Summer in Baden-BadenSummer in Baden-Baden
a Novel
Title rated 4.2 out of 5 stars, based on 7 ratings(7 ratings)
Book, 2001
Current format, Book, 2001, , All copies in use.Book, 2001
Current format, Book, 2001, , All copies in use. Offered in 0 more formatsSummer in Baden-Baden was acclaimed byThe New York Review of Books as "a short poetic masterpiece" and by Donald Fanger inThe Los Angeles Times as "gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving."
A complex, highly original novel,Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December: a species of "now." A narrator--Tsypkinis on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee'sThe Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoyevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything "right." Nothing is invented, everything is invented. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay (which appeared inThe New Yorker), Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle thatSummer in Baden-Baden has survived, and celebrates the happy event of its publication in America with an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel.
A complex, highly original novel,Summer in Baden-Baden has a double narrative. It is wintertime, late December: a species of "now." A narrator--Tsypkinis on a train going to Leningrad. And it is also mid-April 1867. The newly married Dostoyevskys, Fyodor, and his wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, are on their way to Germany, for a four-year trip. This is not, like J. M. Coetzee'sThe Master of St. Petersburg, a Dostoyevsky fantasy. Neither is it a docu-novel, although its author was obsessed with getting everything "right." Nothing is invented, everything is invented. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which in turn resonates with the love of literature's disciple, Leonid Tsypkin, for Dostoyevsky. In a remarkable introductory essay (which appeared inThe New Yorker), Susan Sontag explains why it is something of a miracle thatSummer in Baden-Baden has survived, and celebrates the happy event of its publication in America with an account of Tsypkin's beleaguered life and the important pleasures of his marvelous novel.
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- New York : New Directions, 2001.
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