I wanted to enjoy this book. I really did. Leonard Tsypkin, a Russian doctor wrote only one novel, as a homage to one of his favorite Russian authors, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Tsypkin died in obscurity, and unpublished. After this death, Summer in Baden Baden was discovered and became noteworthy enough to make it onto the 1001 list.
Tsypkin writes the story of Fydor and his second wife Anna living in Baden Baden, Germany after Dostoevsky has left Russia, with significant debt and suffering from debilitating epilepsy. The themes of the novel are similar to the themes of most Russian novels, gambling debt, addiction, sex, and paranoia. Another thing that is very interesting to me is that Tsypkin was Jewish and spent most of his life being persecuted for his religious beliefs, however his novel captures Anna and Fyodor's raging antisemitism.
You can't help but feel bad for Anna, whose husband walks all over her and is downright abusive as they have retreated to Baden Baden to regroup and put their lives back in order. Anna is the one who spends her money to support them, Anna is the one who sits by his bedside when he has epileptic fits, and Anna is the one who endures his barbs.
The main reason that I didn't like this novel was that it was difficult to read. I think that there just isn't a very good English translation of this novel. I have to give Tsypkin the benefit of the doubt and assume that his prose is actually readable in his native language. I've read other Russians before... Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and have found their stories to be engaging. But then again, they also used things called "paragraphs" and "dialog". The translation abandons all of these normal conventions, and is pages and pages of dense block prose. I think that I missed a lot of what what was being said due to the fact that it was so incredibly hard to make my way through.
Moral of the story: If it's a Russian, get a good translation.
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