Summer in Baden-Baden [Hardcover]

Leonid Tsypkin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 3, 2005

A novel about love, married love, and the love of literature, Summer in Baden-Baden is set partly in the present as the narrator crosses Russia in wintertime on a train to Leningrad (the once and future St. Petersburg) and partly in the past as he reimagines the passionate summer of 1867 when Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his young wife Anna travelled across Europe towards Baden-Baden. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which is in turn reflected by the love of Leonid Tsypkin for Dostoyevsky.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A brilliant Russian novel.... There really is no other book like this. -- Kirkus Reviews, 15 January 2002

An extraordinary novel. -- New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Rosen, 3 March 2002

An original and moving exploration of Dostoevsky the gambler, loving husband and rabid anti-Semite. -- Times Literary Supplement, Gabriel Josipovici

Its immediacy and power make it virtually impossible to put down. -- Los Angeles Times, Donald Fanger, 18 November 2001

The book throbs with felt life. -- Arizona Daily Star, Kathryn Lance, 25 November 2001

The work contains so many moments of psychological and literary insight, apart from being a profound meditation. -- Winston-Salem Journal, Dick Schneider, 3 March 2002

Written with a fantastic realism that burlesques Dostoyevsky's own....This is a crazily marvelous book. -- Victoria Glendinning, London Daily News --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Russian --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton (March 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0241143098
• ISBN-13: 978-0241143094
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,039,840 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love, March 30, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Summer in Baden-Baden (Hardcover)

"Summer in Baden-Baden" is a wonderful book revolving around a single summer in the life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Only one theme lies at the core of this book: love. The book tells of Dostoyevsky's 1867 summer in Baden-Baden with his bride, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. As such, the book revolves around conjugal love and carnal love, obsessive love and artistic love, a love of words, a love of games and a love of lazy days in the sunshine.

Dostoyevsky made this trip to Baden-Baden prior to his spectacular literary successes; "The Idiot," "The Possessed," and "The Brothers Karamazov" all had yet to be published. Dostoyevsky was giving himself up to his vices: drinking, gambling, obsessing and, inbetween, suffering from the epilepsy that would plague him until the end of his life. Like all Russians, Dostoyevsky was "extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering." Seduced by anguish and despair, he gambled away his young, pregnant wife's jewels and finally was himself reduced to wandering the streets of the German resort town in beggar's rags.

Besides being an account of Dostoyevsky's summer in Baden-Baden, this book is also a memoir of Tsypkin's journey to St. Petersburg to visit the apartment in which Dostoyevsky died. Supposedly, Tsypkin's aunt, a literary critic, gave Tsypkin an old volume of Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevsky's "Reminiscences," in which Anna details the intimate moments of her honeymoon in Baden-Baden. As Tsypkin travels farther and farther north, he weaves his own narrative into the narrative of Dostoyevsky.

Although Tsypkin adores Dostoyevsky's work and, on some level, has come to worship and revere the man, his reverence does have its reservations. Tsypkin, we learn, is a Jew and, as anyone at all familiar with Dostoyevsky knows, the great writer hated Jews. All Jews. Thus, despite Tsypkin's adoration, Dostoyevsky would have hated Tsypkin.

Tsypkin writes beautiful prose that is a combination of Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Saramago and Sebald, though any comparison is ultimately unfair to all of the authors involved. Tsypkin's prose is...Tsypkin's prose, though like Saramago and Sebald, one sentence can go one for four or five pages, one paragraph for forty or more. And, again reminiscent of Sebald, Tsypkin is seduced by memory and its connections; one thing leads him to another, which leads him to another, which leads him to yet another. If this puts you off, don't let it. Tsypkin is a wonderfully hypnotic writer and it doesn't take many pages of the book until the reader is drawn into both Tsypkin's world and the world of Baden-Baden during the summer of 1867. If anything, I wish the book would have gone on and on.

Although Tsypkin and the Dostoyevsky's take center stage in this novel, it is peopled with many other fascinating characters as well, some real, some fictional: Turgenev, Pushkin, Prince Myshkin, Trusotsky, Fyodor Karamazov and Stinking Lizaveta.

This book should be read, first and foremost, because it is a beautiful literary achievement. But it should also be noted that Tsypkin, like Babel, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and so many others before him did not let oppression keep him from seeing the beauty in life or from discerning the truth from the lies. And, most of all, nothing kept him from passing that beauty on.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An intense and quintessentially Russian novel., June 2, 2002

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Summer in Baden-Baden (Hardcover)

Almost claustrophobic in its intensity, Tsypkin's recreation of the frustration, and even paranoia, of Dostoevsky during one summer in Baden-Baden, in which he attempts to gamble his way out of debt, is a masterpiece, newly published twenty years after its author's death. With sensitivity and a feeling for suffering which may have come from similar frustration, Tsypkin reveals Dostoevsky's inner life, showing us a sensitive but driven man who is also insecure, rude, and arrogant, a man who dominates his wife, a man who suffers from the aftereffects of his imprisonment and his epilepsy, a man virulently anti-Jewish and anti-German and in the grip of compulsive gambling--and a man with whom every reader will ultimately feel empathy, if not complete sympathy.

The story line is deceptively simple. An unidentified narrator, a great admirer of Dostoevsky, is traveling by train to various sites associated with Dostoevsky. As he travels, he reads a Dostoevsky novel, musing about characters in Dostoevsky's novels and events in his life, his honeymoon and marriage, his remarkably supportive second wife, and his associations or wished-for associations with other Russian authors, such as Turgenev. The narrator's additional musings on the forces which eventually impel some later authors, like Solzhenitsyn, to seek exile, while other authors remain behind, bring Russian literary history up to date, expanding the novel's scope beyond that of Dostoevsky and his contemporaries and giving some historical context to Tsypkin's own writing.

Contributing to the dark and intense moodiness of the novel is its style. Single sentences, full of unique images but sometimes two pages long, drive the narrative and the reader along, with the insistence of the train ride which opens the novel. Because each of these sentences is often a single, extended paragraph, there are almost no visual breaks to provide respite from solid type, which completely fills each page and compels the reader to read every word. The writing is so strong, so energetic, and so fresh, however, that most readers will find themselves speeding to keep up with the narrative, the grayness of the text disappearing as Tsypkin's lively images emerge and his characters come to life. This is a challenging and utterly fascinating novel, a startling new work which has earned a place in Russian literary history. Mary Whipple

26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dostoyevsky as a Literary Character, February 21, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Summer in Baden-Baden (Hardcover)

Although I have frequented amazon.com since its very beginnings I have not once written a review. When I saw that not a single review had been written for Summer in Baden-Baden, however, I felt morally obliged to express my love for this book. Summer in Baden-Baden is about Dostoyevsky, yet in absolutely no way is it a biography. It feels almost like what Dostoyevsky would have been like as a character in one of his own novels. Written in a truly unique and powerful style, this is one of the best books I have read in a while. I highly recommend this book.