A summer in Baden-Baden

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A Summer in Baden-Baden ( Russian title: Léto v Baden-Badenu, Лето в Бадене) is the title of a novel by the Russian writer Leonid Borissowitsch Zypkin that was written from 1977 to 1980 and published in 1982 in the Nowaja Gaseta , an émigré newspaper that appears in New York .

Dostoyevsky's favorite picture: Raphael's Sistine Madonna with the perfect triangular composition hangs in his study as a photograph above the divan on which he died on February 9, 1881.

content

overview

The actions essentially take place on two often interpenetrating time levels:

  • A first-person narrator (with biographical similarities to the author) travels from Moscow to Leningrad in the winter, at the end of December, in the present day of Zypkin, in the 1970s, to visit the museum set up in the house where the writer died for his Dostoevsky research.
  • The results of his research are faded in: comparisons to the present level and with fictional characters, interpretations and additional fantasies about the life of Dostoevsky and his second wife Anna between 1867 and 1881, with two main focuses: the stay in Baden-Baden and February 9, 1881, the Day of the poet's death. This is how Zypkin's Dostoevsky portrait is created.

Part 1: Two journeys (pp. 27–88)

The narrator's trip to Leningrad

At the end of December, the narrator travels by train from Moscow to Leningrad (e.g. pp. 27, 30–31, 53–54.) And reads Anna Dostoyevskaya's diary, a transcript of her shorthand notes from the first summer, during the journey their marriage abroad and in the train station in Kalinin remembers the writer's stay in this city after returning from custody in Omsk and his military service in Semipalatinsk (pp. 55–56).

"[T] his steady, gloomy look [Anna] seemed clear and gentle to him [Dostoevsky], which he certainly was".
Dostoyevsky, "a no longer a young man [...] with a simple Russian face, light hair and a gray-blond beard".

Dostoevsky's family relationships

The Dostoyevsky couple's trip from Saint Petersburg to Vilna in mid-April 1867 , then via Berlin to Dresden, is incorporated into this framework . In these stories, in turn, retrospectives of the beginning of their relationship and marriage are faded in from the perspectives of Anna and Fedjas (Fjodor): Out of admiration for the famous writer in Petersburg twenty years her senior, the young woman tried to become his stenographer (p. 46) and he dictated the novel The Gambler to her . The beginning love affair is accompanied by rivalries with the stepson from his first marriage Pavel Alexandrowitsch (Pascha) (p. 48), his sisters, who had planned a relative as the second wife for their brother, and Emilia Feodorovna, the wife of his dead brother where he ran a bankrupt magazine editor. Now he has to pay the debts, and he should also satisfy the creditors of the brother's insolvent tobacco factory (p. 51). With financial support of his mother-in-law (Snitkina), she also equips her with travel money, the Dostoevskies avoid the seizures, get married and go to Moscow, where the friends of their brother Vanya are curious about the wife of the famous author of Guilt and Atonement (p. 63).

Extreme feelings

In Dresden the Dostoevskies move into three-room quarters with Mme. Zimmermann. They stroll through the city, dine in restaurants that are as inexpensive as possible, get annoyed at the service of the waiter they call "diplomat" and visit the museum, where the writer Raphael's painting, with the triangular group above the clouds, which symbolizes perfection for him, high up from The museum attendant's chair (pp. 40, 44) is viewed from and asked down by the latter. Such situations of failed ascent are typical for him. In connection with this, in repeated memoirs (e.g. pp. 34, 39, 43) the motive of humiliation during the time of the katorga and of Dostoyevsky's fearful submission to the square major in the fortress of Omsk, where he was from 1850 to Was imprisoned in 1854. Often he reacts out of his feeling of inferiority or the fear of not being taken seriously and ridiculed by others, uncontrollably, as in Frankfurt when he breaks off a hat purchase because he imagines the saleswoman considers him a barbarian, or if he does in society fears that people will laugh at him when he reveals his feelings (pp. 80–85). He also often misjudges the behavior of his worried wife and her smile and becomes angry. Later he approaches her kneeling with a guilty conscience, brings her small presents and seeks reconciliation while “saying goodbye” in the evening. At the beginning of the relationship he tried to impress her with his shooting skills at a fair, he is constantly worried that his younger wife will make fun of their “swimming together”, which prevents him from “flying like a seagull, free and floating slightly over the sea ”. He jealously watches their cheerful conversations with others. Instead, he wants her to sit next to him at his desk so that he can think better. When she finally does this at his insistence, he accuses her of not doing it gladly and gets angry, for which he then has to ask her forgiveness again in circulatory movements (pp. 83, 85).

The unattainable goal

The trip to Baden-Baden (pp. 64, 70, 71, 80, 86) via Leipzig and Frankfurt is interspersed with intervening retrospectives and memories that reflect the mutual dependence of the couple on one another. Dostojewski visits Homburg from Dresden and Anna reads the letter from his former girlfriend Apollinarija Suslowa, which arrives during his absence . After his return, Anna watches her husband reading the letter. This reminds him (pp. 67–69) of the joint trip with Apollinarija to Italy and Paris. She loved a Spaniard, and after he left her, Dostoevsky was allowed to accompany her on her journey on the train and on the ship, albeit only as a friend. In such situations, as before, when she feared her husband's family would undermine their connection, Anna seeks a hold, symbolized by a ship's mast to which she clings, and this makes it clear that the writer is the center of hers Life is. While Anna looks at the passing landscapes from the train window and imagines how people live in the passing cities (p. 72), she hopes that in Baden-Baden “luck […] Fedja must finally be on her side” and hers financial situation stabilizes. But her husband also thinks of the mountain of gold coins, which only when he "has acquired the shape of a triangle [] and forms a summit [] [...] can pass into his possession" to the "silvery [] ball, the fate rolls along decisively [], for nobody attainable ”.

Part 2 (pp. 88–135)

Dostoyevsky research by the narrator

At the beginning of this section, the narrator suggests biographical references to the author Zypkin (pp. 89-92) by reporting on his return to the destroyed city after the end of the war, where he lived as a medical student with his parents in the hospital where his Father worked. Another parallel is the Dostoevsky research: on the second stay of his train in Bologoje (p. 121) he remembers a union-organized excursion “Dostoevsky in Staraya Russa ” with a film showing The Brothers Karamazov , because in a corner house in this town on Lake Ilmen , the novel house Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, the Dostoyevskis spent every summer with their two children Lyubotschka (Lyubow) and Fedenka (Fodor) from Petersburg, and this is also where Gruschenka Mensheva's house is located, the model for Gruschenka Svetlova (p. 123).

Roulette frenzy

"Fedja sometimes shuttled back and forth several times a day between the pension and the Kurhaus, where the roulette was located."

Baden-Baden appears, in spite of the troubled boarding house because of a forge in the yard and tenants with many children, in the first few days like a clear summer morning. Fedja often visits the Kurhaus several times a day to play roulette. He wins and Anna's "money cat" fills up. Despite Anna's pregnancy, the two hike together to the New and Old Castle and stroll through the spa gardens.

But a changeable phase follows, sometimes the writer has gambled away all the coins that Anna provided him with, and has to ask her for more money. On his way to the Kurhaus, he superstitiously counts exactly 1,457 steps (p. 115) in order to influence the game, which puts him in a state of intoxication: He wins several times and the mountain of money in front of him grows. But when another visitor is disturbed, he gets out of rhythm "and he suddenly rushes down the mountain" and in an attempt to stop him, "his fall [...] continues". Screaming angrily and crying unhappily, he returns to the pension in such situations, where his wife calms him down. His delusions are also articulated in daydreams. During a spa concert (p. 131) for the Egmont overture by Ludwig van Beethoven , he imagines the ascent into a mighty, majestic crystal mountain world to the cloud-covered summit, while the crowd of his critics mocked him from the valley. His wife saves him in a dream from the impending fall, but the fearful state repeats itself during the evening swimming together. She "looks [] into his eyes and [] reaches out her arms to him", but "it [drives] him off, relentlessly and quickly" [...] "his body slacks [] willlessly - quickly and inexorably [sinks] get to the bottom of it. ”The disappointments about the lost games are superimposed with social humiliations. The established and well-off writers Turgenev and Goncharov reside in the Hotel 'Europe', into which the porter does not let him in. This literary class society reminds him of the tension with the satirist Panayev and his circle (pp. 94-100), who caricatured him because of his high self-assessment as a poet. Like Turgenev, whom he admired and whom he tried in vain to get to work on his magazine Vremja (p. 103), they initially encouraged the young writer. Now he feels ignored and socially isolated by them. B. von Nekrasow and Belinski , who promoted his ascent through his review of the poor people . Reasons for this are, in addition to its increasing fame, "heated and careless statements" about the Panayev circle , its definition of true literature and the "dispute between Slavophiles and Westerners ".

3rd part (pp. 135–181)

The crash

After Dostoyevsky has gambled away the travel money, he climbs up to the old castle with Anna , from where “there was a wonderful view of […] Baden-Baden” and “Fedja [stepped] to the edge […] and shouted: 'Leb well, Anja, I'm falling! '"

In the third part, the level of the present takes a back seat: At the end of this section, the narrator arrives in Leningrad. The game theme introduced in the second part, on the other hand, takes center stage: the situation escalates when the initial successes do not continue and Anna has to keep handing him new coins. He even loses his pride, he penetrates the Hotel 'Europe' and asks his wealthy colleague Goncharov for three gold coins. When Fedja loses the last of his cash, he acts increasingly like an obsessional neurosis (p. 141): He pledges his wedding ring and pieces of jewelry Woman, after all, her best clothes. The triangular paths between the Kurhaus, the pension and the pawnbroker accelerate rapidly. He loses all control and wants to force the feeling of happiness of the ascent to the summit. Increasingly carefree he bets without a system (p. 152), wins in the meantime, can no longer stop in time after losses and falls ever lower.

Anna accompanies him full of compassion and love on this path (the Russian title also refers to her), finally goes to the Kurhaus herself to understand his playful instinct and hopes for a profit that will enable them to settle their debts and leave would. When he sees her at the roulette table, he feels a feeling of tenderness and compassion and says: "My wife is a gambler, ei, ei". He leads them away and they take a walk to the old castle. High up above the valley “[he] feels the strange desire to detach himself from the platform [...] and swing up to this blue-black sky, to become one with it, with other worlds. [...] Anna Grigoryevna [stands] next to him now, [holds] his hand with a firm grip, and her face [is] pale ”. Full of remorse, he leads her into the valley. At the post office they receive a letter from Anna's brother Vanya with 100 rubles. Now they could pay for their housing. But while she was packing the suitcase, he promised to buy the jewelry, but gambled away the money again. Anna is now taking the lead and together they buy back clothes and jewelry. Fedja asks for ten francs for his last game in order to complete his triangle with a final win, he comes back successfully and gives her apricots. However, she does not respond to his attempts at reconciliation and is determined to leave, whereupon he suffers an epilepsy attack. Dostoevsky vows to visit the Kurhaus one last time before the train leaves, just to watch, but begs his wife for a guilder. The cycle begins again: he loses, relocates his wedding ring, Anna pledges her earrings, and there is no success again. "[This] time [is] an inevitable final crash, he [] doesn't even try to find a hold in the first place." After arguments with the landlady, who made additional demands, the Dostoevskies finally drive to the train station and leave. The next morning they arrive in Basel.

4th part (pp. 181–238)

Dostoevsky Museum

The present level is connected in the fourth part with the historical level through the narrator's visit to the Leningrad Dostoevsky Museum.

After his arrival in Petersburg, the narrator walks past the houses in which Dostoyevsky lived to see his hostess Gilda Jakowlewna, his mother's best friend. She lives in a shared apartment (pp. 181–194) and tells him in detail about the arrest and imprisonment of her husband, the urologist Mossej Ernstowitsch, in 1937 (p. 188) and the blockade during World War II (p. 201).

At night the narrator reads in Dostoyevsky's diary of a writer from 1877 the section on "Jews: the Jewish question" and reflects, as well as that of many Jewish literary scholars and readers, an ambivalent relationship to the poet he admires, who is repeatedly Jewish in his novels caricatured anti-Semitic as “hidden”. In the dream (pp. 195–197) he processes this contradiction in surrealistic images: a clown-like acrobat with a harlequin mask throws at them, alluding to Dostoevsky scenes in Tver (p. 55) and on the trip to Basel (p. 175) the Jew Issai Fomitsch from the novel Notes from a House of the Dead with sandwiches bought on the platform. After his return from the museum, he reflects on his dream and his examination of Dostoyevsky's anti-Semitism (p. 236).

The next morning the narrator walks through town to Dostoyevsky's house, now a museum (pp. 203–238). On his way he photographs »the house of Raskolnikov«, »the house of the old usurer«, »the house of Sonetschka«. the apartment of the writer and imagines how Anna shortened the novel The Gambler under time pressure because of the deadline . The museum is set up in the five-story corner house on Kuznetschny-Markt. The narrator looks at the exhibited first editions, documents and photographs, reminiscent of Lyubov Fyodorovna, the daughter of Fyodor and Anna, an idiosyncratic life. The writer died in the study (pp. 213–235) on February 9, 1881. A lung hemorrhage from the previous day was probably repeated after the visit of his favorite sister, Vera Mikhailovna, who wanted to persuade the brother to accept an inheritance of more than 500 hectares To renounce his aunt Kumanina's real estate in Ryazan Governorate and to have his share of the estate paid out. During the night, the narrator returns through the snow-covered, almost empty streets to his hostess, who again speaks of the blockade and the arrest of her husband.

analysis

Assemblies

Zypkin uses the assembly technique in his novel , i.e. In other words, it combines various time levels and personal relationships with flowing transitions or association jumps from thematic points of view and repeatedly takes up individual motifs in the course of the novel, such as the summit or the crash.

An example of this linking technique is the interruption of the narrator's train journey in Kalinin (pp. 52–55). Because of its symbolism, the station between Moscow and Leningrad / Petersburg serves as a local transition to Dostoyevsky's return from exile from Semipalatinsk with his first wife Maria Dmitrijewna to this city, from where he submissively tries to be allowed to live again in Petersburg. The narrator describes his efforts as he “hurried to one side of the station, now to the other, with his worn coat billowing, to the trains from Moscow or Petersburg approaching Tver, who bowed respectfully, made loud, demanding speeches Grabbing gentlemen by the laps of their tailcoats or their uniform, she asked, she implored him to listen to him, who calculated his actions cleverly so as not to sell himself cheaply, almost like those Jidden [...] ”. This is followed by a comparison with the protagonist Stavrogin from Demons (p. 56), who is interpreted as an antithesis to Dostoevsky, as the embodiment of his unfulfillable dream, the superman with demonic facial features and a diabolical gait. Pjotr ​​Stepanowitsch Verkhovensky, another demon figure, trudging through the mud behind him, leads on to the memories of a classmate of the narrator and his father (pp. 57–59). After a few anecdotes about the two of them, we go back to the demons and the grotto in Stavrogin Park (p. 61), whose presumable model he has visited in Moscow. It is located near the apartment of Anna's brother Vanya, a student at the Petrovsko-Razumovskoye Academy, where she visited him after their wedding (p. 62). As the train continues, the narrator continues reading the diary and finds in it the description of the train journey from Dresden to Baden-Baden with Anna looking back at the letter from Dostoyevsky's former girlfriend arriving in Dresden, which his wife observed when he read it Writer remembers the time with Polina (pp. 65–69). This fade-in ends with a dash and the scene jumps back to the Dostoyevskies on the train, whereupon, again after a dash ("- I saw him recently [...] he was shown in the top left corner of a painting"), the The narrator's report from a Moscow exhibition (p. 70) follows. He describes a giant picture with the title "Return of the Prodigal Son", which is symbolic for many exiles, and notes that there was a plaque next to it with an explanation of the work of art "to prevent misinterpretation".

Historical background

The author selects three phases of repression from the history of Russia , which are represented in the novel by three characters: In the so-called Age of Reforms , after the French Revolution and the protests of the 1830s and 1840s in Central Europe, several groups also formed in Tsarist Russia. who advocated reform or worked towards an overthrow. In St. Petersburg, Dostoyevsky joined the Petraschewzen , a group of progressive intellectuals who fought despotism and serfdom . The writer was denounced in 1849 and sentenced to death. Only at the place of execution was he informed of his pardon by Tsar Nicholas I, sentenced to four years in exile and sent to Siberia for forced labor .

Zypkin's novel refers to this time in several places: Again and again in Dostoyevsky's memoirs (e.g. pp. 34, 39, 42, 43) the motif of humiliation during the time of the katorga and his fearful submission to the square major appears in the Omsk Fortress opposite, whose face "with a red nose and yellow lynx eyes". as well as the “massive chin” appears to him in fearful situations. During a stay in the train station in Tver | Kalinin, the narrator thinks of Dostoyevsky's stay in this city after his return from Semipalatinsk , where he fulfilled his military duties from 1854 to 1859 and was promoted to officer through protection and good behavior. Two years later, after his exile was lifted, he was allowed to return to St. Petersburg (pp. 55–56).

Despite their dissatisfaction with the political situation, the political views of Russian intellectuals varied widely. In his novel, Zypkin addresses the conflict between supporters of rapprochement with the West (Westerners) and opponents of such rapprochement (Slavophiles). Continuing the comparison between Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, he addresses their common Slavophilia in the second part. The starting point is his discussion with Turgenev in the luxury hotel 'Europe' (pp. 108–112) about his novel Rauch, set in Baden-Baden . Using the example of the former serf Potugin, he accuses his former role model of never having known Russia. For the narrator, this “duel went down in Russian literary history as an ideological argument about the relationship between Russia and the West” and was revived a hundred years later by Solzhenitsyn.

Incorporated into the montages and associated with Dostoyevsky's traumatic experiences are fates from the Stalinist era that were victims of the “purges” . In the fourth part, the narrator learns from his Leningrad hostess Gilda Jakowlewna that her husband Mossej Ernstowitsch was arrested and imprisoned in 1937, i.e. during the period of the so-called Great Terror from 1936 to 1938, like the author's father, Boris Zypkin, in 1934 .

This way of dealing with political opponents or alleged critics continues in the presence of the narrator and is presented using the example of the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn , who for his criticism of Stalin at the end of the Second World War sentenced to eight years of forced labor in labor camps, during the de-Stalinization period during the Khrushchev's government rehabilitated, but then, after returning to the hard line (see 1964–1985: Brezhnev and his successors ), was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974. In local (arrival in Frankfurt) and thematic connection with the Dostoevsky era, the narrator compares the way in which both the tsarist and communist rulers deal with uncomfortable critics (pp. 75–78). Both writers were sentenced to work in prison camps as opponents of the regime and have written books about them. Solzhenitsyn also referred explicitly to his colleague's confession that “happiness, even that of humanity as a whole, should not be built on the sufferings of others”, and certainly not on a “destroyed children's experience []”. The narrator refers to characters as evidence from Dostoyevsky's winter notes on summer impressions .

The subject of repression can also be found in Zypkin's biography: he did not offer his novels to publishers and did not distribute them by typewriter copies because he was afraid of losing his position at the Institute for Poliomyelitis and Virus-Related Encephalitis in Moscow. After his son Mikhail and his wife emigrated to the United States, Zypkin was downgraded in the hierarchy and also made exit applications in 1979 and 1981, but these were rejected. Since he no longer saw a chance to publish his works in Russia, he had journalists smuggle a copy of the novel A Summer in Baden-Baden out of the country. Seven days before his death, the first episode appeared on March 13, 1982 in a Russian émigré newspaper in New York.

Themes and motifs

Longing for the summit and falling

The theme of the futile summit storm pervades the novel as a leitmotif and develops from the most varied of situations, such as the sexuality Anna ("swimming"), the roulette game in the casino, the everyday struggle against invisible resistance, e.g. B. his lack of money for shopping, the expensive dinner in the hotel 'Victoria' or his epilepsy attacks: “[T] this summit and this inaccessible reason contained the terrible and at the same time wonderful solution of a riddle, something he did not name, not even imagine could, and throughout his life [...] he should constantly strive to get to this summit or crater, which however remained inaccessible ”.

The frenzy of gambling expands from the material aspect to a metaphor for his longing for the perfect transcendent feeling of happiness, which also captures him when looking at Raphael's Sistine Madonna, during daydreams and epileptic fits. The image of the sublime mountain world and that of the summit appear again and again above the clouds, so that the valley population mocking them, the rival writers, can no longer be seen. These hallucinations accompany him, for example, with his winnings: “Everything was spinning around him in a wild vortex, he saw nothing but the heap of coins in front of him and the bullet whizzing around [...] he kept getting new coins, which he scrambled up and opened grabbed his reddish-gold shimmering pile - the top of the mountain, all of a sudden it appeared above the clouds that had remained below - it was now at such a height that nothing could be seen of the earth - everything around was covered with white clouds, and he walked over them - strangely enough they carried him, even lifted him up to the unconquered reddish-gold summit, which had recently seemed inaccessible to him ”.

But this feeling of happiness is short-lived. The way he is called down from his chair by the guards in the exhibitions after he "[towered] over all the visitors, they were all pygmies, including the museum attendant who hurried towards him", his actions met with rejection in literary circles. The uncontrolled upstart is viewed with suspicion.

Dostoevsky experiences this feeling of falling in the third part, with his losses in the game: "The speed of his fall took hold of him more and more - if he had not been able to overcome a certain dividing line on the ascent to the summit and was now rolling downwards, then perhaps there was a line here too, a boundary that he would not go beyond? - No external circumstances played a role here - it was only a matter of surrendering to this movement, this elemental force and so he rushed downwards with his eyes closed - the familiar figures were now somewhere up there - grinning they pointed their fingers at him again […] but [...] it was not destined for them to experience this dizzying case to which he had given himself - only the half-hearted thing is humiliating [...] alone an idea that takes possession of him completely frees people and puts them above everything " . Even after his repentant return to Anna "he never forgot this experience of the breathtaking fall, which gave him a feeling of superiority over his surroundings, so that he even felt a certain compassion for those around him".

This motif reappears in the fourth part of Dostoyevsky's description of the sick bed under the photograph of the Sistine Madonna : “The dying man sank inexorably into a bottomless abyss that resembled a volcanic crater - but he himself had the feeling that he was now the highest mountain in the world to climb - it was far higher than the one he had ever conquered or tried to conquer, and believed to walk a straight, bright, crystal path as effortlessly as if it were not climbing uphill, but downhill, in part it was for him as if he were flying with invisible wings, and at the end of the path, on the summit of the mountain, the sun was shining [...] and from the summit of this mountain not only the whole earth opened up before him with the bustle of its inhabitants, but the whole Universe with brightly shining giant stars, and for a moment he gained insight into the terrible secrets of these distant planets, but the next moment he was given away h the sun, and he sank into a terrible, bottomless darkness ”.

Dostoevsky's anti-Semitism

The Russian title “Love Dostoevsky” could also be thought of with a question mark. Because from the beginning (e.g., p. 28) the aspect is present how the writer caricatures the Jews in his novels according to anti-Semitic images, for example Jidde Lyamschin (p. 60). Hidden examples are given from The Demons , Notes from a House of the Dead , Guilt and Atonement , The Karamazov Brothers . But not only in the literary works the Jewish narrator finds a lot of evidence, also in theoretical form Dostoyevsky explains in the section on "Jews: the Jewish question" in his diary of a writer from 1877 his reservations about "world Jewry", that "the Russians mercilessly yield[]".

Towards the end of the novel, this topic is discussed in detail. In view of these “well-known anti-Semitic arguments”, it appears to the narrator “extremely strange that a man who shows such sensitivity to human suffering in his novels should insult this devoted advocate of the humiliated and insulted, who with such fervor, even vehemence, the right to exist champions every creature and sings an enthusiastic hymn to every leaf and grass, has not found a word of defense or justification for people who have been persecuted for thousands of years - was he so blind, has hatred made him blind? ”He wonders why there are so many Jewish scientists in Dostoevsky research (p. 236), he is one of them, he too researches the connections between the biography and the novels, explores family relationships and photographs the templates for the locations.

His own ambivalence, but also his injury as a Jew, is reflected in his dream of an acrobat with a harlequin mask and a Dostoevsky requisist who performs his tricks on a platform. When the comical figure of the Jew Issai Fomitsch from notes from a house of the dead confronts himself, the clown throws sandwiches at him (pp. 195–197). In conclusion, the narrator thinks about this dream (p. 236) and his own way of dealing with Dostoyevsky's anti-Semitism.

Contradictions and extreme emotional fluctuations

The narrator not only discovers moral contradictions in the novel designs; the person he portrays is also exposed to extreme fluctuations in emotions. On the one hand there is compassion for the poor. After a robbery almost two years before his death, Dostoyevsky paid the fine for the drunken perpetrator. On the other hand, he is convinced of his mandate as a writer in “pathological self-love”. He strives for the summit. He also sees the Slavic question as the “divine mission of the Russians who are called to liberate Europe”.

He himself is more of a weak person who tends to overreact from inferiority complexes and compensates for this in his novels. The narrator suspects that the protagonist of the demons Stavrogin can be seen as an antithesis to the author, as the embodiment of his unrealizable dream of the superman with demonic facial features and a diabolical gait. In family disputes he is often yielding to the sisters, but he uses Anna's fortune to pay off his brother's debts, he has his mother-in-law pay for his honeymoon, his gambling addiction overwhelms his wife's housekeeping and pledges her clothes and jewelry.

Apparently it is these weaknesses that Dostoevsky repeatedly regrets, his humiliations, which he considers to be deserved in moments of the crash he caused, the pendulum movements between rebellion and subordination, between not wanting to attract attention, e.g. B. against the Germans, and uncontrolled outbursts of anger in public, between insulting others and one's own vulnerability and his extreme claims, which the Jewish narrator puts on the other scale against the anti-Semitism that hurts him personally.

reception

In the German feature section, Zypkin's novel is celebrated as a discovery after the new translation:

  • as a litter of stature, as a rather singular piece of literature that confronts two centuries, two epochs, two societies in a light, seductively lively narrative flow,
  • as a convincing example of a connection between historical materials, the author's research and his fictional Dostoevsky scenes that incorporate the writer's novels and his biography. In its abundance of associations, this is a Dostoevsky novel like no other: it conjures up a great literary monster with an almost tender love-hate relationship.
  • In this context, the narrative approach (love Dostoyevsky), the question of how the Jewish-Russian author can be fascinated by a contradicting personality with anti-Semitic ideas, that he reads his novels and researches his life, is recognized as extraordinary. Zypkin referred the catastrophe of the century back to literature, sealing it behind a pupil's question to his literary master, representing the quietest, most discreet, perhaps the greatest artifice of this haunting novel.
  • With this technique of linking different building blocks, Zypkins convincingly combines a style characterized by meandering endless loops, which despite all the psychological accuracy has something urgent and breathless. The author only put points at the end of his few paragraphs, otherwise the sentences, separated only by dashes, hurried along as if they were fighting against a deadline. This corresponds to the perception of Dostoevsky, who was looking for spiritual rescue and crashed into walls everywhere. This style harmonizes with the manic-depressive roller coaster of Dostoyevsky's feelings and the relationship with his second wife Anna Grigoryevna.

literature

  • Susan Sontag : love Dostoevsky . Foreword to the novel. In: Leonid Zypkin: A summer in Baden-Baden . Translated from the Russian by Alfred Frank. Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-8333-0513-9 , pp. 5–25.

References and comments

  1. ^ Leonid Zypkin: A summer in Baden-Baden . Translated from the Russian by Alfred Frank. Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8333-0513-9 . This edition is quoted.
  2. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 49.
  3. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 70.
  4. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 38.
  5. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 82.
  6. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 84.
  7. ↑ In the literary processing of this one-sided love affair in The Player , she appears as Polina, who is unreachable for the first-person narrator Aleksej Ivanovich .
  8. ↑ a b Zypkin, 2007, p. 88.
  9. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 87.
  10. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 124.
  11. ↑ a b Zypkin, 2007, p. 92.
  12. ↑ Sonechka, = Sonja and Sofia died in Geneva in 1868 soon after birth.
  13. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 118.
  14. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 119.
  15. ↑ a b c Zypkin, 2007, p. 134.
  16. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 230.
  17. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 108.
  18. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 160.
  19. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 159.
  20. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 160 f.
  21. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 172.
  22. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 205.
  23. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 55 f.
  24. ↑ This scene flows into the narrator's grotesque dream at the end of the novel in connection with the commentary on the writer's anti-Semitism.
  25. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 70.
  26. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 71.
  27. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 34.
  28. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 42.
  29. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 108.
  30. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 78.
  31. ↑ Susan Sontag: Love Dostoevsky . Foreword to the novel. In: Leonid Zypkin: A summer in Baden-Baden . Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin 2007, pp. 5–25.
  32. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 44.
  33. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 117.
  34. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 42.
  35. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 148 f.
  36. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 150.
  37. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 232 f.
  38. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 192 f.
  39. ^ Zypkin, 2007, p. 192.
  40. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 193.
  41. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 153.
  42. ↑ Zypkin, 2007, p. 207.
  43. ↑ First over. by Heddy Pross-Weerth 1983. Aleksey Tashinskiy wrote in 2016: (A) translation ... in which Pross-Weerth converts the complex, sometimes confusing syntactic structure of the text with its page-long sentences into a has transposed more easily consumable prose. In Germersheim translator lexicon UeLex, sv the translator
  44. ↑ a b Fantastic Freedom. In: Der Spiegel.
  45. ^ Woyzeck in Roulettenburg. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . March 15, 2006.
  46. ↑ a b Christoph Keller : Tenderly, with force. A discovery: the American doctor Leonid Zypkin wrote a single book - and it's wonderful. In: The time . July 27, 2006 .;
  47. ↑ Andreas Breitenstein : The Fever of Strangeness - Leonid Zypkin's dizzying Dostoevsky novel "A Summer in Baden-Baden". In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . May 30, 2006 .;