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Leonid Tsypkin,
"Summer in Baden-Baden" English Summary
Basically this novel is a story about Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He travels
with his new bride to Baden-Baden and spends there his money (and his wife's
money and valuables too) in roulette. At the same time the narrator, who
lives during dark Soviet Union times, makes a pilgrimage from Moscow to
snowy Leningrad in order to find memories of Dostoyevsky. In the train,
he reads the memoirs of Dostoyevsky's wife Anna, on the basis of which
the details of the Baden-Baden trip seem to be presented.
The novel moves from a time level to another - covering happenings of
the life of both Dostoyevsky and Tsypkin at different points in time. Technically
the text is unusual: full stops, commas and division into paragraphs are
used extremely sparsely. The most common punctuation mark is dash, after
which the text may jump - starting usually with a small letter - from 1900's
to 1800's.
In the text there are plenty of references to Dostoyevsky's novels and
characters appearing in these. However, the most important object seems
to be Dostoyevsky's person, his weird character. Evidently he lost his
nerves at penal servitude: he still sees the faces of his tormentor in
waiters and other people he meets during the journey. It is shocking how
badly he treats his wife, and how he mocks Jews and Germans. His attitude
proves clear anti-Semitism, and this was also evident in his novels. The
reader wonders - and so does the narrator, or Tsypkin, himself as well
- why he admires so deeply Dostoyevsky, a man who hated people like him.
In spite of this admiration, Tsypkin presents the character of Dostoyevsky
in a very negative light. If somebody had presented this kind of text to
Dostoyevsky, he would perhaps have considered it as a nasty plot by a Jew
against him.
Indeed, the real hero(in) of this novel is not Dostoyevsky, but his
wife Anna. In spite of his cruel behaviour she stays by him to the bitter
end. By the way, his death to flow of bleed in the lungs is depicted in
very detail - I don't understand why; less bloodshed would have been enough.
All in all, the book may be considered masterly in finely tying together
the different kinds of materials from several eras, but I must confess
that I would not have read it on my own, without our reading circle. But
I'm sure that Dostoyevsky fans may get more of its literary references
and other Dostoyevsky related details and therefore enjoy reading it. To
my surprise, however, I noticed that the aftertaste of the book was not
a bad one, but a kind of bitter sweet.
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o AJK kotisivu o Tsypkin