Leonid Borisovich Tsypkin (1926-1982)

Leonid Tsypkin gained recognition as a writer nearly twenty years after his death. The October 1, 2001 issue of the New Yorker carried an article by Susan Sontag,titled “Loving Dostoyevsky: The Recovery Of The Novel".  Sontag wrote that she “would include [Summer in Baden Baden] among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century's worth of fiction and para-fiction.” The article in the New Yorker was followed by the publication of the English translation of the novel (as translated by Roger and Angela Keys), with an introduction by Susan Sontag.  

Subsequent reviews in the American media praised the novel, which dealt with Fedor Dostoyevsky’s obsessive gambling, his difficult relationship with another great writer of his era, Ivan Turgenev, his painful love for his young wife Anna, and his anti-Semitism.  Joseph Frank, the most prominent Western scholar of Dostoyevesky, described it in the New York Review of Books as “a rhapsody on Dostoyevskian themes” and as a “short poetic masterpiece, which opens insightful perspectives on Dostoyevsky as well as on Russian literature past and present.”  Jonathan Rosen wrote in the New York Times that “Tsypkin grapples with Dostoyevsky in this brilliant novel the way Dostoyevsky grappled with a God who, as Ivan Karamazov points out, allows the suffering of children.”  Donald Fanger, Professor of Literature at Harvard, described the novel in his Los Angeles Times review as “a finished work of art in its own right, gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving,” and referred to Tsypkin’s “amazing style, operating through page-long sentences that grow by association, extending themselves in breadth and depth, full of intelligence and surprises.”

Summer in Baden has been translated into more than twenty languages.