Lead Review (Summer in Baden-Baden)
- Book: Summer in Baden-Baden
- Location: Baden-Baden
- Author: Leonid Tsypkin
Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin, a ‘dream-novel’ set partly in Baden-Baden.
Translated from the Russian by Roger and Angela Keys.
This novel is “a kind of dream-novel, in which the dreamer, who is Tsypkin himself, conjures up his own life and that of Dostoyevsky in a streaming, passionate narration.” These are the words of the great Susan Sontag who penned the Forward to the book.
The author was a medic who lived in Russia and he started writing in 1977. He tried to emigrate but he was denied an exit and after his request he promptly got demoted in his job and had his salary reduced. He completed writing the work in 1980 and sadly only lived for seven days after publication.
This is essentially a re-imagining of the lives of the Dostoyevskys, who set off on their travels in 1867 from St Petersburg to Dresden, Baden-Baden and beyond, and the author – who never in fact left the Soviet Union – clearly enjoyed trying to conjure up the locations in which he places his various characters (although there was no evidence when we visited Baden-Baden of the copious brick structures he had imagined and portrayed in the book). Upon arrival in Baden-Baden Dostoyevesky’s wife Anna Grigor’yevna could see “.. a high verdant mountain with white and brick red houses – and here and there the Gothic towers of churches, and above everything the deep-blue sky with fluffy clouds floating across it...”
This is a very curious book, which, although it takes the reader to Baden-Baden, focusses more on the narrator and on the gambling addiction of Dostoyevsky; of course, Baden-Baden is the perfect place to hone your gambling skills, renowned as it is for its casino. Dostoyevsky paces out the steps to and from the gambling emporium along the Lichtentaler Allee, sells some of his wife’s items, spends the money and once again finds himself impecunious. The style of the prose is singular because, it is like a stream of a dream, the words keep coming, there are no sentences, only paragraphs. This book is an acclaimed piece of work (‘Addictive, dreamlike and dazzlingly unique‘ says Adam Thirlwell) but I wonder whether reading habits have changed and now a modern reader will tend to skim and pick at words as they read, rather than go through each word sequentially. If you don’t read this book carefully, it is all too easy to lose track of which character is in the frame at any one time, or which location is cited, as the story swings wildly between Russia and Europe.
The author was a keen photographer and some of his photographs are randomly included – you can only find a 
List of Illustrations brought together at the end. On p90 of my copy there is a photograph of Dostoyevski’s gravestone in St Petersburg. The text below starts off in Baden-Baden on the LIchtentaler Allee, swept over by winds from the Black Forest and then the next paragraph opens with “The train stood at the platform in Bologoye…” The non-sequiturs finally got to me, added to which the author, on the one hand, allows himself to take on the mantle of anti-Jewish sentiment for which Dostoyevsky was known; and on the other, the Germans don’t come out of this well, described as dim-witted and stupid on various occasions. It is of its time – to wit 1970s going back to the second half of the 19th Century – but it simply doesn’t feel right on so many levels in present day.
Overall I just felt this was an anachronistic piece of writing – which is beautifully produced with French flaps – containing a selection of random wooly photos and a style that meandered all over the place. It is hyped as a “trail-blazing modern classic…” I read this in Baden-Baden and it didn’t particularly enhance my experience, although I was keen to walk along the Lichtentaler Alle which features a lot in the book. Not one for me, alas.
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