#8
Washington Post
January 13, 2002
book review
Chance of a Lifetime
'Summer in Baden-Baden' by Leonid Tsypkin
Reviewed by Marie Arana
SUMMER IN BADEN-BADEN
By Leonid Tsypkin
Translated from the Russian by Roger and Angela Keys
New Directions. 146 pp. $23.95
"Nothing is invented. Everything is invented." With that sphinxlike pronunciamento, Susan Sontag beckons us into this fiercely imagined, impeccably researched little novel about a single summer in the life of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. As Sontag suggests in her introduction, Summer in Baden-Baden is at once entirely true and untrue -- a conflation of terrestrial travel and cranial spelunking, of history and hallucination. 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.
It might never have seen the light of day. At the time of his death in 1982, Leonid Tsypkin was a complete unknown in Soviet literary circles: a doctor and medical researcher whose published works were limited to highly technical scientific journals. He might have taken his place in the long, distinguished line of physician writers such as Chekhov and Bulgakov -- except that his communist masters had turned a paranoid eye on the arts. Tsypkin began Summer in Baden-Baden in 1977 at the age of 51. He completed it four years later, only months before he succumbed to a heart attack and just as his countrymen locked into a tragic, unwinnable war in Afghanistan. Harassed by the KGB for his repeated applications for an exit visa, demoted from his senior position at a medical institute because his son had emigrated to the United States, Tsypkin had given up all hope of ever publishing his fiction. He had not produced much: a handful of short stories, two novellas. He began Summer in Baden-Baden fully aware that it would be a labor of love -- a story that, in all likelihood, would only languish in the gloomy confines of his desk drawer.
What a labor of love it is. Love is at the very core of it: conjugal love, carnal love, hopeless love, a love of luxury, a love of the roulette wheel, a love of words, an artist's obsessions, a fan's desires. It recounts Dostoyevsky's trip in 1867 to Baden-Baden with his new bride, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, the 19-year-old stenographer to whom he had dictated his novel The Gambler. This was before the novelist's extraordinary run of literary success. The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov had yet to be written, and Dostoyevsky was plagued by demons, real and imagined.
Uncertain of his future, the former engineer had taken a punishing contract for his new novel; he was drinking too much, gambling away what little fortune he had, losing himself to debilitating epileptic fits, agonizing over his debts, careering from obsessive concern for his pregnant young wife to nearly criminal disregard. Tsypkin reveals him in a bettor's fever, pawning Anna's earrings, brooches and dresses, until she is reduced to wandering the elegant German resort in threadbare clothes and he is reduced to a miasma of self-loathing. But, as Dostoyevsky himself had written in Notes From Underground, "man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering," and so this story is also about that other, very Russian, kind of love: the romance of misery, the seductions of despair. It is about Dostoyevsky's anguish, to be sure, but it is about Tsypkin's, too.
Tsypkin's account of Dostoyevsky's journey to Baden-Baden is embedded in a journey of his own. The novel begins as memoir: The narrator -- clearly Tsypkin himself -- is making a pilgrimage to Petersburg to visit the apartment in which Dostoyevsky died. He settles into the train with a moldering volume he has acquired from his aunt, a literary critic. The book is Reminiscences, by Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevsky, an intimate account of her honeymoon and of her groom's frenzied sprees at the gaming tables of Baden-Baden. What follows is a double narrative, a polyphonic telling, as mesmerizing and haunting as any of Dostoyevsky's psychic odysseys. Tsypkin is traveling into the minds and hearts of the newly married Dostoyevskys even as he is making his way north to the very room in which the writer drew his last breath. But, as we come to learn, Tsypkin's love for Dostoyevsky is a troubled affair, fraught as it is with the clear-eyed understanding that Dostoyevsky despised Jews, made no secret of it, and therefore would have despised him. In this strange double helix of a voyage -- through time, through words, through history, through madness -- Summer in Baden-Baden manages to tell various stories: of a marriage, of a literary obsession, of a nation's anti-Semitism, of the pinched spirit of the communist age, of the swirling nexus of Dostoyevsky's writerly world.
Tsypkin's prose is eerily reminiscent of Jose Saramago's, although he could not possibly have been familiar with the Portuguese Nobelist's work. The sentences are sinuous, endless constructions that challenge as mightily as they reward. A single one can snake across several pages, draw the reader into a dervish dance -- and then, holding on for dear life, refuse to let the reader go. Here, for instance, is a passage in which the narrator introduces the Dostoyevskys' hotel chambermaid, "a very lively and swarthy girl who looked Italian," before he spins off into a fugue of memory, recalling an archetypal young woman he once had seen in a hospital, a figure he was unable to put out of mind:
"I could not yet make out the building I was heading for, but in the common-room or in the corridor male and female students in white lab-coats would be clustering around one of the junior doctors, and amongst them would be the girl with golden hair escaping from under her cap, the one-and-only girl who exists for all of us at that age, and for some of us not only then, the one-and-only girl both imaginary and at the same time real with fine blue veins in her temples beneath the delicate, tender skin and a heart rhythmically contracting to pump fresh, hot blood (is it really hot?) around the fragile, tensile arteries, as yet unsullied by a single nodule or grain of calcium, blood which gives the skin and the whole body that amazing pink tone termed flesh-coloured and which they all attempt to imitate with stockings and tights -- wallpaper and lamp-shades are sometimes that colour, too, but never very successfully: only the skin of a young woman possesses that exact tone -- and as I sit there in the tram, I try in mind to place myself next to that golden-haired student in such a position that the hair tumbling out from under her cap touches my cheek -- and why is it only now in our declining years that we become so sensitive to the touch of a woman's hair, and sitting on public transport, surreptitiously try to let our cheek or bald patch brush against a cascade of female hair flooding down from somewhere? -- and the more casual the touch, the stronger the feeling of contentment, as we can then, having purposely placed our skin against this cascade, try to convince ourselves that it is pure accident, and the more painful is the enforced parting from this cool golden flood pouring down from on high, heedlessly flowing over shoulders covered by a suede or denim jacket and transferring a charge of electrons to our ageing skin -- and to receive this mysterious electron charge from some unwitting donor, and for that reason particularly desired, we, as we leave home in the morning, are also hurrying somewhere, filled with anticipation and certainty that something unusual must be about to happen to us . . . "
The effect, offputting at first, becomes hypnotic as Tsypkin blends his own reminiscences with Anna Grigoryevna's. He knits in cameos of Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevsky's characters, Dostoyevsky's contemporaries and their characters as well. Turgenev, Belinsky, Pushkin, Prince Myshkin (from The Idiot), Trusotsky (from "The Eternal Husband"), Fyodor Karamazov, even Stinking Lizaveta -- all make appearances, so that the novel's pages teem not only with real figures from Russia's past but with a veritable dramatis personae of the Russian imagination.
So why is this vertiginous little book such an important addition to the canon? Because, like the work of so many other writers who toiled beneath the yoke of Soviet history -- Mayakovsky, Babel, Pasternak, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Tsvetaeva, Voinovich, Aksyonov -- Leonid Tsypkin's novel affirms precisely what we value in literature: that, in such prose as this, a mind is able to wrest grace from despair, truth from lies and, most miraculous of all, immortality from a desk drawer. •
Marie Arana is the editor of Book World. She can be reached at aranam@washpost.com.
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