Summary
Published 20 years after the death of its author, SUMMER IN BADEN-BADEN begins in the form of a memoir: the narrator is traveling by train to the famed Black Forest spa, and en route he is reading the account by Dostoevsky's wife, Anna, of their years together. Simultaneously, it tells the story of the writer's marriage, and of the months in 1867 he and Anna, who was pregnant, spent in Baden-Baden, where Dostoevsky wrote, gambled, drank, and agonized over the direction his work was taking. Interwoven with these two stories are disquisitions on the characters in Dostoevsky's novels, his friends, and his anti-Semitism. Introduction by Susan Sontag. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.
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Media Reviews
"[W]hy is this vertiginous little book such an important addition to the canon? Because, like the work of so many other writers who toiled beneath the yoke of Soviet history-Mayakovsky, Babel, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Tsvetaeva, Voinovich, Aksyonov-Leonid Tsypkin's novel affirms precisely what we value in literature: that, in such prose as this, a mind is able to wrest grace from despair, truth from lies and, most miraculous of all, immortality from a desk drawer." -- Marie Arana
-- Washington Post Book World
"...Dr. Tsypkin has done much more than give us another version of well-worn arguments. Like Dostoevsky in his own novels, he has embodied his quarrel with himself in a moving and impressive artistic achievement." -- Joseph Frank
-- New York Review of Books
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
Published date: 2001
Size: 5.75 x 8.5 inches
Weight: 0.7 pounds
Pages: 146
Publisher's Notes
The narrator recounts his journey to Leningrad as the story of the 1867 travels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his new wife, Anna Grigoryevna, also unfolds.
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