Summer in Baden-Baden (New Directions) [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Dostoyevsky made this trip to Baden-Baden prior to his spectacular literary successes; "The Idiot," "The Possessed," and "The Brothers Karamazov" all had yet to be published. Dostoyevsky was giving himself up to his vices: drinking, gambling, obsessing and, inbetween, suffering from the epilepsy that would plague him until the end of his life. Like all Russians, Dostoyevsky was "extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering." Seduced by anguish and despair, he gambled away his young, pregnant wife's jewels and finally was himself reduced to wandering the streets of the German resort town in beggar's rags.

Besides being an account of Dostoyevsky's summer in Baden-Baden, this book is also a memoir of Tsypkin's journey to St. Petersburg to visit the apartment in which Dostoyevsky died. Supposedly, Tsypkin's aunt, a literary critic, gave Tsypkin an old volume of Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevsky's "Reminiscences," in which Anna details the intimate moments of her honeymoon in Baden-Baden. As Tsypkin travels farther and farther north, he weaves his own narrative into the narrative of Dostoyevsky.

Although Tsypkin adores Dostoyevsky's work and, on some level, has come to worship and revere the man, his reverence does have its reservations. Tsypkin, we learn, is a Jew and, as anyone at all familiar with Dostoyevsky knows, the great writer hated Jews. All Jews. Thus, despite Tsypkin's adoration, Dostoyevsky would have hated Tsypkin.

Tsypkin writes beautiful prose that is a combination of Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Saramago and Sebald, though any comparison is ultimately unfair to all of the authors involved. Tsypkin's prose is...Tsypkin's prose, though like Saramago and Sebald, one sentence can go one for four or five pages, one paragraph for forty or more. And, again reminiscent of Sebald, Tsypkin is seduced by memory and its connections; one thing leads him to another, which leads him to another, which leads him to yet another. If this puts you off, don't let it. Tsypkin is a wonderfully hypnotic writer and it doesn't take many pages of the book until the reader is drawn into both Tsypkin's world and the world of Baden-Baden during the summer of 1867. If anything, I wish the book would have gone on and on.

Although Tsypkin and the Dostoyevsky's take center stage in this novel, it is peopled with many other fascinating characters as well, some real, some fictional: Turgenev, Pushkin, Prince Myshkin, Trusotsky, Fyodor Karamazov and Stinking Lizaveta.

This book should be read, first and foremost, because it is a beautiful literary achievement. But it should also be noted that Tsypkin, like Babel, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and so many others before him did not let oppression keep him from seeing the beauty in life or from discerning the truth from the lies. And, most of all, nothing kept him from passing that beauty on.