Summer in Baden-Baden

by Leonid Tsypkin (Author), Leonid Tsypkin (Author), Roger and Angela Keys (Translator), Susan Sontag (Introduction)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $4.44

  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.

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $7.35

  Summer in Baden-Baden is Leonid Tsypkin's beautiful and original cult classic -- a love story of the rarest intensity by a 20th century Russian master.One bitterly cold winter in the 1970s, Leonid Tsypkin's obsession with Dostoyevsky leads him to Leningrad by train, so that he can see for himself where his hero died. As the train makes its way across Russia, a journal inspires Tsypkin to conjure up the summer of 1867, when Dosteyevsky and his young wife Anna travelled across Europe to Baden-Baden. The destructive demons that beset Dostoyevsky in his later life were in full force at this time, and man and wife battled for their very souls. Yet in Tsypkin's hands this elegy to the great Russian writer becomes a glorious and unforgettable love story.Praise for Summer in Baden-Baden: 'A remarkable fantasia . . . written in a unique and unforgettable style' James Wood, Guardian'A hypnotic double narrative, a journey within a journey, both real and imagined, from the present to the past and back again, told in miraculous prose' Evening Standard'Luminous, extraordinary, magnificent' Literary ReviewLeonid Tsypkin was born in Minsk in 1926 of Russian-Jewish parents. Summer in Baden-Baden is the culmination of a passionate, clandestine literary vocation. A distinguished medical researcher by profession, Tsypkin never had even a measure of 'underground' fame. Twice denied permission to leave the Soviet Union with his family, he died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1982.