SUMMER IN BADEN-BADEN

A brilliant Russian novel, first published in serial form in 1982, then made available in a little-read English translation, grafts onto its omniscient author’s account of his own journey to Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) the parallel story of the travels, and travail, of the great Fyodor Dostoevsky. Tsypkin (1926–82) was a prominent physician and medical researcher whose single fictional work offers perhaps the most complex and telling view of this fascinating character—a simultaneously pompous and craven arriviste, vulnerable epileptic, loving husband (to the stoical, splendid Anna Grigor’yevna), and faithless compulsive gambler, “defender of the insulted and injured” and virulent anti-Semite—ever put on paper. Tsypkin’s ingenious juxtapositions and perfectly fashioned transitions between his own conflicted homage to a deeply flawed mentor and a richly imagined fictional past in which Dostoevsky’s runaway passions and his creations are seen in relation to the whole range of Russian literature, cohere into a compact, pellucid, and deeply moving literary experience. There really is no other book like this.