Summer in Baden-Baden

A Novel

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by Leonid Tsypkin,

Translated by Angela Keys and Roger Keys,

Introduction by Susan Sontag

New Directions

Due/Published September 2003, 176 pages, paper

ISBN 0811215482

New in paper (F03)

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.

It is wintertime, late December: a species of "now." A narrator--Tsypkin--is on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not 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 resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky.

In an introductory essay (which appeared in The New Yorker), 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.