num_pages: 286
description: Summer in Baden-Baden, written between 1977 and 1981, 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 in his lifetime. A complex, highly original novel written in a prose that suggests the intensity and daring of José Saramago and Thomas Bernhard (authors that Tsypkin could not, of course, have possibly read), Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is winter-time, late December, no date given: a species of "now." A narratorTsypkinis on a train going to Leningrad (once and future 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 J.M. 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 liter! ature's disciple, Leomid 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.
language: English
title: Summer in Baden-Baden
titlecomplete: Summer in Baden-Baden
genres: 20th Century, Literature, Historical, Classics, Literary Fiction, Novels, Germany, Russian Literature, Russia, Fiction
ratings_count: 1122
places: Baden-Baden
publisher: HAMISH HAMILTON