived his career as a medical doctor and researcher of polio and cancer. Sontag writes,
Which is immensely high praise. She likens him to Sebald, too, which, for Sontag, is also immensely high praise. I was reminded of Bernhard whilst reading Dostoyevsky's rambling mind, and found Sontag thought the same (I read forewords once I've finished, like most). She also likens his sentences to Saramago's. They are very long. Full-stops are only used at the end of paragraphs; within each paragraph, everything is instead joined together with hyphens. It is maybe the first book I've read of this nature. And these sentences aid the meandering narrative Tsypkin has written, which includes numerous points throughout Dostoyevsky's life, as well as the narrator of the story, which Sontag has no fear in calling Tsypkin himself. Sontag well explains,
If it sounds disorientating, it is; it is a book of strange, hallucinatory power. One recurring image in the imagined mind of Dostoyevsky is a giant triangle, whose apex is sometimes obscured by clouds. As a library book, I couldn't underline as I do in my own books, but I've chosen a random page to show the mania of Fedya and the hyphen-filled paragraphs that make up the novel. Turgenev and other Russian writers also feature as characters.
And so on and on do the sentences run, driven by commas and hyphens, circling Dostoyevsky's tormented life, writing, and the narrator, who, on his own journey, eventually has to face his hero's (hero?) hatred of Jews.
Yet some ten years ago, rifling through a bin of scruffy-looking used paperbacks outside a bookshop on London's Charing Cross Road, I came across such a book, "Summer in Baden-Baden", which I would include among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century's worth of fiction and para-fiction.
Which is immensely high praise. She likens him to Sebald, too, which, for Sontag, is also immensely high praise. I was reminded of Bernhard whilst reading Dostoyevsky's rambling mind, and found Sontag thought the same (I read forewords once I've finished, like most). She also likens his sentences to Saramago's. They are very long. Full-stops are only used at the end of paragraphs; within each paragraph, everything is instead joined together with hyphens. It is maybe the first book I've read of this nature. And these sentences aid the meandering narrative Tsypkin has written, which includes numerous points throughout Dostoyevsky's life, as well as the narrator of the story, which Sontag has no fear in calling Tsypkin himself. Sontag well explains,
In course of these ardently protracted paragraph-sentences, the river of feeling gathers up and sweeps along the narrative of Dostoyevsky's life and of Tsypkin's: a sentence that starts with Fedya and Anna in Dresden might flash back to Dostoyevsky's convict years or to an earlier bout of gambling mania linked to his romance with Polina Suslova, then thread onto this a memory from the narrator's medical-student days and a rumination on some lines by Pushkin.
If it sounds disorientating, it is; it is a book of strange, hallucinatory power. One recurring image in the imagined mind of Dostoyevsky is a giant triangle, whose apex is sometimes obscured by clouds. As a library book, I couldn't underline as I do in my own books, but I've chosen a random page to show the mania of Fedya and the hyphen-filled paragraphs that make up the novel. Turgenev and other Russian writers also feature as characters.
When he arrived home, Fedya fell onto his knees before Anna Grigor'yevna so that she was quite taken aback and began to retreat into the corner of the room, as he crawled after her, still on his knees, and saying over and over again. 'Forgive me, forgive me!' and 'You've my angel!' � but she continued to side-step, so he jumped to his feet and began to drum his fists against the wall � and then he began to hammer his own head, as if by design, as though he was playing out some kind of farce, so that she briefly felt like laughing, but she was afraid that their landlady might hear and, apart from that, it might lead to another fit � so she ran up to him and tried to restrain him —and his face was pale and his trembled and his beard was twisted to one side � and kneeling before her yet again, he repented his losses and the fact that he made her unhappy, but she was unable to take in his words or understand the full depth of his suffering and humiliation and, standing in the corner of the room, she looked at him in amazement and even with an unfriendly kind of smile � could it be that she was laughing at him? � so he leapt up and began to drum the wall again so that, at last, she would have to realise, that they would all have to realise . . .
And so on and on do the sentences run, driven by commas and hyphens, circling Dostoyevsky's tormented life, writing, and the narrator, who, on his own journey, eventually has to face his hero's (hero?) hatred of Jews.
April 10, 2022
Susan Sontag writes:
‘Intently patrolled� � I like that! At a time when most publishers won’t accept unsolicited manuscripts, let alone pay them proper attention when they do! When even agents don’t accept them! It’s like some Kafkaesque doorkeeper fable! Maybe in the seventies it was different, though with the invention of the word processor in the eighties the submissions must have flooded in. My dad wrote three novels in the eighties � no publisher, to my knowledge, ever read them. My uncle wrote a huge novel before he died, which both my parents thought was a masterpiece, but my mum couldn’t find an agent willing to take on a dead author and, again, no publisher read it. In the nineties I held a job (briefly) as ‘slush pile� reader for Random House. I’d receive a package of manuscripts in the mail, skim or occasionally read them, write a small (sometimes very small) ‘report� on each, bill the publisher for my time taken and never hear from them again. Money in the bank, sure, and another package of manuscripts, but never a word on the work I’d done. Was I, then, doing the ‘patrolling�? Maybe to Sontag it’s inconceivable that any but professionals already on the radars of the so-called patrollers could come up with these masterpieces, but not to me. The frightening thing is how many hidden masterpieces there must be, in all languages, and it can only be getting worse.
Meantime, I’m not even convinced that Summer in Baden Baden is a masterpiece. The comparison to Bernhard � gimme a break! Read The Lime Works and tell me just stringing every sentence out with ‘ands� and extended parentheses is the equivalent of that virtuosity. Yeah, it sweeps you up; oftentimes it sweeps you (or swept me) up and over what it sought to convey, and by each seemingly interminable sentence’s end the last thing you feel like is re-reading it. Nor did I feel any deep insight into Dostoevsky, and if (as Sontag claims) it’s supposed to depict some great love affair, I didn’t get it: endless squabbling (often culminating in threats of suicide from Fedya) and endless making up. Not a relationship I found unique or interesting. There’s Dos’s anti-semitism, which particularly stings the Jewish Leonid Tsypkin � but it’s barely explored. There’s Tsypkin’s (or the narrator’s) own life � but again, it’s wafer-thin. A good early draft, then, unbalanced by excessive focus on Dos’s gambling (tedious, well-illustrated early on then drawn out ad nauseum) and too little clarity in the present-day sections? Cos I mean, yeah, it was good. It flew by. But didn’t it feel just slightly pointless? To me this book is one more reason to take a break from the past and start ‘patrolling� the present.
The literature of the second half of the twentieth century is a much traversed field, and it seems unlikely that there are still masterpieces in major, intently patrolled languages waiting to be discovered.
‘Intently patrolled� � I like that! At a time when most publishers won’t accept unsolicited manuscripts, let alone pay them proper attention when they do! When even agents don’t accept them! It’s like some Kafkaesque doorkeeper fable! Maybe in the seventies it was different, though with the invention of the word processor in the eighties the submissions must have flooded in. My dad wrote three novels in the eighties � no publisher, to my knowledge, ever read them. My uncle wrote a huge novel before he died, which both my parents thought was a masterpiece, but my mum couldn’t find an agent willing to take on a dead author and, again, no publisher read it. In the nineties I held a job (briefly) as ‘slush pile� reader for Random House. I’d receive a package of manuscripts in the mail, skim or occasionally read them, write a small (sometimes very small) ‘report� on each, bill the publisher for my time taken and never hear from them again. Money in the bank, sure, and another package of manuscripts, but never a word on the work I’d done. Was I, then, doing the ‘patrolling�? Maybe to Sontag it’s inconceivable that any but professionals already on the radars of the so-called patrollers could come up with these masterpieces, but not to me. The frightening thing is how many hidden masterpieces there must be, in all languages, and it can only be getting worse.
Meantime, I’m not even convinced that Summer in Baden Baden is a masterpiece. The comparison to Bernhard � gimme a break! Read The Lime Works and tell me just stringing every sentence out with ‘ands� and extended parentheses is the equivalent of that virtuosity. Yeah, it sweeps you up; oftentimes it sweeps you (or swept me) up and over what it sought to convey, and by each seemingly interminable sentence’s end the last thing you feel like is re-reading it. Nor did I feel any deep insight into Dostoevsky, and if (as Sontag claims) it’s supposed to depict some great love affair, I didn’t get it: endless squabbling (often culminating in threats of suicide from Fedya) and endless making up. Not a relationship I found unique or interesting. There’s Dos’s anti-semitism, which particularly stings the Jewish Leonid Tsypkin � but it’s barely explored. There’s Tsypkin’s (or the narrator’s) own life � but again, it’s wafer-thin. A good early draft, then, unbalanced by excessive focus on Dos’s gambling (tedious, well-illustrated early on then drawn out ad nauseum) and too little clarity in the present-day sections? Cos I mean, yeah, it was good. It flew by. But didn’t it feel just slightly pointless? To me this book is one more reason to take a break from the past and start ‘patrolling� the present.
July 25, 2007
Once or twice in our lives, we are fortunate enough to stumble upon a hidden masterpiece, a book so entrancing that its obscurity strikes one not so much as an act of cultural oversight but as a natural disaster, leaving in its wake throngs of readers deprived of the book's great and terrible beauty. Luckily, in recent years the cult of "Summer in Baden-Baden" has grown considerably, with the book finding its way here, as it did in its native Soviet Russia, from friend to awestruck friend, passed around semizdat-style. Any attempt at definition is bound to fail, as Leonid Tsypkin -- a haunted and supremely talented writer who has never seen this, his only work, published in his lifetime -- has invented a brand new hybrid genre, bringing together literary criticism, biography, novellas and travelogues. For good measure, however, the plot is as follows: The narrator, Tsypkin himself, is riding the train form Moscow to St. Petersburg in the 1960s or 1970s. He is reading a book, Anna Dostoyevsky's account of her travels with her husband in the year 1867, when the two, then newlyweds, left Russia for a summer in the German spa town of Baden Baden. Dual accounts emerge: On the one hand is the great author, his fame far from fully recognized, his finances in disarray, his sexuality ill at ease and his psyche ravaged by a growing addiction to gambling. He runs around Baden Baden, a town awash in splendor, fuming at the sight of his fellow compatriots, Goncharov and Turgenev, both adored by the critics and in possession of considerable fortunes. One moment he is ecstatic, bursting into casinos with crystal chandeliers and plush carpeting in the hope of winning instantaneous wealth. The other he crawls back to his modest apartment, paralyzed with guilt, begging his young wife's forgiveness. Tsypkin has concocted here not so much a biography as a fantasy, however well-grounded in fact, and he enriches his text with subtle allusions to Dostoyevsky's work, small nuggets that are bound to delight fans of the great author. But the book is as much Tsypkin's story as it is Dostoyevsky's; on a parallel track to Fyodor and Anna's woes, Tsypkin recounts his own journey, one that ends with a pilgrimage to the author's house in St. Petersburg. This, I believe, is the truly masterful part of the book, as Tsypkin weaves together political commentary, lamenting the crumbling Soviet Union, with literary criticism, pondering the shortcomings of his idol, an unhappy, anti-Semitic wretch of a man who nonetheless transcended the barriers posed by his wounded soul to become one of humanity's sharpest observers. Tsypkin style, to be sure, is likely to frighten some, especially on first glance: The book itself is written in long, breathless sentences, sometimes a paragraph long. Although the book is short, its density is uncommon, demanding a slow and meditative pace, boundless patience, and a real admiration for Tsypkin's uncommonly artful sentences. Despite the difficulty it presents, it is an immensely moving book, one in which love and fame and wealth and friendship and failure are all cut open, analyzed as seldom before, making the reader a bit sadder, a bit smarter, a bit more aware.
August 7, 2012
Leonid Tsypkin strongly felt what now appears to be a universal human need: to be a fan of someone or something. But he was cursed by fate. He lived in a place and at a time when there was no one to worship but God yet God was itself banned as a matter of state policy and there were no rock stars, actors, great athletes, football teams or anything one could substitute for God.
Tsypkin was born in 1926 in Minsk. His parents were Russian jews. He was a young boy when the Stalinist purges, the Great Terror, started. His father, his father's two sisters and a brother were arrested. His father tried to commit suicide while in prison but survived and later got out. His father's aforementioned three siblings all perished. When Minsk was captured by the Germans in 1941 it was the turn of Tsypkin's grandmother, another aunt and two little cousins to die, murdered in a ghetto. He and his father, however, managed to escape from Minsk with the help of his father's former patient. Later, Tsypkin himself became a doctor like his parents.He married and had a son, Mikhail.
He had always loved literature and the arts and at some time toyed with the idea of writing full time or becoming a film director. But he was afraid he may not be able to support his family with any of these careers. So he stuck with being a doctor, devoting much of his time on research.
He did manage to write some poems, two novellas and this one, his longest. But none of these was ever published in Russia during his lifetime.
His son Mikhail and the latter's wife were granted exit visas in 1977 and they migrated to the United States. Two years after, Tsypkin himself, his wife and mother applied for exit visas but were denied. The emigration of his son to the United States had caused him a lot of trouble: his salary (the only source of livelihood for the family) was cut by 75% and he was treated as a pariah in the research institute ran by the government where he worked. He was trappped.
It was at this period (1977 to 1980) that he wrote this novel. After it was finished, and with no prospect of having it published in the country, he managed to smuggle a copy of the manuscript out through the help of a journalist friend who had managed to leave early in 1981. In September that year, he, his wife and his mother re-applied for exit visas. The following month his mother died, aged 86. A week later the denial of their application came.
In early March 1982 he was told by the head of the Moscow visa office that he will never be allowed to emigrate anywhere. Days later, his son Mikhail, who was then studying in Harvard, told him that this novel will be published, on installment, at a Russian-emigre weekly based in New York. The first of these installments appeared on 13 March 1982. A week later, or on 20 March 1982, Tsypkin died of a heart attack. It was his 56th birthday. He never got to see any of his work in print or came to know of the readers' reaction to any of his literary output. How would he have reacted to Susan Sontag's introduction here where she gushed that she would include this novel "among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century's worth of fiction and para-fiction" we will never know.
This is a part-historical, part-imaginary and part-autobiographical fan blog written long before the age of the internet and using, not a laptop, but a World War II-vintage Erika typewriter. The object of Tsypkin's fanboyism was the only type of idol the KGB then will not suspect you of hatching a plot to destabilize the regime: a Russian author dead for about a century with an apolitical body of work: Fyodor Dostoevsky.
A true fan he was, for only a true fan would do what Tsypkin did before actually wiriting this novel amidst the hopelessness and tribulations of his sorry life. First, he scoured the libraries and archives to do research on Dostoevsky. Then, camera in hand, he went to Leningrad to take photos of places which had a part in Dostoevsky's life AND that of the characters in his novels. That is why in between paragraphs of this novel the reader will be occasionally confronted with images of streets, buildings, walls, holes, stairways, rooms and the like all without any human beings in them as if even in these images of places Tsypkin did not want anyone but Dostoevsky and his characters to magically appear and re-enact the incidents of their lives.
It seemed a historical fact that in the summer of 1867 Dostoevsky and his young wife Anna travelled across Russia to Baden-Baden (then a popular resort town). But his anti-semitism, his gambling addiction, his compulsive almsgiving, his use of swimming as a metaphor for the sex act--were these still facts or were they just imagined by Tyspkin? (sorry, but I read my Dostoevsky more than 30 years ago).The scenes here go from Dostoevsky's time to Tyspkin's own time in the 1970s as if the century which separates these times had been compressed to make the past and the present happen simultaneously through the medium of this novel. Tyspkin was like an Elvis Presley impersonator dressing up like him and singing his songs to relive what had long been gone.
This is one desperate longing expressed through prose.
Tsypkin was born in 1926 in Minsk. His parents were Russian jews. He was a young boy when the Stalinist purges, the Great Terror, started. His father, his father's two sisters and a brother were arrested. His father tried to commit suicide while in prison but survived and later got out. His father's aforementioned three siblings all perished. When Minsk was captured by the Germans in 1941 it was the turn of Tsypkin's grandmother, another aunt and two little cousins to die, murdered in a ghetto. He and his father, however, managed to escape from Minsk with the help of his father's former patient. Later, Tsypkin himself became a doctor like his parents.He married and had a son, Mikhail.
He had always loved literature and the arts and at some time toyed with the idea of writing full time or becoming a film director. But he was afraid he may not be able to support his family with any of these careers. So he stuck with being a doctor, devoting much of his time on research.
He did manage to write some poems, two novellas and this one, his longest. But none of these was ever published in Russia during his lifetime.
His son Mikhail and the latter's wife were granted exit visas in 1977 and they migrated to the United States. Two years after, Tsypkin himself, his wife and mother applied for exit visas but were denied. The emigration of his son to the United States had caused him a lot of trouble: his salary (the only source of livelihood for the family) was cut by 75% and he was treated as a pariah in the research institute ran by the government where he worked. He was trappped.
It was at this period (1977 to 1980) that he wrote this novel. After it was finished, and with no prospect of having it published in the country, he managed to smuggle a copy of the manuscript out through the help of a journalist friend who had managed to leave early in 1981. In September that year, he, his wife and his mother re-applied for exit visas. The following month his mother died, aged 86. A week later the denial of their application came.
In early March 1982 he was told by the head of the Moscow visa office that he will never be allowed to emigrate anywhere. Days later, his son Mikhail, who was then studying in Harvard, told him that this novel will be published, on installment, at a Russian-emigre weekly based in New York. The first of these installments appeared on 13 March 1982. A week later, or on 20 March 1982, Tsypkin died of a heart attack. It was his 56th birthday. He never got to see any of his work in print or came to know of the readers' reaction to any of his literary output. How would he have reacted to Susan Sontag's introduction here where she gushed that she would include this novel "among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century's worth of fiction and para-fiction" we will never know.
This is a part-historical, part-imaginary and part-autobiographical fan blog written long before the age of the internet and using, not a laptop, but a World War II-vintage Erika typewriter. The object of Tsypkin's fanboyism was the only type of idol the KGB then will not suspect you of hatching a plot to destabilize the regime: a Russian author dead for about a century with an apolitical body of work: Fyodor Dostoevsky.
A true fan he was, for only a true fan would do what Tsypkin did before actually wiriting this novel amidst the hopelessness and tribulations of his sorry life. First, he scoured the libraries and archives to do research on Dostoevsky. Then, camera in hand, he went to Leningrad to take photos of places which had a part in Dostoevsky's life AND that of the characters in his novels. That is why in between paragraphs of this novel the reader will be occasionally confronted with images of streets, buildings, walls, holes, stairways, rooms and the like all without any human beings in them as if even in these images of places Tsypkin did not want anyone but Dostoevsky and his characters to magically appear and re-enact the incidents of their lives.
It seemed a historical fact that in the summer of 1867 Dostoevsky and his young wife Anna travelled across Russia to Baden-Baden (then a popular resort town). But his anti-semitism, his gambling addiction, his compulsive almsgiving, his use of swimming as a metaphor for the sex act--were these still facts or were they just imagined by Tyspkin? (sorry, but I read my Dostoevsky more than 30 years ago).The scenes here go from Dostoevsky's time to Tyspkin's own time in the 1970s as if the century which separates these times had been compressed to make the past and the present happen simultaneously through the medium of this novel. Tyspkin was like an Elvis Presley impersonator dressing up like him and singing his songs to relive what had long been gone.
This is one desperate longing expressed through prose.
April 29, 2023
A Book in Need of Repeated Resurrection
Wonderful book, if by "wonderful" you mean claustrophobic, smelly, compulsive, unrewarding, culturally isolated, and erudite beyond any point. This is a slightly fictional recreation of a summer Dostoevsky spent in Baden-Baden, written by a Russian author and Dostoevsky maniac (what is politely known as an "independent scholar") who is otherwise unknown, and now long dead.
Susan Sontag attempts to raise this Lazarus of a manuscript, but it is really all about being dead: Dostoevsky's own life, on the edge of disaster; Tsypkin's life, cut off from the literary world and enslaved to his obsession; Sontag's literary resurrection project, doomed, now that she is dead, to the endless catalog of well-meaning introductions.
Stupendous book.
Wonderful book, if by "wonderful" you mean claustrophobic, smelly, compulsive, unrewarding, culturally isolated, and erudite beyond any point. This is a slightly fictional recreation of a summer Dostoevsky spent in Baden-Baden, written by a Russian author and Dostoevsky maniac (what is politely known as an "independent scholar") who is otherwise unknown, and now long dead.
Susan Sontag attempts to raise this Lazarus of a manuscript, but it is really all about being dead: Dostoevsky's own life, on the edge of disaster; Tsypkin's life, cut off from the literary world and enslaved to his obsession; Sontag's literary resurrection project, doomed, now that she is dead, to the endless catalog of well-meaning introductions.
Stupendous book.
November 1, 2018
Acaba Susan Sontag bu kitabı sahiplenmese ne olurdu? Sontag’ın önsözde belirttiği hususlar çerçevesinde okudum ama zor bitirdim. Yazar tıp doktoruymuş ve 100’ün üzerinde bilimsel makale yazmış, bu alışkanlığını edebiyat denemesinde de aynen korumuş bence. Yavan ve karışık bir üslup. Cümleler uzun ve her cümlede birkaç tane “tire� (-) işareti var. Bırakın akıcılığı zorluk için kasıtlı yapılmış gibi. Konu da anlaşılması zor ve bilmece gibi, Dosteyevski’leri anlatıyor, arada kendisi de katılıyor. Muhalif bir yazar sansürden kurtulmak için böyle yapmış galiba ortaya tahammülü zor bir okuma metni çıkmış. Kısaca benim tarzımda değil.
May 29, 2016
Seemingly everyone who reads this says "How could such a good book be scarcely known?" (and the circumstances under which it was published at all are remarkable).
The unnamed narrator, basically Tsypkin himself, is taking a train from Moscow to Leningrad in the late 70s in winter - it is dark and cold, the sodium lights of each town flash by. He is reading the "Diary" of Dostoevsky's second wife, Anna, and uses this to retell two episodes from their life together - a summer in Baden-Baden just after they were married, scarcely idyllic because Dostoevsky's well-documented gambling obsession dominates their days, and a quick flash-forward to his deathbed. There's also an interlude on Pushkin, an aside pondering Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism and a few more topics.
Tsypkin (and his narrator) was from a family of accomplished doctors, cultivated and having a great literary enthusiasm. The state of Russian Jews having progressed from the outright murderousness of the Stalin era to a constant state of civil and professional discrimination, the book closes with him staying with an aunt in one of those formerly grand now-crumbling apartments, shared with several other families, because he has traveled to Leningrad to continue his research on Dostoevsky.
His prose style is exhilarating and remarkable and almost unprecedented - every sentence is a long paragraph and weaves together four threads. Susan Sontag's introduction (a big reminder that I am way behind in reading her), says he could be compared to Thomas Bernhard or W. G. Sebald but observes there's almost no chance he could have been familiar with either.
The book was published in New York in 1982 in a Russian emigre literary journal, the manuscript having been smuggled out of the USSR. Tsypkin's decision to give his blessing to his son and daughter-in-law emigrating to California a couple of years prior effectively ended his professional life and scotched his own requests to leave - he had already declined to attempt to publish any of his two decades of literary work as samizdat for fear of actually going to jail, so the fact that the book can be read is some kind of victory.
The unnamed narrator, basically Tsypkin himself, is taking a train from Moscow to Leningrad in the late 70s in winter - it is dark and cold, the sodium lights of each town flash by. He is reading the "Diary" of Dostoevsky's second wife, Anna, and uses this to retell two episodes from their life together - a summer in Baden-Baden just after they were married, scarcely idyllic because Dostoevsky's well-documented gambling obsession dominates their days, and a quick flash-forward to his deathbed. There's also an interlude on Pushkin, an aside pondering Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism and a few more topics.
Tsypkin (and his narrator) was from a family of accomplished doctors, cultivated and having a great literary enthusiasm. The state of Russian Jews having progressed from the outright murderousness of the Stalin era to a constant state of civil and professional discrimination, the book closes with him staying with an aunt in one of those formerly grand now-crumbling apartments, shared with several other families, because he has traveled to Leningrad to continue his research on Dostoevsky.
His prose style is exhilarating and remarkable and almost unprecedented - every sentence is a long paragraph and weaves together four threads. Susan Sontag's introduction (a big reminder that I am way behind in reading her), says he could be compared to Thomas Bernhard or W. G. Sebald but observes there's almost no chance he could have been familiar with either.
The book was published in New York in 1982 in a Russian emigre literary journal, the manuscript having been smuggled out of the USSR. Tsypkin's decision to give his blessing to his son and daughter-in-law emigrating to California a couple of years prior effectively ended his professional life and scotched his own requests to leave - he had already declined to attempt to publish any of his two decades of literary work as samizdat for fear of actually going to jail, so the fact that the book can be read is some kind of victory.
August 1, 2024
I was so looking forward to this. At least I had some background on Dostoevsky having recently read . I thought I would get more, but from a slightly different perspective. My hopes were high, but reality was a very different thing.
The edition I read is 146 pages. The text isn't separated with chapters. I didn't count them, but I'm guessing there are no more than 150-160 paragraphs in the entire novel. Toward the end, I know that one paragraph was 5 pages long and another was 4 pages. Each paragraph is only one long sentence. Did the author buy just so many periods and had to use them sparingly? He did use plenty of commas and dashes and even a semi-colon every now and then. There is no dialogue, although every once in awhile the author referenced something someone said, so there were also a very few quotation marks thrown in, but for whatever reason is unknown.
No, this isn't stream of consciousness. The author seemed incapable of sticking to one thought or subject in these paragraph long sentences. It was at the end that I thought of the best description: logorrhea. I have known that word for maybe 60 years and this is the first occasion where I think it fits precisely.
I will find a 2nd star for this, but I might be feeling generous only because I was stubborn enough to finish it.
The edition I read is 146 pages. The text isn't separated with chapters. I didn't count them, but I'm guessing there are no more than 150-160 paragraphs in the entire novel. Toward the end, I know that one paragraph was 5 pages long and another was 4 pages. Each paragraph is only one long sentence. Did the author buy just so many periods and had to use them sparingly? He did use plenty of commas and dashes and even a semi-colon every now and then. There is no dialogue, although every once in awhile the author referenced something someone said, so there were also a very few quotation marks thrown in, but for whatever reason is unknown.
No, this isn't stream of consciousness. The author seemed incapable of sticking to one thought or subject in these paragraph long sentences. It was at the end that I thought of the best description: logorrhea. I have known that word for maybe 60 years and this is the first occasion where I think it fits precisely.
I will find a 2nd star for this, but I might be feeling generous only because I was stubborn enough to finish it.
January 18, 2022
"I was on a train, traveling by day, but it was winter-time -- late December, the very depths -- and to add to it the train was heading north -- to Leningrad -- so it was quickly darkening on the other side of the windows -- bright lights of Moscow stations flashing into view and vanishing again behind me like the scattering of some invisible hand . . ."(Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden-Baden, p 1).
So begins a literary doppleganger in the sense that there are two narratives, one of Leningrad and today and Leonid Tsypkin, and one of Petersburg and yesterday and Fedya and Anna. Tsypkin's novel mesmerizes with two stories that enthrall with emotion and truth. A taut gem of historical fiction that gets to the heart of Dostoevsky and appeals to all who have loved his work. The story clings to the real events of Dostoevsky's life torn from the pages of Anna's Diary and other sources that intertwine with Tsypkin's own modern journey. Among the themes of the book are those of all great Russian literature as seen through the painful experiences of Dostoevsky's own vices and the dreamlike desires of the narrator.
I was fascinated as the novel flowed back and forth between the first person I reflecting the narrator's memories and the third person scenes of fedya and Anna -- between past and present. The taut lyricism that keeps the novel short, even through the use of long sentences is difficult to compare with any other novel I have read. However, in its uniqueness I would place it with Rilke's Notebooks of Malt Laurids Brigge. Different in many ways but just as unique in its ability to haunt one's memory. Sadly, the author did not live to see the English-language publication of this novel. Like other great Russian authors he worked in the medical profession, but he left us a gift based on his passion for literature.
So begins a literary doppleganger in the sense that there are two narratives, one of Leningrad and today and Leonid Tsypkin, and one of Petersburg and yesterday and Fedya and Anna. Tsypkin's novel mesmerizes with two stories that enthrall with emotion and truth. A taut gem of historical fiction that gets to the heart of Dostoevsky and appeals to all who have loved his work. The story clings to the real events of Dostoevsky's life torn from the pages of Anna's Diary and other sources that intertwine with Tsypkin's own modern journey. Among the themes of the book are those of all great Russian literature as seen through the painful experiences of Dostoevsky's own vices and the dreamlike desires of the narrator.
I was fascinated as the novel flowed back and forth between the first person I reflecting the narrator's memories and the third person scenes of fedya and Anna -- between past and present. The taut lyricism that keeps the novel short, even through the use of long sentences is difficult to compare with any other novel I have read. However, in its uniqueness I would place it with Rilke's Notebooks of Malt Laurids Brigge. Different in many ways but just as unique in its ability to haunt one's memory. Sadly, the author did not live to see the English-language publication of this novel. Like other great Russian authors he worked in the medical profession, but he left us a gift based on his passion for literature.
August 27, 2022
3.5 stars. An interesting, original, short, character based novel with a double narrative. The story mostly follows the lives of the newly married Dostoyevskys. The Dostoyevskys are on a journey to Baden-Baden. Fyodor’s gambling addiction is described and his wife, Anna Grigoryevna, is very supporting. Occasionally the unnamed narrator, a Jew, describes his interest in Dostoyevsky. This unnamed narrator is living in a time years after Dostoyevsky has died. The point I found interesting is that Dostoyevsky’s kindness and humanity to others did not extend to the Jews. The unnamed Jewish narrator asks why, given Dostoyevsky’s animosity to Jews, that the unnamed narrator and his Jewish associates all hold Dostoyevsky’s novels in high esteem.
This book was first published in 1981.
This book was first published in 1981.
January 9, 2016
This is a strange sort of novel, written by one who never lived to see it published, but withal one of the greatest works produced during the Soviet era. Picture a doctor who is obsessed with the life of Dostoyevsky, who sees his own life as if it were in lock step with that of earlier writer. He recreates his life, and that of his second wife Anna Grigor'yevna, so vividly that I will have a difficult time unlinking it from this work.
Picture this memory of Anna Grigor'yevna's while her husband lies dying:
is such a good book that it makes me want to re-read what Dostoyevsky I have already read and maybe include some of the obscure ones I haven't, such as The Insulted and the Injured and A Raw Youth.
Picture this memory of Anna Grigor'yevna's while her husband lies dying:
[S]he was on her knees before her dying husband, her husband, Fedya, who used to come to her every evening to say goodnight, used to write long, passionate letters to her from Bad Ems, where he would travel every summer to take the cure, who used to cause jealous scenes at readings of his works whenever she exchanged a quick word with anyone or he thought she was looking at someone, and then they would walk home separately, but he would not be able to keep it up, and he would catch up with her and ask her to forgive him, saying that if she refused, then he would throw himself on his knees before her there and then—and she would forgive him, and they would walk on together—and supporting her carefully by the arm, he would look into her eyes and then, leaving her for a moment, would dash into a shop and buy her some sweetmeats—nuts, raisins, bon-bons—and when they arrived home they would drink tea and he would produce the sweetmeats for her and the children, but if she had a cold, he would get irritated and ask her to stop sneezing, and this made her laugh, and in the end he would start to laugh as well.Did you notice that this is all one sentence with phrases strung together by ands or other conjunctions. The translation by Roger and Angela Keys is so spot on that 's sesquipedalian sentences would flow like a river in flood.
is such a good book that it makes me want to re-read what Dostoyevsky I have already read and maybe include some of the obscure ones I haven't, such as The Insulted and the Injured and A Raw Youth.
January 20, 2023
Tsypkin is blending two stories: within the framework in which he reports about his own journey from Moscow to Petersburg, he tells about Dostojevski travelling with his wife Anna to Switzerland and Germany especially Baden-Baden. The Dostojevski tale is basically borrowed from the diary of Anna.
One of the main themes of this novel you could � abstractly � describe as: it is good to keep a fair distance between the artist and his art. The artist Dostojevski, as described in Tsypkin’s (only) novel, has some character features, like his gambling and his antisemitism, that are not considered positive. On the other hand, Tsypkin shows a great admiration for Dostojevski’s literary work, spreading around in context many names Dostojevski protagonists. Certainly D’s antisemitism puzzles Tsypkin, extra understandable because of Tsypkin being a jew himself.
Concerning the style it really is an easy read when you consider the hyphen as the ending of a sentence. But for maintaining a steady reading rhythm you would better read a whole paragraph in one continuous flow. Dostojevski and Tsypkin-himself take turns as is recognisable by the third person narrative and the first person narrative respectively.
I find it difficult to valuate this novel. Tsypkin’s style brings a special rhythm, even smoothness if you wish, but hard to connect it with my starring. About the contence: the gambling scenes and the scene at the end of the novel are exquisite writing, of which I hope and expect that there is more Tsypkin in it than Anna Grigorjevna. Several times Dostojevski meets colleagues like Turgenjev, coincidentally; those are written with great atmosphere. Tsypkin has wrought something extraordinairy, partly and especially because literary writing wasn’t his profession. He brought me closer to Dostojevski, his idol. (3,5*) JM
One of the main themes of this novel you could � abstractly � describe as: it is good to keep a fair distance between the artist and his art. The artist Dostojevski, as described in Tsypkin’s (only) novel, has some character features, like his gambling and his antisemitism, that are not considered positive. On the other hand, Tsypkin shows a great admiration for Dostojevski’s literary work, spreading around in context many names Dostojevski protagonists. Certainly D’s antisemitism puzzles Tsypkin, extra understandable because of Tsypkin being a jew himself.
Concerning the style it really is an easy read when you consider the hyphen as the ending of a sentence. But for maintaining a steady reading rhythm you would better read a whole paragraph in one continuous flow. Dostojevski and Tsypkin-himself take turns as is recognisable by the third person narrative and the first person narrative respectively.
I find it difficult to valuate this novel. Tsypkin’s style brings a special rhythm, even smoothness if you wish, but hard to connect it with my starring. About the contence: the gambling scenes and the scene at the end of the novel are exquisite writing, of which I hope and expect that there is more Tsypkin in it than Anna Grigorjevna. Several times Dostojevski meets colleagues like Turgenjev, coincidentally; those are written with great atmosphere. Tsypkin has wrought something extraordinairy, partly and especially because literary writing wasn’t his profession. He brought me closer to Dostojevski, his idol. (3,5*) JM
December 21, 2019
Nice story, mostly about the last 15 years in the life of Russian author Dostojewski. It evokes the journey the writer made with his second wife to the German spa Baden-Baden, around 1867, and in addition also the story of his last days and dead in 1881. The whole character of Dostojewski is presented: his gambling addiction, his paranoïd inferiority complex, his epilepsy, his disdain for germans en jews, etc. The focus is on his very variable relation with his wife Anna.
This story is intermixed with that of the author (Tsypkin himself), travelling by train from Moskou to Leningrad (now St-Petersburg), and his visit to building Dostojewski lived in. Tsypkin is obsessed by Dostojewski; his story is based mainly on the diary of the widow Anna (and thus very coloured). He writes in very, very long sentences, reminding me of latin "periods".
Nice, but only for those who have a thorough knowledge of the life and works of Dostojewski.
This story is intermixed with that of the author (Tsypkin himself), travelling by train from Moskou to Leningrad (now St-Petersburg), and his visit to building Dostojewski lived in. Tsypkin is obsessed by Dostojewski; his story is based mainly on the diary of the widow Anna (and thus very coloured). He writes in very, very long sentences, reminding me of latin "periods".
Nice, but only for those who have a thorough knowledge of the life and works of Dostojewski.
September 26, 2020
Apie Dostojevskį kiek kitaip, nuvainikuojant, parodant jį kaip smulkmenišką, prasilošusį neurotiką, panašų į Woody Alleno filmų personažus. Perskaityti tikrai verta.
August 19, 2020
Paras kesäkirjani 2020. Runollista, nostalgista ja eleganttia venäläistä proosaa. 4,5 tähteä. Tämä jos mikä on kadonnut klassikko.
Kirja kertoo Fjodor ja Anna Dostojevskin (toisen vaimon) kesästä Baden Badenissa, satakunta vuotta myöhemmin Dostojevskejä tutkivasta ja heistä unelmoivasta Leonid Tsypkinistä ja siinä välissä kirjailija Dostojevskin kuolemasta.
Kaikki tämä nivoutuu yhteen monimutkaisina, mutta intuitiivisesti ymmärrettävinä, aikakerroksina ja loputtoman pitkinä virkkeinä. Jos pidät W. G. Sebaldista, ihastut tähän kirjaan.
Tarinassa on paljon rumuutta ja hulluutta. Fjodor kärsii pakonomaisesta peliriippuvuudesta, vainoharhaisuudesta ja sairaskohtauksista. Dostojevskit olivat antisemitistejä - pitääkö tämä tosiaan paikkaansa? -, mikä pienentää pariskunnan inhimillistä hohtoa suuresti.
Tsypkin itse ei saanut elinaikanaan julkaistuksi tätä upeaa kirjaa - ja se on riipaisevaa. Tsypkin oli aika lailla yhden kirjan ihme, mikä käy ilmi kirjaan myös ihastuneen Susan Sontagin alkupuheesta.
Erityinen kirja, erityinen kirjailija.
Kirja kertoo Fjodor ja Anna Dostojevskin (toisen vaimon) kesästä Baden Badenissa, satakunta vuotta myöhemmin Dostojevskejä tutkivasta ja heistä unelmoivasta Leonid Tsypkinistä ja siinä välissä kirjailija Dostojevskin kuolemasta.
Kaikki tämä nivoutuu yhteen monimutkaisina, mutta intuitiivisesti ymmärrettävinä, aikakerroksina ja loputtoman pitkinä virkkeinä. Jos pidät W. G. Sebaldista, ihastut tähän kirjaan.
Tarinassa on paljon rumuutta ja hulluutta. Fjodor kärsii pakonomaisesta peliriippuvuudesta, vainoharhaisuudesta ja sairaskohtauksista. Dostojevskit olivat antisemitistejä - pitääkö tämä tosiaan paikkaansa? -, mikä pienentää pariskunnan inhimillistä hohtoa suuresti.
Tsypkin itse ei saanut elinaikanaan julkaistuksi tätä upeaa kirjaa - ja se on riipaisevaa. Tsypkin oli aika lailla yhden kirjan ihme, mikä käy ilmi kirjaan myös ihastuneen Susan Sontagin alkupuheesta.
Erityinen kirja, erityinen kirjailija.
February 4, 2025
bu kadar editörlükten yoksun bir çevirinin basılması -hem de iki farkı yayınevi tarafından farklı farklı zamanlarda aynı çeviri olmak üzere- gerçekten şayan-ı hayret.
July 29, 2013
As many of you who follow me on ŷ probably know by now, Dostoyevsky is my favorite author, and I am incredibly passionate about reading and analyzing his works. Thus, I am often wary about fictitious portrayals of him (for an excellent interpretation, I strongly recommend watching the Russian TV series, "Достоевский: Жизнь, Полная Страстей"-- "Dostoyevsky: A Life Full of Passion"). I had recently read J.M. Coetzee's "The Master of Petersburg", and found it overall disappointing and unfairly harsh in its treatment of its central character-- Dostoyevsky. Tsypkin's "Summer in Baden-Baden" is, unlike Coetzee's novel, based on true events, and highly historically accurate. It is a narrative about Fyodor Dostoyevsky's life, mainly focusing on his years abroad in Germany with his wife, Anna, shortly after their marriage. But it is also a novel about Tsypkin himself, who, while reading Anna's "Reminiscences" on a train voyage, imagines Anna and Fyodor on their own journey nearly a century earlier.
Tsypkin, while not entirely unflawed in his portrayal of Dostoyevsky, nonetheless excels at making his version of the author seem genuine. He agonizes through Dostoyevsky's long battle with gambling addiction (which he finally gave up after the birth of his and Anna's daughter, Lyubov) and the toll it takes on Dostoyevsky as well as those around him. Tsypkin's peculiar style-- run-on sentences which form entire paragraphs-- while excessive at some points, works powerfully here. Readers feel the frantic pain of obsession along with Tsypkin's Dostoyevsky as he desperately attempts to achieve some semblance of control even as his life spirals helplessly downward-- and even, perhaps, as he enjoys that fall.
The Dostoyevsky portrayed in "Summer in Baden-Baden" is also a man constantly haunted by the suffering he endured as a political prisoner in Siberia. At last, a fictional portrayal of Dostoyevsky which gives proper weight to this issue! Tsypkin perhaps takes historical liberties in believing that Dostoyevsky was flogged while in prison, but such an occurrence could very well have happened. As in Tsypkin's portrayal, the real Dostoyevsky rarely spoke about his prison experiences. Instead, they often manifested in cruel outbursts toward others. This is one of the first works I have encountered which properly grasps the fact that, while still worthy of blame, Dostoyevsky's losses of temper were often not born of cruelty for its own sake. Rather, they were the physical manifestation of deep and undiagnosed psychological wounds.
And Tsypkin gives to Anna as well the complex portrait she deserves. In the pages of his novel, she is not merely a submissive pushover. Rather, she undergoes an intense transformation throughout the novel, and matures just as she does in the pages of her "Reminiscences". At first a good-hearted but inexperienced young woman, she unwittingly enables her husband's gambling addiction by giving him money and endlessly forgiving him for losing it. Nonetheless, by the final scene of Tsypkin's novel, readers glimpse the much more self-assured Anna who took charge of the family's finances and thus allowed Dostoyevsky to become the great writer we know today.
In its final scene, the novel skips ahead many years to the night of Dostoyevsky's death in 1881 (at only age 59, from a lung hemorrhage). It is here the Tsypkin's full potential as a writer is realized, in heartbreakingly beautiful prose (I actually teared up a bit): "[Anna] realized with horror that this was actually happening, and that she was on her knees before her dying husband, Fedya, who used to come to her every evening to say goodnight, used to write long, passionate and incoherent letters to her... if she had a cold, he would get irritated and ask her to stop sneezing, and this would make her laugh, and in the end he would start to laugh as well" (139). In my opinion, Tsypkin's great triumph in "Summer in Baden-Baden" can be seen in the deeply human characters he creates. He is sympathetic in his narrative, understanding that although our pasts may mark us, they do not define who we can become. His Dostoyevsky is imperfect but kindhearted in the end, an often-troubled soul who managed nonetheless to transcend his own difficulties and prejudices and to make the world a better place. Tsypkin, like Anna, manages by the end of the novel to care for Dostoyevsky as a human being,rather than as an untouchable idol.
Tsypkin, while not entirely unflawed in his portrayal of Dostoyevsky, nonetheless excels at making his version of the author seem genuine. He agonizes through Dostoyevsky's long battle with gambling addiction (which he finally gave up after the birth of his and Anna's daughter, Lyubov) and the toll it takes on Dostoyevsky as well as those around him. Tsypkin's peculiar style-- run-on sentences which form entire paragraphs-- while excessive at some points, works powerfully here. Readers feel the frantic pain of obsession along with Tsypkin's Dostoyevsky as he desperately attempts to achieve some semblance of control even as his life spirals helplessly downward-- and even, perhaps, as he enjoys that fall.
The Dostoyevsky portrayed in "Summer in Baden-Baden" is also a man constantly haunted by the suffering he endured as a political prisoner in Siberia. At last, a fictional portrayal of Dostoyevsky which gives proper weight to this issue! Tsypkin perhaps takes historical liberties in believing that Dostoyevsky was flogged while in prison, but such an occurrence could very well have happened. As in Tsypkin's portrayal, the real Dostoyevsky rarely spoke about his prison experiences. Instead, they often manifested in cruel outbursts toward others. This is one of the first works I have encountered which properly grasps the fact that, while still worthy of blame, Dostoyevsky's losses of temper were often not born of cruelty for its own sake. Rather, they were the physical manifestation of deep and undiagnosed psychological wounds.
And Tsypkin gives to Anna as well the complex portrait she deserves. In the pages of his novel, she is not merely a submissive pushover. Rather, she undergoes an intense transformation throughout the novel, and matures just as she does in the pages of her "Reminiscences". At first a good-hearted but inexperienced young woman, she unwittingly enables her husband's gambling addiction by giving him money and endlessly forgiving him for losing it. Nonetheless, by the final scene of Tsypkin's novel, readers glimpse the much more self-assured Anna who took charge of the family's finances and thus allowed Dostoyevsky to become the great writer we know today.
In its final scene, the novel skips ahead many years to the night of Dostoyevsky's death in 1881 (at only age 59, from a lung hemorrhage). It is here the Tsypkin's full potential as a writer is realized, in heartbreakingly beautiful prose (I actually teared up a bit): "[Anna] realized with horror that this was actually happening, and that she was on her knees before her dying husband, Fedya, who used to come to her every evening to say goodnight, used to write long, passionate and incoherent letters to her... if she had a cold, he would get irritated and ask her to stop sneezing, and this would make her laugh, and in the end he would start to laugh as well" (139). In my opinion, Tsypkin's great triumph in "Summer in Baden-Baden" can be seen in the deeply human characters he creates. He is sympathetic in his narrative, understanding that although our pasts may mark us, they do not define who we can become. His Dostoyevsky is imperfect but kindhearted in the end, an often-troubled soul who managed nonetheless to transcend his own difficulties and prejudices and to make the world a better place. Tsypkin, like Anna, manages by the end of the novel to care for Dostoyevsky as a human being,rather than as an untouchable idol.
February 5, 2024
If one must talk about Russia in some literary capacity, one must do so from the vantage point of 19th century demigods, 20th century poor tortured fools, or some 21st century synthesis of the two. To find this on the 1001 BBYD list espoused by no less than the likes of Sontag is no surprise, then, as one writer contending with capitalistic antisemitism introduces another writer confronting the communistic version while also presenting a writer whom, it could be easily said, has served, does serve, and will serve as a cornerstone for that millennia old breed of systematic dehumanization, least until academia is treated as the cornerstone of ethics that it is, rather than as the hobby of the rich, the gladiator ring of the bourgeoisie, and the fripperies of the working class. In terms of what's actually going on in this work, there's your stream of consciousness, run on sentences, and portraits of a specific type of isolated masculinity that turns all men into degrading Father, all women into the beloved yet betraying Mother, and the rest of the world into the sort of benighted freak that has outlawed duels and has thus deprived the main character of any chance of honorable closure. In short, tediously predictable in its "Western" fireworks and bait and switch pathos, and while my interest in reading the multiple works of Dostoevsky left on my TBR has not abated (indeed, I delighted in recognizing certain references, if partially due to it being a reprieve from the slog that is creativity cringing under the foot of the state, whether communist or capitalist), Tsypkin has effectively cured me of even the slightest bit of indulgence in the posthumous cult of this particular tortured artist. Others may felt differently, but once you've dealt with one aged man lashing out and then piteously begging for forgiveness for decades on end, you've dealt with them all, and life's too short to puzzle over whether the artistry that came (from it? or despite it) was worth it.
September 24, 2012
Leonid Tsypkin was a researcher, an author of over 100 scientific papers, by nighttime a pathologist and a writer who wrote for the pleasure and love of literature alone, literally for the drawer. During his lifetime his readership didn´t include more than family members and some of his son´s friends from University. He was not associated with any of the Soviet dissident circles, the samizdat underground movement and surely not an officially recognized writer. Fortunately Tsypkin managed somehow to let his manuscript be smuggled out of the country and one week before his death at the age of 56 it was published in serial form in a newspaper in the United States. He never saw any of his pages in print.
This, should I call it a novel, a travel-diary, a memoir?, is undoubtedly the product of art but even more so it is a highly accurate biography of Fyodor Mikhailovich. Not a biography in the strict sense of the word with dates and whereabouts but a biography of the soul, of the mind of a great writer, even as one can expect with a high portion of fiction or as Susan Sontag wrote in her marvellous, essay like, introduction: "Nothing is invented. Everything is invented."
Of course this is not a literary study of Dostoyevsky, as we are dealing with a literary work, the novel, the characters of which the author, Dostoyevsky, his wife Anna Grigor´yevna, and some more people, operate in a dark and chilly St.Petersburg, or in the summer of Baden, Basel and the intermediate Tver, all of them literally valid and in fact meticously studied, in particular the spirit and gloomy atmosphere of Dostoyevsky´s life and of Tsypkin´s.
In the Soviet Union of the 1970s, our narrator who is Tsypkin and not Tsypkin, makes a journey by train en route from Moscow to Leningrad, where he arrives at the end of the book and visits the Dostoyevsky-museum. He flips through the diary of Anna Grigor´yevna, Dostoyevsky´s second wife, immersed in reading
"(...)I took from the suitcase in the rack above me a book I had already started to read in Moscow and which I had brought especially for the journey to Leningrad, and I opened it at the page held by a bookmark decorated with Chinese characters and a delicate oriental drawing - and in my heart of hearts I had no intention of returning the book borrowed from my aunt who possessed a large library, and because it was very flimsy and almost falling apart, I had taken it to a binder who trimmed the pages so that they lay together evenly and enclosed the whole thing in a strong cover which he pasted the book´s original title-page - the Diary of Anna Grigor´yevna Dostoyevskaya produced by some liberal publishing-house still possible at that time - either ´Landmarks´, or ´New Life´, or one of those - with dates given in both Old Style and New Style and words and whole phrases in German and French without translation and the de rigueur ´Mme´ added with all the dilligence of a grammar-school pupil - a transliteration of the shorthand notes which she had taken during the summer following her marriage abroad."
while she recalls their journey in the opposite direction a century before our narrator, which will lead them to Germany, a Summer in Baden-Baden, and Dresden. The novel is set mainly on these two narrative threads, but always there are the flashbacks, memories and impressions. We sense something of the difficult and complex character of the Russian writer, about his gambling, his memories of humilitation in the prison camp and his great love for his wife - but also a mixture of passion, anger, demands and rejection.
In an almost surprisingly subtle and carefully but manically, obsessively crafted manner the author describes the process of being, of imagining Dostoyevsky, with trivias, metaphors, his rise and his fall, a capital wounded person, jealous, selfish, abusive as to the last detail, not so much a tragic figure but pathetic, a reckless gambler, neurotic; with all the subleties of the mind, his mentality, how Fedya is walking down the street, creating in his fevered imagination scenarios of victory and vengeance, of elevation and forgiveness.
Tsypkin reveals himself as a master of the word and the pen: there is a strong interdependence of time, of past and present tense, of third and first person narrative and the single sentences are exaggerated up to two or three pages without any breaks or paragraphs or time to breath, which makes it a frustratingly slow, exhausting and demanding read. He skillfully moves between the two temporal main levels, pushes additionally alot of background info in-between just to move forward again to the actual here and now and the lines of what is and of what was are blurred almost to extinction.
Jose Saramago and Thomas Bernhard come to mind, two writers who are similar stylistically but Tsypkin had, as he was never allowed to leave his country, no chance of reading and there is no proof that he was even aware of their literary achievements. His style is totally his own witout any notable outside influence.
The fully enjoyment comes probably only under one condition: the reader should have read Dostoyevsky´s major works up to "Crime and Punishment" as there are many references from Tsypkin to them. Many allusions require a certain knowledge of the literary world of Czarist Russia, of Dostoyevsky´s relationship with Turgenev and Tolstoy, also of the Soviet Times Solzhenitsyn is there without being named...
This, should I call it a novel, a travel-diary, a memoir?, is undoubtedly the product of art but even more so it is a highly accurate biography of Fyodor Mikhailovich. Not a biography in the strict sense of the word with dates and whereabouts but a biography of the soul, of the mind of a great writer, even as one can expect with a high portion of fiction or as Susan Sontag wrote in her marvellous, essay like, introduction: "Nothing is invented. Everything is invented."
Of course this is not a literary study of Dostoyevsky, as we are dealing with a literary work, the novel, the characters of which the author, Dostoyevsky, his wife Anna Grigor´yevna, and some more people, operate in a dark and chilly St.Petersburg, or in the summer of Baden, Basel and the intermediate Tver, all of them literally valid and in fact meticously studied, in particular the spirit and gloomy atmosphere of Dostoyevsky´s life and of Tsypkin´s.
In the Soviet Union of the 1970s, our narrator who is Tsypkin and not Tsypkin, makes a journey by train en route from Moscow to Leningrad, where he arrives at the end of the book and visits the Dostoyevsky-museum. He flips through the diary of Anna Grigor´yevna, Dostoyevsky´s second wife, immersed in reading
"(...)I took from the suitcase in the rack above me a book I had already started to read in Moscow and which I had brought especially for the journey to Leningrad, and I opened it at the page held by a bookmark decorated with Chinese characters and a delicate oriental drawing - and in my heart of hearts I had no intention of returning the book borrowed from my aunt who possessed a large library, and because it was very flimsy and almost falling apart, I had taken it to a binder who trimmed the pages so that they lay together evenly and enclosed the whole thing in a strong cover which he pasted the book´s original title-page - the Diary of Anna Grigor´yevna Dostoyevskaya produced by some liberal publishing-house still possible at that time - either ´Landmarks´, or ´New Life´, or one of those - with dates given in both Old Style and New Style and words and whole phrases in German and French without translation and the de rigueur ´Mme´ added with all the dilligence of a grammar-school pupil - a transliteration of the shorthand notes which she had taken during the summer following her marriage abroad."
while she recalls their journey in the opposite direction a century before our narrator, which will lead them to Germany, a Summer in Baden-Baden, and Dresden. The novel is set mainly on these two narrative threads, but always there are the flashbacks, memories and impressions. We sense something of the difficult and complex character of the Russian writer, about his gambling, his memories of humilitation in the prison camp and his great love for his wife - but also a mixture of passion, anger, demands and rejection.
In an almost surprisingly subtle and carefully but manically, obsessively crafted manner the author describes the process of being, of imagining Dostoyevsky, with trivias, metaphors, his rise and his fall, a capital wounded person, jealous, selfish, abusive as to the last detail, not so much a tragic figure but pathetic, a reckless gambler, neurotic; with all the subleties of the mind, his mentality, how Fedya is walking down the street, creating in his fevered imagination scenarios of victory and vengeance, of elevation and forgiveness.
Tsypkin reveals himself as a master of the word and the pen: there is a strong interdependence of time, of past and present tense, of third and first person narrative and the single sentences are exaggerated up to two or three pages without any breaks or paragraphs or time to breath, which makes it a frustratingly slow, exhausting and demanding read. He skillfully moves between the two temporal main levels, pushes additionally alot of background info in-between just to move forward again to the actual here and now and the lines of what is and of what was are blurred almost to extinction.
Jose Saramago and Thomas Bernhard come to mind, two writers who are similar stylistically but Tsypkin had, as he was never allowed to leave his country, no chance of reading and there is no proof that he was even aware of their literary achievements. His style is totally his own witout any notable outside influence.
The fully enjoyment comes probably only under one condition: the reader should have read Dostoyevsky´s major works up to "Crime and Punishment" as there are many references from Tsypkin to them. Many allusions require a certain knowledge of the literary world of Czarist Russia, of Dostoyevsky´s relationship with Turgenev and Tolstoy, also of the Soviet Times Solzhenitsyn is there without being named...
April 13, 2025
rip dostoyevsky you would’ve loved mj lenderman’s “she’s leaving you�
this was awesome im obsessed thank you leonid tsypkin thank you susan sontag 🙏
this was awesome im obsessed thank you leonid tsypkin thank you susan sontag 🙏
Read
November 4, 2019I love the Russians and their literature. Studied Russian history extensively in college. Read this for a book club at my alma mater, UC Berkeley. For me, this book didn't measure up. It was like a tortured exercise in self-exorcism. The reality is that most artists are not saints. This is not an excuse, but reality. I thought I'd be the only dissenter, but it turns out most in the group disliked this book.
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"Mikhail Bulgakov’s gentle irony in THE MASTER AND MARGARITA is a warning against the mistake, more common in our time than we might think, of equating artistic mastery with a sort of saintliness, or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, of confusing the aesthetic with the ethical."
-Richard Pevear
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"Mikhail Bulgakov’s gentle irony in THE MASTER AND MARGARITA is a warning against the mistake, more common in our time than we might think, of equating artistic mastery with a sort of saintliness, or, in Kierkegaard’s terms, of confusing the aesthetic with the ethical."
-Richard Pevear
May 10, 2020
по жанру это вовсе не роман, да и трудно определить жанр этого текста. повесть-эссе? но замечательная, в очень точно выбранном и выдержанном тоне, экспериментальная по форме и в то же время ничуть не претенциозная, что просто редкость.
April 8, 2024
برای آشنایی با زوایای خاصی از زندگی شخصی داستایوسکی کتاب بدی نبود ولی به نظر میرسی� بعضی جاها سوگیرانه نوشته شده. کلا اطلاعات جالبی میدا�. هرچه بیشتر از آثار داستایوسکی خوانده باشید بهتر این کتاب را میخوانی� و با آن ارتباط میگیری�. به خصوص رمانها� معروفت� او مانند برادران کارامازوف، جنایت و مکافات، قمارباز، یادداشتها� زیرزمینی، ابله، شیاطین(جنزدگا�) که در این کتاب به شخصیتها� آنه� زیاد اشاره شده است و لازم است خواننده آنه� را بشناسد.
March 2, 2025
felt like being told a delightfully rambling story by a regular at the pub over a few pints
October 13, 2024
This is a difficult book to rate. When I read the review that made me buy the book, even when I had read a dozen first pages, it seemed worth 4 stars, but gradually I got tired of the enormously long sentences. I also thought that Dostoyevsky whom I regard as one of the finest Russian writers, came out as a weak and flawed individual, and I did not like that. His fame is in the fiction he wrote, not in his personality.
Another question is, who is this English-language version for? Few people know Russian literature so well that names like Nekrasov and Goncharov would mean anything to them. Maybe this does not matter and you can follow the thinking without having read many Russian classics?
Another question is, who is this English-language version for? Few people know Russian literature so well that names like Nekrasov and Goncharov would mean anything to them. Maybe this does not matter and you can follow the thinking without having read many Russian classics?
December 13, 2019
Pārsteigums un baudījums no vāka līdz vākam, Sūzenas Sontāgas pēcvārdu ieskaitot.
July 3, 2013
Brilliant novel on the weakness which is part of creativity (summer in Baden-Baden is a very low point in Dostoevsky's life when he, being a compulsive gambler, gambled everything away - the money he gambled belonged to his heavily pregnant wife who was with him). The other dimension of the novel is a writer trying to deal with his admiration for Dostoevsky in spite of the latter's virulent antisemitism.
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