Summer in Baden-Baden

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Summer in Baden-Baden, written between 1977 and 1980, is a lost masterpiece, one of the major achievements of Russian literature in the second half of the twentieth century, whose author, Leonid Tsypkin (1926-1982), never saw a single page of his literary work published during his lifetime." A complex, highly original novel written in a prose that suggests the intensity and daring of Jose Saramago and Thomas Bernhard (authors that Tsypkin could not, of course, have possibly read), Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December, no date given: a species of "now." A narrator - Tsypkin - is on a train going to Leningrad (once and future St. Petersburg). And it is mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, the great novelist, and his youthful wife, Anna Grigoryevna, are on their way to Germany, for a trip that will keep them abroad for four years. This is not, like M. J. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg, a Dostoyevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything "right." Nothing is invented. Everything is invented. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn rhymes with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky.

In a remarkable introductory essay, Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and celebrates the happy event of its publication in America with an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel.

FROM THE CRITICS

Marie Arana - Washington Post Book World

Leonid Tsypkin's little novel, about a single summer in the life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, stands to change the way we think of 20th-century Russian fiction. It is, in more ways than one, a chronicle of fevered genius.

- Arizona Daily Star

The book throbs with felt life.

Victoria Glendinning

Written with a fantastic realism that burlesques Dostoyevsky's own....This is a crazily marvelous book. —London Daily News

Kathryn Lance - Arizona Daily Star

The book throbs with felt life.

Donald Fanger - Los Angeles Times