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Author: Tsypkin, Leonid, Sontag, Susan

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 6 June 2024 by FABER & FABER in the United Kingdom as part of ‘the Faber Editions’ series.

Paperback | 240 pages
198 x 130 x 15 | 210g

Join Dostoevsky on his tumultuous honeymoon in this hypnotic cult classic , introduced by Susan Sontag.

‘A wonderful work of art.’ Jon McGregor’Extraordinary in its confidence and enchantment.’ Chris Power’Addictive, dreamlike and dazzlingly unique.’ Adam Thirlwell’Luminous, melancholy and enraptured.’ Chloe AridjisWhy was I reading this book now, in a railway-carriage, beneath a wavering, flickering, electric light-bulb . . Summer, 1867: The newlywed Dostoevsky and his young wife Anna – his one-time secretary – are travelling to the German spa resort of Baden-Baden on honeymoon. Their love is ecstatic, yet the author is plagued by demons: haunted by his crimes and punishments, consumed by fevers of jealousy, gambling to avoid mounting debts and shaken by epileptic fits. Winter, 1970s: Our Jewish narrator embarks on a pilgrimage from Moscow to Leningrad to trace the footsteps of his literary hero. As the train travels across the Soviet Union’s bleak expanses, he immerses himself in Anna’s travel journal: and their journeys – past and present, real and imagined – soon become entwined. The result of a clandestine literary vocation, Summer in Baden-Baden was smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1981 and first published in a Russian émigré weekly in the USA. It has since been hailed as a trailblazing modern classic, translated into more than twenty languages – and its hypnotic, enigmatic power only grows.