Evening Standard (London): Summer of sex, gambling and self-hatred

Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin (with an introduction by Susan Sontag). translated by Roger and Angela Keys (Hamish Hamilton, Pounds 14.99) IN 1991 Susan Sontag picked up a book from a bin of used paperbacks outside a shop on Charing Cross Road. She came to consider it a masterpiece - "among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century's worth of fiction" - and did much to rescue it from obscurity, notably by writing an essay for the New Yorker in 2001. This led to the novel's publication in the United States and now, happily, to the present edition with Sontag's excellent introduction.

To be reviewing this remarkable book feels like another instance of serendipity: more than 20 years ago I read the Russian manuscript (smuggled out of the Soviet Union), and went on to commission the English translation, published in 1987 - the edition that Susan Sontag happened upon years later in a second-hand bookshop.

Leonid Tsypkin, a Russian Jew, lived and died in obscurity. He was a research doctor by day and a secret writer by night, without any prospect of being published. Most of his family had been wiped out under Stalin, and he was persecuted. In 1977, as a result of his son and daughter-in-law being granted exit visas to America, his medical career was effectively ended.

That same year he began Summer in Baden-Baden, completed months before he died of a heart attack in 1982, aged 56.

This unusual novel begins with the narrator - unnamed, but clearly Tsypkin himself - travelling by train from Moscow to Leningrad, where he plans to visit the house in which Fyodor Dostoevsky spent his last days. He settles down to read a dogeared book, a memoir by Anna Grigoryevna, second wife of Dostoevsky, describing their turbulent time together in Baden-Baden. What follows becomes a double narrative, a journey within a journey, both real and imagined, from the present to the past and back again.

In 1867, in order to escape crippling debts, the newly wed couple flee to Baden-Baden, where Dostoevsky has the mad idea of winning enough at the roulette table to pay back his creditors. Using Anna's reminiscences as a portal to the past, our narrator enters the life of Dostoevsky and his demons: gambling, epilepsy and selfhatred, to name only three. The facts of that single summer are scrupulously researched, and the creative rendering of them is hypnotic and exhilarating. "Nothing is invented. Everything is invented," as Sontag puts it. Worked into the text is Tsypkin's own strange infatuation with Dostoevsky: a Jewish writer idolising a Russian writer who hated Jews.

In Baden-Baden, Dostoevsky embarks on a terrible cycle of sinfulness and redemption - the stuff of his own novels, in fact - begging and stealing to fund his gambling, losing everything, pawning Anna's jewels, even her clothes, screaming abuse at her one moment and kissing the hem of her threadbare dress the next in loathsome self-abasement. At odd moments between the frenzies at the casino there are exquisite scenes of lovemaking, here described as "swimming".

Tsypkin's prose style is ideally suited to convey the emotional intensity of his story. The sentences are miraculously long, building and swelling in a hectic, feverish stream of consciousness, rising and falling vertiginously, often extending over several pages and held together only by the odd conjunction or dash. All of this could easily be intolerable for the reader.

But it is not. Instead, it is something approaching genius (as is the translators' achievement in making it accessible).

Quite the most moving part of this double helix of a book is the depiction of Dostoevsky's long-drawn-out death, with young Anna in faithful attendance, kneeling by her husband's bed, wiping bloodstained foam from his mouth.

Sontag writes that after reading this book one is "purged, shaken, fortified, breathing a little deeper, grateful to literature for what it can harbor and exemplify". Large claims, but valid.