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 ...
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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 Review Leonid 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.
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Seller's Description:
New. 0811214842. *** FREE UPGRADE to Courier/Priority Shipping Upon Request ***-*** IN STOCK AND IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE FOR SHIPMENT-FLAWLESS COPY, PRISTINE, NEVER OPENED--160 pages--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. --with a bonus offer--
