Part novel, part memoir, part travelogue, this rediscovered cult classic imagines the ill-fated summer spent by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his wife at Baden for their honeymoon, the famous German spa town. Written by Soviet Jewish writer Leonid Tsypkin, this is a book that invents its own genre, described as a kind of intense biographical fantasia.
The novel was smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1981 - it only appeared in print in an American émigré journal one week before the author's death. Tsypkin never saw the work published in his native Russian.
What does Susan Sontag say?
“Among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century’s worth of fiction and para-fiction.”
What do the reviewers say?
“One of the most beautiful and oddest books I have read about the singular power literature has over its devotees”
“A frantic, frenetic, fever-burst of a novel; a wonderful work of art”
“The way it dances between forms – fiction and biography, story and essay, Dostoevsky’s life and Tsypkin’s own – is extraordinary in its confidence and enchantment”
Why do we love it?
A one-of-a-kind book that’s both lyrical and brutal, by a forgotten author with a fascinating life. Rooted in the strangely compelling story of Dostoyevsky’s marriage to his typist, and roaming across a dreamily familiar 19th century landscape, I’ve never read anything quite like it.