Written between 1977 and 1981, but first published in an English translation in 2001, almost twenty years after Leonid Tsypkin’s death, Summer in Baden-Baden is a fusion of fiction and autobiography. A nameless narrator — Tsypkin (1926 – 1982) — embarks on a train journey from Moscow to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) to visit the house where Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881) died. The house is now a museum devoted to the writer’s legacy and as the narrator wanders around looking at the exhibits he imagines the scenario that becomes the fictional part of the narrative under review. Dostoyevsky was Tsypkin’s literary hero and he had extensively researched all aspects of his life, including his addiction to gambling, alcohol and womanising. The story that evolves from Tsypkin’s museum visit concerns a trip to Baden-Baden (a spa town on the north-western border of Germany’s Black Forest mountain range) which Dostoyevsky takes with his new wife, Anna Grigoryevna.
As Susan Sontag (1933 – 2004) explains in her Foreword, despite repeated applications, the Russian authorities never granted Tsypkin a visa to leave the country. Therefore, his descriptions of Baden-Baden and the German countryside are wholly based on his research as an armchair traveller.
Written without chapters, in a Joycean stream-of-consciousness style, the narrator’s reflections are intersected with the extended fictional musings of Dostoyevsky whom Tsypkin portrays as an exceedingly curmudgeonly and bigoted individual, making his fascination with Dostoyevsky rather puzzling. The assumption, then, has to be that the appeal is entirely based on Tsypkin’s love for Dostoyevsky’s work, rather than on his traits and personality. Tsypkin’s penchant, also, for Kafka’s writings is evidenced in his frequent references to insects. He describes a dream in which he is taken into custody for standing on a chair in the museum in a deliberate provocation to the attendant’s glares and remonstrations. In his dream the police commandant pushes him across a polished table and beats him. Tsypkin writes of him:
“His face hung over him [Tsypkin] like a flushed red ball, the gorged abdomen of a blood-sated mosquito and his whole life might have become exquisite torment, because such humiliation was literally breathtaking.”
There are snippets of perversity such as this scattered throughout the novel. The nightly love-making of Dostoyevsky and his wife, for example, is depicted variously as swimming, drowning, floating and rising to the surface of the water, arms thrashing and gasping for breath.
The story is set in the summer of 1867. Despite the author imagining Fyodor and Anna Grigor’yevna (Dostoyevsky’s second wife) to be on their honeymoon, there is little observable affection between them (aside from their nightly activities). When out together Dostoyevsky always walks several paces ahead of her and Anna hesitates trying to catch him up, afraid that she might annoy him. Once in Baden-Baden, Dostoyevsky spends his time in the casinos, leaving his young wife to wander about alone, visiting castles and museums or walking in parks. Although he expects Anna to accept his dalliances with other women without complaint, Dostoyevsky is clearly a jealous individual, since he dislikes the admiring glances other men give Anna as they pass by. Tsypkin writes of Dostoyevsky:
“At such moments he longed for her to grow old quickly and become plain and ugly, so that German men and others would stop casting looks at her and put her off swimming with him at night.”
After five weeks in Baden-Baden, during which Fyodor pawns much of his wife’s jewellery and even some of her underwear to fund his gambling, the couple return to Russia where Fyodor goes on to do some of what many consider to be his finest writing (eg. The Idiot (1868 – 1869), Demons (1871 – 1872), The Brothers Karamazov (1879 – 1880)). They have four children. Sofya, born in 1968, dies of pneumonia when still a baby and a son, Alexei, dies, aged three, from an epileptic seizure. In 1969 Anna Grigor’yevna gives birth to the Dostoyevskys’ second daughter, Lyubov and their son, Fyodor in 1971. Lyubov and Fyodor both survive into adulthood. The last third of the novel is taken up with Dostoyevsky’s final days, after he suffers two pulmonary haemorrhages. None of the book is easy reading, but this section is poignant and harassing in equal measure. It is a circumstance that forces both Anja and Fedya (to use their affectionate names) to look at themselves, the kind of people they are and the sort of marriage they have. There are regrets on both sides. Fedya tries to repent for being a cad and having had extra-marital affairs, while Anja wishes she had been firmer in standing up to her husband, rather than putting up with his bad behaviour, on the one hand, whilst also wondering if she could have been more supportive. Gambling addition is, after all, a kind of illness. This is how Tsypkin imagines the scene:
“She was on her knees before her dying husband, her husband, Fedya, who used to come to her every evening to say goodnight, used to write long, passionate letters to her from Bad Ems, where he would travel every summer to take the cure, who used to cause jealous scenes at readings of his works whenever she exchanged a quick word with anyone or he thought she was looking at someone, and then they would walk home separately.”
Whether or not one enjoys Summer in Baden-Baden, it must be said that the translation from Russian to English by Roger and Angela Keys is exemplary in precisely how it captures the nuances, mood and writing style of Tsypkin’s original.
Any Cop?: The narrative is a mere two hundred pages long, but the slim volume belies the literary complexities between the book’s covers. Tsypkin’s novel will undoubtedly have both its fans and detractors, yet the re-issue of this little-known novel as part of their ‘Classic Fiction’ series in order to bring it to a new audience, is surely to the publishers, Faber & Faber’s great credit.
Carola Huttmann
Bookmunch 