Summer in Baden-Baden

One bitterly cold winter in the 1970s, the author's obsession with Dostoyevsky leads him to Leningrad by train, so that he can see for himself where his hero died. As the train makes its way across Russia, a journal inspires him to conjure up the summer of 1867, when Dosteyevsky and his young wife Anna travelled across Europe to Baden-Baden.

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Summer in Baden-Baden is Leonid Tsypkin's beautiful and original cult classic -- a love story of the rarest intensity by a 20th century Russian master.

One bitterly cold winter in the 1970s, Leonid Tsypkin's obsession with Dostoyevsky leads him to Leningrad by train, so that he can see for himself where his hero died. As the train makes its way across Russia, a journal inspires Tsypkin to conjure up the summer of 1867, when Dosteyevsky and his young wife Anna travelled across Europe to Baden-Baden. The destructive demons that beset Dostoyevsky in his later life were in full force at this time, and man and wife battled for their very souls. Yet in Tsypkin's hands this elegy to the great Russian writer becomes a glorious and unforgettable love story.

Praise for Summer in Baden-Baden:

'A remarkable fantasia . . . written in a unique and unforgettable style' James Wood, Guardian

'A hypnotic double narrative, a journey within a journey, both real and imagined, from the present to the past and back again, told in miraculous prose' Evening Standard

'Luminous, extraordinary, magnificent' Literary Review

Leonid Tsypkin was born in Minsk in 1926 of Russian-Jewish parents. Summer in Baden-Baden is the culmination of a passionate, clandestine literary vocation. A distinguished medical researcher by profession, Tsypkin never had even a measure of 'underground' fame. Twice denied permission to leave the Soviet Union with his family, he died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1982.