The Trampled Pride of the Possessed

In conception and form, “Summer in Baden-Baden” is like no other book--or at least not enough like even its nearest relatives (Osip Mandelstam’s “Egyptian Stamp,” Boris Pasternak’s early stories, Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Malte Laurids Brigge,” J.M. Coetzee’s “The Master of Petersburg”) to make comparison useful. For this and other reasons, summary characterization is bound to be misleading. You could say that it is a dense and imaginative re-creation of (mostly disastrous) episodes from a trip the 46-year-old Dostoevsky made through Germany with his young bride, Anna Grigorievna, in the spring of 1867; of their respective characters and psyches, presented both from without and within; and of their marriage. You could add that it is at the same time (like more than one earlier Russian masterpiece) a meditation on itself, a book about its own writing--and so about writing in general. You could mention the suggestive light it casts on Dostoevsky’s creation. All those things are true, but they are incidental to the fact that this is a finished work of art in its own right, gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving.

Its history is as singular as its achievement. The author, Leonid Tsypkin (1926-1982), was a pathologist by profession in Moscow who only late in his too-short life began to write, secretly, for himself alone. “Summer in Baden-Baden” took form over a four-year period between 1977 and 1981. Convinced that it was unpublishable in Soviet Russia, he had a friend smuggle it abroad, and in 1982 a New York emigre weekly printed it in installments. Tsypkin died of a heart attack a week after the first installment appeared.

No critical notice was taken of the book. But one reader, an emigre who worked as a commentator for Radio Liberty and owned a tiny publishing house in Germany, secured the rights from Tsypkin’s son and published the book in German. Soon after, someone from Quartet Publishers in England, noticing the German edition, commissioned Roger and Angela Keys to produce their (brilliant) translation and brought it out in 1987--once more, apparently, to no significant response. Susan Sontag, whom we have to thank for finally rescuing this astonishing book from obscurity (after happening on a used copy in a London bookstore), calls it in her introduction a masterpiece that deserves to stand “among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century’s worth of fiction and para-fiction.” She does not exaggerate.

Two major continuities give the book its shape. One is the fragmentary account of the Dostoevskys in Germany and, later, back in St. Petersburg in the final days of the writer’s life. This account draws its details directly from Anna Grigorievna’s diary and from the reminiscences she composed after her husband’s death. The other is the framing (but similarly fragmentary) report of the author-narrator’s journey by train from Moscow to Leningrad, Anna Grigorievna’s published diary in hand, in pursuit of his obsessive and never-explained fascination with Dostoevsky (whom he refers to, following her, as Fedya).

“Why,” he asks, “had I rushed around Moscow shaking with emotion (I am not ashamed to admit it) with the ‘Diary’ in my hands until I found someone to bind it?--Why, in public on a tram, had I avidly leafed through its flimsy pages, looking for places which I seemed to have glimpsed before, and then why, after seeing it bound, had I carefully placed the book, which had now become heavy, on my desk like the Bible, keeping it there day and night?--Why was I now on my way to Petersburg--yes, not to Leningrad, but precisely to Petersburg whose streets had been walked by this short-legged, rather small individual (no more so, probably, than most other inhabitants of the nineteenth century) with the face of a church-warden or a retired soldier?--Why was I reading this book now, in a railway-carriage, beneath a wavering, flickering electric light-bulb, glaring brightly at one moment, almost extinguished the next according to the speed of the train and the performance of the diesel locomotives, amid the slamming of doors at either end of the carriage by people constantly coming through balancing glasses full of water for children or for washing fruit, leaving for a smoke, or simply to go to the toilet, whose door would bang shut immediately afterwards?--amid the banging and slamming of all these doors, with the rolling motion jogging my book now to one side, now to the other, and the smell of coal and steam engines which somehow still lingered although they had stopped running long ago.”

These two narratives advance, interrupting each other, without chapters or subdivisions, toward no resolution. At the end the narrator raises once again the question of why he is “so strangely attracted and enticed by the life of this man who despised me and my kind”--and once again is forced to leave the question unanswered. What is clear is that the strange attraction has resulted in a genuine poetry whose meaning comes not from either of these narrative strands, or from the sum of both, but precisely from the enigma of their juxtaposition.

I say they are juxtaposed, but reading the book gives the sensation of traveling along a Mobius strip, whose two sides turn out to be, uncannily, a single thing. What unites all the disparate material is, first of all, Tsypkin’s amazing style, operating through page-long sentences that grow by association, extending themselves in breadth and depth, full of intelligence and surprises. The book throbs with felt life. As in Dostoevsky’s own writing, its most prosaic details, freighted as they are with drama and implication, have a way of turning suddenly luminous.

Inevitably, Tsypkin’s book is saturated with allusions to the Russian cultural tradition. Scenes as well as characters evoke it. There is a magical description of the narrator’s walk down Nevsky Prospect, the main artery of Petersburg/Leningrad, that will inspire a sense of deja vu in anyone who has seen it in winter or read any of the great writers--Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Blok, Zamiatin, Mandelstam--who shaped it into an enduring cultural myth. At one point the narrator walks “at random, led by a kind of instinct” until he reaches “exactly the right spot” to find his heart “pounding with joy and some other vaguely sensed feeling”--which might well be the recollection of how this somber city seems to guide the footsteps of its denizens in Pushkin’s “Queen of Spades” or Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” or Andrei Biely’s “Petersburg.” In this case he has arrived via a labyrinth of back streets at the apartment, now the Dostoevsky Museum, in which the writer died, and he goes on to re-create that dying with exceptional power.

The facts come directly from Anna Grigorievna’s accounts, and they are scrupulously adhered to. But now her consciousness (and Dostoevsky’s) are refracted (and so objectified) through a third, that of a 20th century Russian Jew, capable (as Sontag notes) of “prodigious, uncanny acts of empathy.” By the same token, Tsypkin builds into his quasi-fiction the familiar feel of the Dostoevsky world with its pervasive shabbiness and psychological disarray, its openness to the transcendent, its feverish vitality.

Tsypkin’s Dostoevsky is not only a strongly etched character (“already getting on in years, not very tall and with such short legs that it seemed, if he were to get up from the chair on which he was sitting, he would not appear very much taller--he had the face of a man of the common people, and it was obvious that he liked to have his photograph taken and that he was a fervent man of prayer”) but also a plausible one--passionate, given to bizarre impulsive behavior, driven. Readers who have missed in Joseph Frank’s magisterial biography of Dostoevsky a complex enough sense of what the man himself was like will find it supplied here.

Frank, for example, treats Dostoevsky’s crisis in Siberian prison--the exchanging of youthful radicalism for religious and political conservatism--as an entirely positive thing: the writer’s suffering leads him, via a classic William Jamesian conversion experience, to a radically altered sense of the world and his relation to it, which opens the way to the great novels of his maturity. Tsypkin, though his view does not rule out such a reading, conjectures something darker: “Could his morbid pride ever have become reconciled with the humiliations to which he was subjected there?--no, he had only one way out: to consider these humiliations as his just deserts--’I bear a cross, and I have deserved it,’ he wrote in one of his letters--but in order to bring this about he had to represent all those earlier views of his, for which he had suffered, as erroneous and even criminal--and this he did....”

Tsypkin suggests that in all his subsequent dealings--with other writers, with officials, with strangers--Dostoevsky’s main efforts were “subconsciously to preserve his self-esteem” against “the visions and images of his trampled pride [which] never left his side”--and which this book presents as crippling even his sexual relations with the wife he loved and trusted.

Why are we so interested in reading about the lives of writers? One reason, surely, is the intrinsic fascination of bad behavior, and writers’ lives seem to show more of it than most people’s. But mainly, we keep hoping that a knowledge of their experience will bring us closer to understanding the creative process. It is usually a vain hope. At best we can get only a little closer, and Tsypkin, combining the obligations of a biographer and memoirist with the liberties of a novelist, seems to assume this from the start. What he does instead, while concentrating on the purely human Dostoevsky, is to remind us of the miracle, mystery and authority of art--and to do it doubly by resting the demonstration on the evidence of his own.