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Summer in Baden-Baden

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"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.

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

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.

Leonid Tsypkin, a leading Russian medical researcher, wrote one novel, Summer in Baden-Baden, before he officially asked the Soviet government for a visa allowing him to go to Israel. He did not get the visa, and for the unpatriotic act of asking to leave the Socialist Paradise he lost his job and shortly thereafter died of a massive heart attack.

Dostoevsky would have understood. The great Russian novelist is the major character of the novel, a man forced out of Russia by a veritable horde of creditors while trying to support a new wife and a family of deadbeat relatives that could give parasites a good name. The story follows the narrator, who is never named, a modern day [1970's] Russian Jew who is traveling by train to important Dostoevsky sites and contemplating the writer's importance in modern Russia, including dealing with Dostoevsky's vicious anti-Semitism and the odd fact that most of his greatest modern critics are Jewish, and Dostoevsky himself, as he tries to write, make money, and deal with his humiliating addiction to the roulette wheel.

The stories track and intertwine in an unique, almost Proustian, style, involving long sentences that go on for pages at a time and shift from the past to present and back again without stopping or explaining why the shift is occurring. The style, however, allows Tsypkin to make a point in the present and illustrate the point by shifting to Dostoevsky's life. Once the reader gets used to the style; for me I finally felt comfortable with it some twenty or thirty pages into the book; the overall effect is dazzling.

That Leonid Tsypkin only wrote this one book is a major loss for Russian literature in particular and for world literature in general. This book displays a massive talent crushed by the brutal needs of a totalitarian society. In an otherwise great book the one objection is Susan Sontag's foreword. She means well, but she is so intent on proclaiming the greatness of this book that she forgets that Tsypkin can do that by himself; reading her forward almost put me off reading the book itself. Read it after you've read the book.

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

In this novel-dream, the narrator (Tsypkin himself) interweaves the story of the time spent by Dostoevsky and his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, in Germany, with his own trip to Saint Petersburg (then called Leningrad, in the 70's) in search of the footsteps of his favorite writer. Based on Anna's own diaries about that time and about the last days of D. back in Russia, the author gradually builds a vivid and faithful portrait of D.'s and his wife's characters. In long paragraphs, many of them in the form of "stream of consciousness", Dostoevsky is revealed as a tormented man, with profound emotional imbalances. Epilepsy, chronic poverty, and especially the terrible vice of gambling, cause in him acute periods of euphoria and unfounded hope, mixed with deep depressions who lead him to moments of abject repentance before the stoic, loyal, and resigned Anna. Meanwhile, through jumps in time interwoven without previous notice with the narrative about D., the author-narrator reveals something about the sad and somber life in the last decades of the USSR.

Of course the depiction of gambling and its consequences is very sad and hallucinating, in paragraphs where Tsypkin accurately pictures the nightmare of hopeless delusion. There is always one last coin to beg from Anna, the one that will finally make their fortune. And always, the last disappointment comes about, since everyone that gambles out of necessity, necessarily loses.

Finally, D. and Anna return to Russia, where he goes on writing and they have their children. In the last part, the last days of D. are narrated. The story of his final agony and death is masterful, almost as good as that of The Leopard in the eponymous novel by Lampedusa. In spite of the hurried, hallucinated and Joyce-like style, the book is very readable and little confusing. It is written with good poetic qualities and is highly recommended.

Leonid Tsypkin, who died in 1982, was a great admirer of Dostoyevsky's work, and one winter he set out for a train journey from Moscow to what was then still Leningrad to visit the Dostoyevsky Museum there, a building which also includes the flat in which Dostoyevsky died. And we embark on two interwoven `streams of consciousness', the author's and the great writer's. The sentences are enormously long, often running for pages at a time, but we are never lost, and their powerful rhythm carries us along (which, incidentally, is a great tribute to the translators, Roger and Angela Keys.)

It must be admitted that, if one did not know that Dostoyevsky was one of the greatest and most profound writers of the 19th century, one could not guess it from the description of the very unpleasant figure who emerges from these pages, gripped, as he was, by what the blurb describes as `the destructive demons that beset him late in life'. He is unattractive in voice and appearance; he is clumsy; he is foul-tempered and shouts when angry, even in public places; he is paranoid, always suspecting that people - even those who love or admire him - are laughing at him (and indeed sometimes they do, so gross is his behaviour); his literary success notwithstanding, he is deeply insecure and unsure of himself; he alternates between arrogance and obsequiousness; he bullies his timid second wife, Anna Grigorievna (and then abjectly pleads for forgiveness); he is a compulsive, frenetic and largely unsuccessful gambler, demanding money for this obsession from his wife and pawning even her clothes (and towards the end of his life will be equally incontinent in the alms he gives to beggars); and this man, who was `so sensitive in his novels to the sufferings of others, this jealous defender of the insulted and the injured' was a rabid anti-Semite (which troubled Tsypkin who, like so many of the ardent admirers of Dostoyevsky, was himself Jewish).

What, then, makes reading a book about such a person so rewarding an experience? In the first place, Tsypkin has a Dostoyevskian compassion for his hero's suffering (and for that of his young wife). The story is set for the most part in the gambling resort of Baden-Baden in the summer of 1867. Dostoyevsky was still deeply marked by the appalling experience of his exile in Siberia from 1849 to 1859, and especially by a humiliating flogging that had been inflicted upon him there. In moments of stress, he identifies those around him with the ghoulish and mocking faces that had witnessed the flogging. And of course he suffers terribly from his addictions, from his sensitivities, from his own obsequiousness, from his epileptic fits, and finally from the lung haemorrhage that killed him. (While most of the book is set in Baden-Baden, the last part of it describes his death 13 years later).

And because this is a stream of consciousness book, we enter into both Dostoyevsky's and Tsypkin's dreams and flights of imagination, which are beautiful and poetic, and often surrealistic. Equally wonderful are the descriptions of the Russian winter - the frozen landscape Tsypkin can see through the misted windows of his railway carriage, and the crispness of the snow in Leningrad.

If you know Dostoyevsky's novels, then the allusions to them will further enrich your appreciation of this gripping book. You will then realize how much of Dostoyevsky's own life-experience is mirrored in them. If you don't know the novels, it may lead you to read some of them, and to understand why this deeply flawed man was nevertheless one of the towering figures in European literature.

Written by a medical researcher who lived and died (1926-82) in the former USSR, Leonid Tsypkin's brilliant novel is the posthumous fruit of both the authors obsessive interest in Dostoevsky as well as his own (largely unsung) talent, eventually being published as "Summer in Baden-Baden".

Tsypkin's genuine admiration (and sympathy) for his subject is mixed with wry critical barbs, as the fast-paced Faulknerian "bend" of the narrative flows seamlessly between diverging time perspectives: starting with the unspecified (though obviously Soviet, c.1975) "present" of an unnamed narrator (Tsypkin himself) on a wintry train ride from Moscow to St. Petersburg (né Leningrad), the novel shifts to the part-fact/part-fantasy "past", artful renderings of Fyodor Dostoevsky and his young wife (Anna Grigoryevna) traveling in German spa towns during the first years of their union. Vividly descriptive passages reveal the famous writer's volcanic temperament: the breathless desperation of "Fedya's" obsessive gambling, irrational jealousies, stubborn (aesthetic & personal) grudges and paralyzing epileptic fits are contrasted with visionary (artistic/spiritual) ecstasies, giving of alms and tender lovemaking with (and child-like dependence on) his patiently deferential "Anya" (a complex and eccentric personality in her own right).

A caveat: readers unfamiliar with the details of Dostoevsky's life and work will fail to appreciate the richly allusive impact of "Summer in Baden-Baden". There are numerous references to Dostoevsky's real-life past ( literary soirée's of early manhood, association with radical intellectuals, his imprisonment by Czarist authorities and subsequent political & spiritual conversion, etc) as well as re-staged "scenes" (not quotations) from his famous fiction (all the late novels); Tsypkin deploys the symbolic image of the infamous "Crystal Palace" ("Notes From Underground") as a virtual idée fixe. At no point are distinct dividing lines drawn between these passages; fictional characters and real-life persons exist side-by-side. The bizarre "argument" (literal & figurative) Tsypkin stages between Dostoevsky and Turgenev stretches a hundred years later into a scene describing the newly exiled Alexander Solzhenitsyn ("...the man with the hard and penetrating gaze, and two melancholy creases furrowing his forehead ...") and "refusnik" scientist Andrei Sakharov. In a blackly comic sequence, both dissidents are subjected to hostile crudities hurled by the kind of ordinary "Sasha's & Masha's" for which they took their principled stands.

Towards the end of the novel, as narrator (Tyspkin) gets off the train in the blizzard-blown streets of St Petersburg, his visit to an old acquaintance prompts another time-bending passage, the (now past) "present" which has itself a "past", his friend recalling her long-dead relatives and hardships of the Leningrad blockade. This in turn sets the mood for Tsypkin's musing on Dostoevsky's virulent anti-Semitism, the embodiment of paradox when contrasted with the "...man so sensitive in his novels to the sufferings of others, this jealous 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 ...". The closing pages are a realistic yet undeniably moving depiction of Dostoevsky's last days of life.

A note about the translation: not speaking Russian, this reviewer is left somewhat helplessly in the unfamiliar waters all readers of translations are fated to tread through- how can one know just how effective a translator is without reading the original language? Nevertheless, my intuitive response is that Roger and Angela Keys should be applauded for their shaping (in English) of a prose style which, not self-consciously but in a wholly natural manner, alternates effortlessly between reality and fantasy.

Finally, the uniquely quirky journey from manuscript to publication, along with many literary details are expounded in Susan Sontag's well-written and informative introduction.

I would not recommend this book for those who have not read Dostoevesky's major works or are not familiar with Dostoevesky's life. There are passages which can get very confusing if you just dive into this novel without prior knowledge of Dostoevesky. To ease matters for readers, Dostoevesky (in his real life) was sent to a Russian labor camp duirng his early years, often have coughing fits, was a compulsive gambler, was often in debts, and relied on his writings to pay off his debts. Tsypkin used this biography of Dostoevesky to craft a fantastical novel that mirrored Dostevesky's real life.
The main theme is centered on the relationship between Dostoevesky and his young, always forgiving wife Anna. The strong points in this novel are the scences where Dostoevesky have several of his fits and how Anna stayed patient and forgiving. Tsypkin was very vivid in detailing the ups and downs of their marriage, and some scences could pack an emotional wallop for readers.

Leonid Tsypkin was a research physician with an amazing gift for creating beautiful streams of words. His novel Summer in Baden-Baden is about compulsion -- his own compulsion to understand Fyodor Dostoevsky and Dostoevsky's compulsion to gamble. Both men sacrifice much to feed their compulsions.

Tsypkin imagines an aging Dostoevsky bereft of most of his creative powers, but still trying to live the life of a Russian literary giant. Dostoevsky travels with his young wife first to Berlin and then to Baden-Baden. Along the way, Tsypkin spares us none of Dostoevsky's refined prejudices. Ironically, Dostoevsky has a pronounced prejudice against Jews, and Tsypkin is a Jew. Dostoevsky also has a prejudice against Germans, yet he and his wife travel to Germany for respite from their financial and familial obligations in Russia.

Some of Tsypkin's most beautiful prose is devoted to private scenes between Dostoevsky and his wife. A subtheme of the novel is Dostoevsky's compulsive infatuation with his wife, and the love-making scenes are movingly limned.

As an imagined biography of Dostoevsky, the book conveys a useful outline of the his life. Details, accompanied by photographs, provide the reader with firm reference points. Always hovering in the background for those who have read them are Dostoevsky's great novels.

We can all regret that Leonid Tsypkin wrote so little. His style is unique. Some sentences run to a page or more, but they are captivating and fresh. It is hard to imagine the personal discipline, the personal compulsion to write, that must have been Tsypkin's. His life in Soviet Russia was so bounded, so fragile, so lacking in personal space. How did he do it? We can only shake our heads and wonder and be glad.

By all means, get this book and read it. If you have never read one of Dostoevsky's novels, read one first -- I recommend either The Idiot or Crime & Punishment as an introduction to Dostoevsky.