Little more than thumbnail sketches exist regarding Leonid Tsypkin's life (1926-1982). A survivor of Stalin (unlike most of his family), he was a Jewish doctor who had a distinguished career as a research scientist at a Moscow institute until 1977, when his son and daughter-in-law emigrated to America. Because of their decision to leave, he was demoted and shortly dismissed; he never got out of the USSR. His only novel, the astonishing Summer in Baden-Baden, was written between 1977 and 1980 and smuggled out of the country. It was first published in a Yiddish translation by a New York emigre journal in 1982, and appeared five years later in an English translation in London. In 1999 it was published in Russian in a one-volume edition of Tsypkin's principal prose works. The American edition of 2001 is owed to Susan Sontag's discovery and promotion.
Summer in Baden-Baden is about the Dostoyevsky that lives in the imagination of Leonid Tsypkin. Tsypkin, inseparable from his Jewish narrator, speaks of himself in the first person, in the time-present of the novel, during which he travels by train from Moscow to Leningrad/St. Petersburg, to visit the Dostoyevsky museum and take photographs of places imbued with the writer's spirit. He's on a pilgrimage; possibly it's annual. He carries with him the diary of Anna Grigor'yevna Dostoyevskaya. His thoughts on the train journey run on two parallel planes. One is a deep creative reverie, imagining the life of Fedya and Anna Dostoyevsky during the first spring and summer of their marriage in 1867, while they travel abroad. The other plane concerns surface reflections having to do in one way or another with the guilt he feels about loving Dostoyevsky. Tsypkin knows the evidence of Dostoyevsky's anti-Semitism as well as any Dostoyevsky scholar: that the novelist devoutly believed Jews were a race attempting to achieve world domination-Jewish financiers bringing economic ruin, Jewish socialists exploiting the resulting misery, Jewish liberals preaching tolerance and allowing the enemy within the gate-and that Dostoyevsky actually experienced spiritual terror fantasizing a leering, hook-nosed and thick-lipped monster with tentacles grasping the throats of its victims.
It seems to me that in its unfolding, Summer in Baden-Baden bears some resemblance to an Italian sonnet, its structure roughly in three parts, the second an elaboration of the first, and the third a dramatization of the thematic material of the first and second from an entirely new perspective. This structure corresponds to the depictions of the Dostoyevskys in Dresden, then in Baden-Baden, and then Tsypkin in Leningrad, a pilgrim worshipping at the shrine (the Dostoyevsky museum) and confronting his guilty love. Tsypkin's journey in the time-present of the novel is toward this confrontation. The brio of his portrayal of Dostoyevsky in the Dresden and Baden-Baden sequences derives from his efforts to justify his love to himself. Just how guilt figures in the portrayal is the fascinating question. To the extent that the portrait is malicious, a joke at the expense of Dostoyevsky, Tsypkin has had his cake and eaten it, too.
A number of other authors have written full-scale novelistic treatments of Dostoyevsky, focusing, unlike Tsypkin, on an individual work rather than on the man himself. Conrad, in Under Western Eyes (1911), creatively reuses Crime and Punishment, on one level as part of an aesthetic and ideological rebuttal of Dostoyevsky as an apologist for the autocracy; on another, to express his hatred of all things Russian, displacing blame in order to accept the guilt of having betrayed his father, and the judgment that he was the weak artistic twin and bastard offspring of the great Russian. Nabokov facetiously caricatures Dostoyevsky's proclivities in Despair (1934 in Russian; 1966 in English), his taste, style, monomaniacal heroes, particularly Raskolnikov, parodying scenes and speeches for his tour de force, seeking to debunk Dostoyevsky and demolish his status as an icon-and, at the same time, to write a novel about his murderous feelings of love for the master. Bernard Malamud in The Assistant (1957) solved the problem of loving a writer who detested Jews. He redeems his Raskolnikov through conversion to Judaism. In each of these retellings, the writers achieve revenge on Dostoyevsky while succumbing to his possession.
At least six other writers have made creative reuse of one or another of Dostoyevsky's great novels, including J. M. Coetzee in The Master of Petersburg (1994), who has devised a retelling of the notorious, originally censored chapter of The Possessed, "At Tihon's." Coetzee, like Tsypkin, introduces a fictional Dostoyevsky. His aim is in part like Tsypkin's, to reveal the creative personality of the writer. Coetzee is not at all interested in the biographical man, but the writer the man becomes on the track of a new hero and constellation of characters. He is also out to impress himself with what it takes to be free of political constituencies, free to allow the story to tell itself, which was especially difficult in revolutionary South Africa, as it was for Dostoyevsky in the politicized atmosphere of the Russia of the 1860s and 70s. Coetzee's Dostoyevsky has no principles and no beliefs. He's a fanatic, as focused in his way as the terrorist Sergei Nechaev, willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to find his story. He pays with his soul for the power to summon forth the complex human world that lies behind our orthodoxies. Ah, to be able to imitate the master's power!
Why am I so obsessed with Dostoyevsky? Why am I so eager to submit to his power? Tsypkin's Jewish narrator asks himself, though the full, souring impact of the questions (with their rancid cargo of anti-Semitism) he is able to submerge for the time, abandoning himself to a supreme pleasure: thinking Dostoyevsky.
In February 1867 Dostoyevsky married Anna Grigor'yevna Snitkina, the twentyyear-old stenographer to whom he had dictated The Gambler four months earlier, fulfilling a contractual obligation that would otherwise have cost him years of indenture. Was he an aging bull at forty-six with a yen for tender grass? He brought to the marriage bewildering debts (owing partly to the failure of a literary journal), the impatient threats of creditors, deep ties of gratitude to his dead brother Mikhail that called for unstinting financial aid to the widow and her children; and responsibility for Pasha Isayev, his teenage stepson, who expected his support (and who earned a reputation for being shiftless). All of these dependents were greatly annoyed by the prospect of Dostoyevsky's marriage. While Tsypkin travels by train, so too do the Dostoyevskys-to Vilna, Dresden, to Baden-Baden, and on to Basel and Geneva-to get away, and on a honeymoon, to win at roulette, and also, though it was a constant with Dostoyevsky and hardly need be said, to come upon a nexus of events and emotions that will lead to his next novel.
Tsypkin enters their world, through the medium of the diary, at a cheap restaurant near the Dresden museum, where with a rattle and bang of silverware, the great writer's private demons are expelled into the open and Tsypkin's novel properly begins. The waiter deliberately ignores the Dostoyevskys, servilely attending to an "officer with fleshy red nose and yellowish eyes." Fedya explodes-shouting at Anna, clattering utensils, slamming the door of the restaurant, and proceeding up the street with a look of disdain on his face. For he saw himself in that despicable waiter, he with that cringing, mewling, fawning look and shuffling downcast gaze, satisfying the stockade commandant's appetite for lewdness. In the waiter he saw himself as he had been fifteen years before, jumping from the barracks bed where he had been resting because ill, and literally running, his whole demeanor grovelling, terrified of being caned. And now Anna would be rubbing it in; Anna had witnessed his humiliation. Fifteen years ago he ought to have walked past Commandant Krivtsov slowly, with great dignity. Anna catches up to him in the street, puts a hand on his arm, but he whispers something spiteful, meant to mortify her. Later he feels chastened, which prompts Tsypkin to an aside. "[P]laying with her at will, was probably like the feeling which I have towards sleek young dogs who, at the sight of a hand stretched out for a stroke, wag their tails in a nervous, pleading way, flatten themselves against the ground and begin to tremble." Precisely the nature of his relationship with Krivtsov. He might as well have been, to the merry disgust of everyone, the man's creature.
Anna is always a passionately willing partner to his love-making. They swim together frequently, nightly-it is their honeymoon-tirelessly stroking for the strong tides. Tsypkin's lovely metaphor for their love-making softens the impressions made on us by Fedya's preposterous, insufferable performances-little continuous explosions of ressentiment which might seem to make integrity in their relationship impossible. That night in bed with Anna he is not carried away, but is preyed upon by a fantasy version of the Krivtsov-memory-twinkling "yellow eyes," his backside bare and beaten, and most shameful, "witnesses, peering through the metal grilled windows" at his unmanning.
The next morning, eyeing a soft chair with a curved back (no doubt yellow) in the gallery where the Sistine Madonna hangs, Fedya "prepar[es] himself for action." And he actually stands on the chair, with an attendant in view attired in full livery with gilded buttons. Payback time! His boldness, his audacity would surely wipe the look of satisfaction off the drunken major's face. At the approach of the attendant, Anna leads him hurriedly from the gallery. But had he stood on the chair long enough? "[A]nd had he really stood on that chair for as long as he actually wanted to"? Was it victory for him or for the commandant?
The searing fantasy version of the memory continues to plague him-his trousers down, the guard caning him, and everyone who knew and cared about him watching through the guard room windows. Brusquely he pushes Anna away. Had he held out on the chair, his would have been a "triumphant pose, leg placed firmly on the commandant's stomach." The fantasy spectators would have blown him kisses!
The mockery and parody, the scene and psychology, smack of the Underground Man. The furtive quickness of transitions in his mood, the sense of imposture, or something surreptitious, that it is performance, and that it is sly, Tsypkin later identifies with Lyamshin-as if to say, Dostoyevsky fashioned that repulsive caricature out of traits he found in himself and identified as Jewish. Indeed, distinctly sharp digs at the venerable FMD, in case one hadn't noticed.
Tsypkin's prose modulations, the paragraph-long sentences held together by conjunctions, pant like a blowfish, as if keeping pace with a man incessantly prodded by phantom humiliations into acts of spiteful self-injury. Tsypkin's Fedya reminds me of an ox turning a millstone, suddenly stung by a gadfly. He cannot get at it-he cannot rewrite the past and it won't leave him alone; or, rather, he can revise it, but the stomach he stands on, that of the fallen Krivtsov, transforms itself again into the hideous yellow abdomen of the bloodsucking insect stinging him with shame. Was Anna ashamed of him, was she laughing at him, did she love him? Tsypkin's Fedya returns again and again to doubting his miraculous luck. Besides, his eyes are so often turned inward, he's incapable of making out what is right before his face. When he does put himself in her place, even then he is conscious, like the Underground Man, of acting a part, of playing his own hand, calculating every effect while wringing out tears and kisses; yes, of there being something surreptitiously nasty in his most abjectly repentant state; yes, especially when on his knees, wheedling.
Tsypkin's Anna chose to have a life with exactly that novelist. It was a matter fixed in her soul even before she met him, when, "gasping with excitement," she was sent by the school to be his stenographer, and felt, Tsypkin says, like someone clinging to the mast of a storm-wrecked ship. She gave him her love from the first totally and unconditionally. Unlike Mariya Dmitriyevna-Dostoyevsky's first wife, who had not experienced his epileptic fits before they were married, and who subsequently felt repelled and physically disgusted by him (Mariya never cared for him sexually)-Anna had had first-hand experience of the illness at a family engagement party. (A similar mortifying scene occurs at Aglaia's engagement party in The Idiot, when Myshkin has a most untimely epileptic fit. Everyone can see the doomed nature of such a marriage.) Anna felt inexhaustible tenderness for the prostrated man then, and subsequently, as when in Dresden after the chair incident, Tsypkin describes the wheezing and gurgling of the brain-shocked, paralyzed man tethered to the bed by invisible ropes and writhing, sweat pouring from his forehead, his face blue, foam bubbling on his lips. She wipes the sweat and foam away with a towel, stroking his face. He takes her hand and presses it to his lips.
Tsypkin's train jostles to a stop at the station in Kalinin-Tver', as it was called in pre-revolutionary days. Dostoyevsky had spent three panicky months there with an invalid wife-it was early fall 1859, ten and a half years since his arrest and deportation-desperately rushing about to acquire final authorization to return to Petersburg. The obsequious petitioner, begging, pleading, conniving, behaving in fact like the Jew in the great novel he would write with its setting in Tver' ten years later, finding the despicable Lyamshin in himself. Also finding, far more significantly, the novel's great hero in himself-Stavrogin, "that principal antithesis to himself, that embodiment of his own unattainable dream, that demonic-faced superman, stepping firmly and with diabolical gait . . ." One look from him and Krivtsov would have wet his trousers. Tsypkin imagines him in company with his lesser devil, Pyotr Verkhovensky, mincing behind him, cunningly and obsequiously out to manipulate him-his face gray, head close-cropped with a bald patch, the very spitting image of an old classmate of his, Tsypkin thinks. There's an idea, Verkhovensky groveling like a Jew before the Prince, "You are the sun and I am a worm." Weren't all revolutionaries Jews to Dostoyevsky? But Tsypkin implies that if shortness, servility, and wriggling are the chief Jewish traits, Dostoyevsky was a landsman.
No doubt there is an element of revenge in the portrayal, at times an um-pah-pah insistence of cabaret in the dancing, singing witnesses of the fictional D's humiliation, something between high-spirited spoof and cold malice, conveyed by a rollicking, carnivalesque, calliope tone and style, panting and puffing as if trying to keep up with the maniacal frenzy of the man, insinuating revenge in the high merriment of parody, yet, at the same time, revealing itself to be intimately germane, not caricature, but the curtain opening on the explosive core of his creativity; or, yes, payback, but never mind, Tsypkin showing the creative personality of Dostoyevsky, the one for whom we forgive everything because of the dance of the pen.
The train enters Baden-Baden, Anna dozing on his shoulder, and Fedya studying her face. Did she love him? Or is the question, how can she love him? But these are merely rhetorical questions. Baden-Baden looms up as the second quatrain of this Italian sonnet, the incidents connected with Dresden being the first. The themes, portrayals, tonalities, and style introduced in the first are most majestically developed and elaborated in the second. The sestet, the leisurely movement to closure, occupies the last forty pages of the novel, and like the best of the Shakespearean sonnets (those in the Italian form), approaches the main theme from an altogether new perspective.
Anna is his wife of four to six months during that summer in Baden-Baden, where he lets himself go to the dogs, his face blotchy, his eyes bloodshot, gambling himself away to the bone, imploring anyone for a fresh loan, compelling Anna to go on the humiliating journey from pawnbroker to pawnbroker, to hock her wedding presents, her jewelry and wedding ring, and finally her clothes. He had written to his girl-wife on the occasion of their engagement:
You have been given to me as a gift from God so that none of the seeds of your soul and none of the riches of your heart shall perish, but may grow profusely and attain abundant flowering. I have received you as a gift, so that I may be redeemed from my great sins when I give you back to God, fully developed, fortified and preserved from everything that is base and poisonous, from everything that kills the spirit. (Kjetsaa 201)
Picture him as framed by Tsypkin: stupefied, slumped on a bench, the deep receding hairline, the eyes peering unfocused into the far distance, his forehead gleaming with sweat, his mind on other humiliations than that of begging Anna on his knees for more money to gamble with. If possible, more searing even than Krivtsov's bloated features-he writhes at memories of the humiliations he suffered at the Panaevs'-at his debut in 1845 as Belinsky's protege. They had not understood him; the excitement had gone to his head. He was young and drunk with the triumph of Poor Folk, imagining that people were talking about him in every corner of the salon. How could they not see how much tawdry longing for acceptance lay behind his need to astonish them-Nekrasov and Belinsky, and especially Turgenev-"to captivate [them] with his ideas and at the same time to warm himself with the pride of his own dreams"? And so egged on into a snare, fooled, made a fool of, himself a fool, the object of convulsive merriment, an ass, and treated like one. Had he actually said that his genius merited publication in a gold surround? Did that deserve a cartoon in which he was a pimple on the nose of Gogol? So, peering out, unfocused, as if looking for Anna, who was already sitting beside him on the bench, he sees how he would thrust himself upon them, hoping to wrest from them a few complimentary words, and the ignominy of it, sitting alone after they had turned their backs on him and left the table, his heart pounding in his ears; and absolutely nothing had changed twenty-two years later, Turgenev by happenstance in Baden-Baden, dressed in lavender with his gold lorgnette, and staying at the hotel deluxe-deluxe, seizing the opportunity to insult him to a lady companion. Monsieur D, engineer by trade, or was it former engineer, scarcely disguising his contempt. And he, what did he do, with his cheap suit and foreshortened legs? But the point is that Dostoyevsky would have bent down and picked up the fop's handkerchief. Must he ever behave like a trained seal?
As if in answer, Tsypkin's Dostoyevsky sneaks into Turgenev's marble columned hotel, and finds himself seated opposite the leonine figure gorgeously attired in a Turkish bathrobe and matching slippers, a white inlaid card table between them. Dostoyevsky impulsively solves the question of why he has come. He insults Turgenev; he calls him a German; his novels, he says, are novels written by a German. As for Turgenev's understanding of things Russian, he would see more clearly peering in a generally easterly direction through the lens of a telescope-his intonation exaggeratedly nasal to mimic the high-pitched squeal of Turgenev, and to caricature a fop. Then Turgenev, peering through his lorgnette: such patriotism from you, with your history!-rather smartly scoring below the belt, in other words, just see what fear has done to a timid man.
One hundred years later, Tsypkin says, these very cudgels were taken up by Solzhenitysn and Sakharov squired by his Jewish wife, and just as with the original combatants, the battle has no real meaning historically, no meaning to the Russian people, nor is it really ideological. The one thing inherent in Russia's national destiny, Tsypkin says, half in jest, is the eradication of the Jews.
One combatant, at any rate, is driven by phantoms, and these phantoms have everything to do with his gambling as well as his clash with Turgenev. They quite disappear, his whole past disappears in the all-consuming sense of liberation he feels in the climb up the hill to the casino, when everything around him spins in a kind of mad vortex. "[N]othing was visible except the piles of coins before him and the tiny ball, rolling round and finishing in the sector he had divined." While winning, he is above the clouds, "so high he could not even see the earth-all was covered with white cloud, and he strode across the cloud and, strangely, it supported him and even lifted him up towards the reddish-gold, unconquered peak."
But the climbing high in this sublime afflatus suddenly pops when a stranger at the roulette table accuses him of stealing his coin. He shrinks from the insult; he is too stupefied perhaps to take objection. The fall, having begun, continues, and as he loses, Turgenev's phantom face expands from the company of phantoms dancing and singing his humiliation, until he is out on the Lichtenthaler Allee muttering to himself and gesticulating, obliviously acting out a fantasy version of what he should have done to the insulting stranger, and writhing at the chorus of witnesses convulsed with laughter at the little Jew they took him for. I think Tsypkin insinuates so much as to say, his vehement gambling and wild, anti-Semitic outbursts are defensive acts of hate, paranoid defensive strikes at a crowd of jeering phantom witnesses.
Tsypkin's train enters Bologoye, the final stop before Leningrad. Looking at the station through windows glazed with ice, he is led by his thoughts to Lake Il'men' a hundred miles to the northwest, to Novgorod on its northern shore, with its medieval churches, and bell towers, and golden cupolas-its austere remoteness, wavy clouds reflected on the lake, as if painted by Raphael. Tsypkin conjures it as a vision ofthat toward which Dostoyevsky climbs when feeling released from the past. In the 1870s they would rent, and later in the decade purchase, a summer house in Staraya Russa, going the last leg of the journey from St. Petersburg by steamer across Lake Il'men' and past the receding cupolas of the Novgorod cathedrals. Scenes from Karamazov flood Tsypkin's imagination, for their house is the old profligate's house, and the town itself the locale of the novel. He is gripping Anna's diary, thinking of the beating Dmitry gives his father, thinking of the scene between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor-implying nothing specific, perhaps Dostoyevsky's prophesy of the destructiveness of the human soul without grace-thinking of Dostoyevsky on his knees before Anna after his losses and insult at the casino-crawling after her on the floor, calling her his angel, begging for love, amnesty, begging forgiveness, begging for money to gamble with, pounding the wall, striking his head with his fists, until Anna dissolves into pity, and her comforting words bring on a fit of sobbing. But his mortification at the gaming table requires more than this. It requires his deliberately bumping against respectable Germans, aiming for them, ambushing them, until Anna is able to steer him into a near-deserted street.
He is quite literally possessed; one might recommend an exorcist; it is possible to say-is it?-that to blame him for his anti-Semitism would be to blame him for being the creator of his novels. His persecuting demons excite the fervor of his faith with its scorpion's tail of anti-Semitism. They lie behind his gambling mania. They give him all the voices. Mustn't one take him all in all, as Henry James says about Coleridge when posing to himself the problem of portraying him in a story?
Would not such a drama necessarily be the question of the acceptance by someone-someone with something important at stake-of the general responsibility of rising to the height of accepting him for what he is, recognizing his rare, anomalous, magnificent, interesting, curious, tremendously suggestive character, vices and all, with all its imperfections on its head, and not being guilty of the pedantry, the stupidity, the want of imagination, of fighting him, deploring him in the details-failing to recognize that one must pay for him and that on the whole he is magnificently worth it. (Holmes xviii)
Scene: Fedya begging money to gamble with. Anna flees the apartment and is only overtaken when she nearly collapses, pregnant and nauseated. Fedya on his knees before her in public obtains the last of her money. On this flip side of his free fall, kicking his heels in a head-first descent, the puffing and panting of the calliope prose describes him strenuously climbing, defying walkways, stairways, overcoming the terrifying steepness, toward the very peak of the mountain. He feels free, placed above everything, something which the court of worthies officiating at his humiliation never could begin to comprehend-that chorus of scoffers pointing up at him "with its enormous crude corporate finger smeared with dirt, bringing to mind the finger of one of the crowd in the painting of the 'Deriding of Christ' which he had seen in Dresden"-while on the drizzly, prosaic afternoons of the summer, Fedya, as usual, plies between house and casino, again and again losing the money the pawnbroker had given him for her brooch and earrings, her lace shawl, her engagement ring.
