Summer in Baden-Baden

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by Leonid Tsypkin,

Translated by Angela Keys and Roger Keys,

Introduction by Susan Sontag

New Directions

Due/Published November 2001, 160 pages, cloth

ISBN 0811214842

Appearing in English translation for the first time in the US, Summer in Baden-Baden is one of the great newly discovered classics of twentieth-century Russian literature. Fyodor Dostoyevsky first met Anna Grigor'yevna Snitkina in St. Petersburg in 1866. Within four weeks he had dictated his novel The Gambler to her and two weeks later he asked her to be his wife. In April 1867 the couple went on a journey that lasted more than four years and took them to Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. While in Baden-Baden, Dostoyevsky found himself on the verge of bankruptcy, possessed by the same mania as the hero of The Gambler. Summer in Baden-Baden is a complex, artful, highly personal biography which is written as if by a contemporary of Dostoyevsky. Although it borrows much from the diaries of Anna Grigor'yevna Snitkina, the book also relates Dostoyevsky's Russia to the Russia of the late twentieth century. Tsypkin paints a portrait of a man plagued by epilepsy and tortured by ferocious passions, such as his physical obsession with Anna, his gambling, and his antisemitism. We are also shown Dostoyevsky's traumatic relations with his literary contemporaries, including Turgenev and Goncharov. Throughout, there is a sense of his desperate struggle to reconcile his ambition with the sentence of humility that he imposed upon himself after his escape from the firing squad in 1849.

Author Biography: Leonid Tsypkin died in Moscow on his fifty-sixth birthday in the spring of 1982. A pathologist by profession, he upholds the long tradition of doctors-turned-writers from Chekhov to Aksyonov. Tsypkin was a devoted admirer of Dostoyevsky's writings and a collector of Dostoyevsky memorabilia. Summer in Baden-Baden marks the culmination of a life-long avocation. The manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and first published in Russian by the emigré New York weekly Novyy Americanets in 1982.