Summer in Baden-Baden

Fyodor Dostoyevsky first met Anna Grigor’yevna Snitkina in St. Petersburg in 1866. Within four weeks he had dictated his novel The Gambler to her and two weeks later he asked her to be his wife. In April 1867 the couple went on a journey that lasted more than four years and took them to Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. While in Baden-Baden, Dostoyevsky found himself on the verge of bankruptcy, possessed by the same mania as the hero of The Gambler.

Summer in Baden-Baden is a complex, artful, highly personal novel that is written as if by a contemporary of Dostoyevsky. Although it borrows much from the diaries of Snitkina, the book also relates Dostoyevsky’s Russia to the Russia of the late 20th century.

Author Leonid Tsypkin paints a portrait of a man plagued by epilepsy and tortured by ferocious passions, such as his physical obsession with Anna, his gambling, and his anti-Semitism. Readers also are shown Dostoyevsky's traumatic relations with his literary contemporaries. Throughout Summer in Baden-Baden, there is a sense of his desperate struggle to reconcile his ambition with the sentence of humility.

About the Author
Leonid Tsypkin died in Moscow on his 56th birthday in the spring of 1982. A pathologist by profession, he upholds the long tradition of doctors-turned-writers. Tsypkin was a devoted admirer of Dostoyevsky’s writings and a collector of Dostoyevsky memorabilia. Summer in Baden-Baden marks the culmination of a lifelong avocation. The manuscript was smuggled out of the Soviet Union and first published in Russian on March 13th, 1982.

Translated from Russian by Roger and Angela Keys
Introduction by Susan Sontag

Summer in Baden-Baden was acclaimed by the The New York Review of Books as "a short poetic masterpiece" and by The Los Angeles Times as "gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving."

"Although its publication comes almost 20 years after the death of its author, and although his name continues to go unrecognized in Russia, this slender volume stands to change the way we think of 20th-century Russian fiction. It is, in more ways than one, a chronicle of fevered genius."
--The Washington Post Book World