A Magic Journey

...I look at him across the table and see in his pleasant soft features a determination to stay "not known yet...

...He had no explanation for it...

...Anna replaced in his heart a femme fatale, Apollinaria Suslova, a well-known St...

...But these humble bodies are shown sharing a deep physical love: "That night, when he went to kiss Anya, they swam away again together, rhythmically thrusting out their arms from the water and raising their heads to take in gulps of air - and the current did not sweep him away - they swam toward the receding horizon, into the unknown, deep-blue distance, and then he began to kiss her again- a dark triangle appeared, upturned - its apex, its peak...

...Although a refusenik, having twice been denied an exit visa, he still was always on the move, at least in his imagination...

...He is always overdressed, or underdressed, never comme il faut, like his fellow writers Ivan S. Turgenev and Ivan A. Goncharov...

...Instead, he served as the prototype for the writer's ever hated Byronic man, Nikolai Stavrogin in The Possessed...

...But the latter resist demythologization to the point where they doubt that Dostoyevsky's legs were as short as mentioned above...

...This seems somewhat implausible in the light of Dostoyevsky's outstanding gift of ironic observation, reflected in his portrait of Turgenev moving from one of his great novels to another...

...Asked whether he really disliked the Jews, the celebrated American writer is purported to have said: "Yes, it's true, I don't like them...

...As Sontag puts it: "Tsypkin is traveling into Fedya's and Anna's souls and bodies, as he travels to Leningrad...

...He itti belonged to the tribe of Russian Jewish writers and poets that contributed a lot to rekindling the spirit of the Russian intelligentsia...

...There are prodigious, uncanny acts of empathy...

...like the inverted peak of a high mountain...

...Perhaps in the 1970s, during one of those Moscow "kitchen sessions" where intellectuals washing down eggplant "caviar" with cheap Bulgarian wine talked about the heavily jammed foreign radio broadcasts and onionskin somizito manuscripts...

...In the rare episodes placing Fedya in a social situation, he sees himself as a clumsy dolt, a laughingstock losing his composure with Turgenev, that benevolent and politely condescending gentlemen...

...Fyodor and Anna have left Baden-Baden...

...Two weeks later, when the manuscript was done, he told her everything about his penal servitude, his epilepsy, his lack of money, and asked her to marry him...

...They never lived in the shtetls of the Pale, but they longed for the freedom to fly off, the way Marc Chagall and his fiancée flew over the dilapidated Vitebsk's roofs...

...Like other creative intellectuals of the late Soviet epoch, though, Leonid Tsypkin tended to demythologize the major Russian literary figures...

...In the concluding dozen pages Tsypkin changes the rhythm of his narrative from the staccato to the elegiac...

...Relatively few books have been written about the Russian Jewish intelligentsia of the Soviet period...

...Tsypkin's story shifts back and forth in time and crosses the borders of several genres: It is partly autobiography, partly a travelogue and partly a reimagining of Dostoyevsky's life, creating a text of extreme intensity that is not easy to swallow...

...In that sense Tsypkin was a happy man...

...Near the bed, genuflecting, is Anna...

...The next day Tsypkin goes to the Dostoyevsky Museum, located in the building where his idol died in 1881...

...Someone sitting in a corner, squeezed between Shurochka and Dodik, smiles shyly...

...Sweaty and panicky, he tosses himself from the Kurhaus Casino to the pawnbrokers—those invariable Weissmanns and Josels—stopping on the way at the apartment he and Anna have rented to sneak out with an heirloom of hers, or a shawl, or a peignoir...

...To escort the dead and be first To greet the resurrected is their calling...

...She holds the hand of her beloved Fedya...

...Unlike everybody else, he is not trying to draw attention to himself...

...Where his idol is concerned he often overplays his hand...

...He never could remember what it was, but in his subconscious there settled a vague hope that next time he would find out more...

...he would not appear much taller...

...Reminiscences by Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevsky, so this trip the lovely and devoted wife of his idol is also present...

...It is a dark winter afternoon...

...Even a routine eight-hour train ride from Moscow to Leningrad was a magic journey to his dreamland, for he had as his travel companion that genius of Russian letters and notorious antiSemite, his beloved Fyodor ("Fedya") Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky...

...Summer in Baden-Baden opens with the unnamed narrator (Tsypkin) bound once more for Leningrad...

...In whose every step reverberates sobbing...

...A poem by Osip Mandelstam, a singer of Leonid Tsypkin's tribe, comes to mind: There are women kin to the damp earth...

...The journey is over...

...Sentences run a very long paragraph, or a whole page, or sometimes three whole pages, and there are no chapters...

...She came to work for the mysterious literary giant as a secretary, shortly after his return from Siberia thanks to Alexander II's perestroïka...

...As for Dostoyevsky's anti-Semitic feelings, it should be recalled that his vitriolic remarks extended to the French, Germans, Poles —and to his own tribe, the "holy and long-suffering" Russian narod (people...

...Desperately trying to meet a publisher's deadline, he dictated The Gambler to her...

...An example is Prince, "that principal antithesis of himself, that demonicfaced superman, stepping firmly and with diabolic gait," who did not make it into print...

...That is Dr...

...In the chic Baden-Baden resort town Fedya looks tragically comic, or simply comic, or downright slapstick...

...In a poetic tribute to Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, the contemporary poet Vladimir Kornilov described her as the "one and only luck of Russian letters...

...In the 1970s this was considered avantgarde...

...Petersburg nihilist who tortured Dostoyevsky with her mendacious behavior...

...or rather the core of a volcano," et cetera, et cetera...

...he writes "for the desk drawer...

...He was indissolubly connected to Russian literature, and at the same time functioned outside of its everyday contaminations by Soviet filth, stool pigeons and vanity fair...

...Anna is a young, petite woman with a "glowering" face...

...As he stands out front his heart is "pounding with joy and some other vaguely sensed feelings...

...In this respect he apparently was somewhat akin to William Faulkner...

...Reviewed by Vassily Aksyonov C. Robinson Professor of Russian Literature, George Mason University...

...He did not even refer to the Jews as a people, but as a tribe, and to this tribe I belong...

...This vicious cycle is occasionally broken, but only when Fyodor is preoccupied by the almost devastating vision of some hostile fictional character he is fashioning...

...What does he write...

...The fight over his roulette playing is, in fact, the central plot of Summer in Baden-Baden, if one can speak of a plot in a work that is essentially a highly emotional verbal stream filled with the haunting nightmares of its protagonist...

...Who is that...

...And how afterward "he walked toward Krivtsov...

...With each passing hour he is getting paler, to the point of total whiteness...

...Among other things, he muses about Dostoyevsky's notorious anti-Semitism...

...I probably never met Leonid Tsypkin, but I knew many people like him: engineers, physicians, scientists, and other professionals engaged in a lifelong love affair with Russian literature...

...Behind the Iron Curtain there was only one place of escape, Russian literature, that metaphysical shtetl of happiness...

...Then, back at the casino, he quickly loses the pitiful sum these have yielded at the pawnshop...

...It is not known yet...

...Leonid has arrived in Leningrad...

...This mesmerizing book ends with the author inside the museum, in the bedroom where the great Russian writer is dying of an unstoppable throat hemorrhage...

...Tsypkin, a pathologist, and—you know what—he is an outstanding writer...

...He recalls in detail how "when corporal punishment was being applied" a certain prisoner—as though it weren't him—"was beaten with birch-rods, leaving bloody weals on his back and buttocks...

...The completely self-denying Anna, by contrast, stood guard behind her sick husband and challenged their destiny on many critical occasions...

...The pathologist-author provides an astounding approximation of one of those fits...

...How come this writer, who was most sensitive to the plight of all "insulted and injured," was so insensitive to the Jews' multimillennial ordeal...

...After a pause, he added: "I don't like humans, in general...

...For amid the horrible convulsions, the bloody foam on his lips, the unbearable pain and dimming consciousness, there was one ever evasive split second, or something unrelated to time, that gave him a feeling of having attained the unattainable—a sense of the meaning of life...

...Anna (whose maiden name was Snitkin, phonetically close to Tsypkin) is the novel's most developed, not to mention most touching, character...

...On balance, Tsypkin is probably closer to the truth than readers driven by stubborn literary stereotypes...

...On the one hand its members were an indispensable part of the environment, on the other they were firmly separated from it by invisible barriers such as the "fifth paragraph"—the nationality question on the form for securing a mandatory internal passport...

...Indeed, besides everything else, it was also Anna who ultimately helped Fedya, as she always called her husband, overcome his pathological obsession with gambling...

...These shameful and striking scenes usually end with the appearance of Anna, who heroically plays the role of a nurse tending the idiot...

...Fyodor is "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...

...Now here, now there—on a restaurant terrace "so picturesquely placed over the Elbe" or on a chestnut-lined avenue— Fyodor sees "the yellow-lynx eyes of that drunk, red-nosed swine of a commandant in the convict-prison' named Krivtsov, who ordered him whipped...

...The onlookers, friends and admirers, stand along the walls and in a doorway...

...Actually, Leonid Tsypkin belonged to a tribe that was totally unknown to Dostoyevsky, because it had not yet come into being when he died...

...walked with his head lowered - no, not walked, but almost ran - humiliating in itself- and when he reached the officer, he stared at him, not a finn, hard look, but with pleading eyes - realizing this from the way Krivtsov's pupils dilated like a predator's.' Dostoyevsky was plagued, too, by sudden epileptic fits, yet he confessed that he awaited them with anticipation...

...Mentioning Aleksandr S. Pushkin here, just in passing, he can't resist removing the varnish from textbooks about the poet...

...A large number of them were Jewish...

...Today's reader may be vexed by the inescapable abuse of syntax as well as by the metonymical enumeration of objects—until all of a sudden he finds himself engrossed in the book's nervous and solemn incantations...

...On his lap he has a precious book...

...The bodies are not especially striking in this case...

...author, "Generations of Winter" As I finished Susan Sontag's astute Introduction to this remarkable posthumously published novel, I f leetingly felt I had met the author...

...It is not an exaggeration to say that without her some of his major masterpieces would have been left unwritten...

...A century earlier, in the hot summer of 1867, the Dostoyevskys headed for the writer's much coveted roulette tables at a German spa in the same carriage that is now taking the narrator across frosty Russia...