717. Summer in Baden-Baden

Summer in Baden-Baden
Leonid Tsypkin
Published in English in 1982
Around 250 pages

I love it when authors totally stan other authors, so I was excited to read a book about Tyspkin's love for Dostoyevsky. And I've missed our depressing Russian authors lately.

We get two narratives here, but the juicy one follows the newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna, who are on their way to Germany for a four-year trip. Tsypkin is enough of a Dostoyevsky fan boy to know pretty much everything about his life, but it's not meant to be 100% real. But like most famous writers, Dostoyevsky was kind of a tool.

Even though it is fictional, this is a rich portrait of a complicated, deeply flawed man. I guess Tyspkin did not live long enough to see this book published, which is a shame, but it felt like such a passion project that I don't think he wrote it for an audience.

This is like a love letter to Russian literature, and I enjoyed all the literary allusions, even if the structure was a little hard to digest at points. 

RATING: ****-

Interesting Facts:

Susan Sontag wrote the preface.

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