23 May 2025
Martin Dewhirst reviews: Leonid Tsypkin, Summer in Baden-Baden, translated from the Russian by Roger and Angela Keys, Faber Editions, London, 2024, xxvi + 213 pp. £9.99. ISBN 978-0571-38689-5.
I think this is the first time I have reviewed (rather than discussed at length) a work first serialised (in Russian, in the USA) almost 45 years ago and published (in English, in the UK) almost 40 years ago. The original text can be read online without payment. The excellent translation costs a mere tenner, and I suggest you buy, read and keep it, because I appreciated it more fully when I read it, including the Foreword by Susan Sontag, for the second time.
The author (1926-1982), a Belarusian Jew and Doctor of Medical Sciences, wrote several literary works but showed them to hardly anybody. In a way, he was an ‘underground’ man. This short novel began to be serialised in Russian in the USA a few days before he died in Moscow on his 56th birthday. His son had been allowed to leave the USSR and apparently didn’t even drop in to Israel on his way to America, whither his father was also hoping and intending to emigrate. The Russian author he was most fascinated by was the antisemitic F.M. Dostoyevsky, and the book he reads one day on the train from Moscow to Leningrad is the carefully cut (in two senses) and selected edition of the diary left by the great writer’s very loyal second wife, Anna Grigor’yevna, published in the 1920s (but superseded now by the complete edition that came out after Tsypkin’s death). It’s extremely intriguing that many, perhaps nearly all, of the best experts on Dostoyevsky in the USSR were Jewish – see p. 163 of the book under review.
Tsypkin was, of course, well aware of this, and knew that Dostoyevsky also didn’t think all that much of Poles and Germans either. Naturally, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t a writer of genius, like his greatly admired Pushkin (not exactly a ‘pure’ Russian) and the Ukrainian Gogol’. In addition, Dostoyevsky also greatly disliked several of his contemporary Russian colleagues, most notably Turgenev, as this book proves. However, Tsypkin pays special attention to Anna Grigor’yevna’s frequent mentions of her husband’s horrific epileptic fits in 1867 and later, which must have made both of their lives even more difficult, not only during the Baden-Baden period, when their financial problems became even more acute because of his (and her occasional) frantic attempts to resolve them by gambling in the renowned local casino. Did/Will things get any better when they leave Germany and move on to Basel?
More important, I think, is Tsypkin’s style, his ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, maybe without having read much (if any) Proust, Joyce, etc., etc. Perhaps he was influenced by the first part of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864, when his first wife died), without identifying himself later with that other underground man and his stream of consciousness at that time? Can the underground mentality come to an end? Yes, it can! Tsypkin’s addiction to extremely long sentences reminds me more of the aforementioned antisemitic Ukrainian writer of genius, Gogol’, who also, however hard he tried, failed to identify with the main Russian narrative.
So what is the storyline of this work? It’s a long monologue and duologue with the narrator’s comments on the book he is reading in the train, including short appearances of Tsvetayeva, Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn and others, interspersed with references to two key episodes in Dostoyevsky’s difficult life: (1) – being sentenced to death for dissident activities, reprieved seconds before he expected to be shot, and subsequent lengthy imprisonment in a labour colony, which maybe saw the onset of his epilectic fits, and (2) – his ‘working holiday’, if such it can be called, or second new life with his second wife, after publishing Crime and Punishment but prior to writing his later masterpieces. This made me wonder whether they and Tsypkin realised that they and he were living in a six-dimensional world: not just in the past, present and future, but also scaling the heights, plumbing the depths and measuring the lengths to which human beings can go.
Finally, an example of the text that awaits the reader:
‘A thin, scarcely perceptible thread still connected him [Dostoyevsky – md] with this world, but it, too, was growing weaker with every minute – the dying man was sinking inexorably into a deep, bottomless abyss resembling the hollow cone of a volcano, although it seemed to him that he was actually clambering up the highest mountain in the world, much higher than any other he had climbed or attempted to climb, and it seemed that he walked up a straight, light, crystal path, moving so easily that he did not appear to be going up at all, but descending, and at times he even thought that he was floating on invisible wings, and at the end of this path, on the very peak of the mountain, a bright sun shone, reflected in the crystal over which he was gliding and, when he reached the summit and the sun momentarily blinded him, he saw how low and insignificant those mountains were, where he had struggled upward before – nothing but tiny, wretched hills, and from the summit of this gigantic mountain was unveiled before him not only the earth with the vanity of its inhabitants, but the whole of the universe with its huge, bright stars, and for a moment there were revealed to him all the terrible secrets of those distant planets, but at that moment the sun was extinguished and he sank down into terrible, fathomless darkness.’ (pp. 199-200)
