Extraordinary.

The New York Times Book Review

A lost masterpiece and one of the major achievements of Russian literature in the second half of the 20th century.

Summer in Baden-Baden

by Leonid Tsypkin

With a contribution by Susan Sontag

A lost masterpiece and one of the major achievements of Russian literature in the second half of the 20th century. Summer in Baden-Baden was acclaimed by The New York Review of Books as “a short poetic masterpiece” and by Donald Fanger in The Los Angeles Times as “gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving.” Its author, Leonid Tsypkin, never saw a single page of his literary work published during his lifetime. A complex, highly original novel, Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December, no date given: a species of “now.” A narrator––Tsypkin––is on a train going to Leningrad (once and future St. Petersburg). And it is mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevsky, Fyodor and his wife Anna Grigoryevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of St. 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 literature’s disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky. In her remarkable introductory essay, Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle that Summer in Baden-Baden has survived, and offers an account of Tsypkin’s beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel.

Paperback(published Sep, 01 2003)

ISBN
9780811215480
Price US
14.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
176

Clothbound(published Sep, 01 2003)

ISBN
9780811214841
Price US
23.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
176
Portrait of Leonid Tsypkin

Leonid Tsypkin

20th Century Russian writer

Extraordinary.

The New York Times Book Review

Tsypkin grapples with Dostoyevsky in this brilliant novel the way Dostoyevsky grappled with a God who, as Ivan Karamazov points out, allows the suffering of children.

Jonathan Rosen, The New York Times Book Review

My feeling is that Summer in Baden-Baden is the most unrecognized work of genius not to have been published in America in the last fifty years.

Stephen Dixon

If you want from one book an experience of the depth and authority of Russian literature, read this book. If you want a novel that can fortify your soul and give you a larger idea of feeling, and of breathing, read this book.

Susan Sontag

Although its publication comes almost 20 years after the death of its author, and although his name continues to go unrecognized in Russia, this slender volume stands to change the way we think of 20th-century Russian fiction. It is, in more ways than one, a chronicle of fevered genius.

Marie Arana, Washington Post Book World