Summer in Baden-Baden: From the Life of Dostoyevsky - Hardcover

Almost claustrophobic in its intensity, Tsypkin's recreation of the frustration, and even paranoia, of Dostoevsky during one summer in Baden-Baden, in which he attempts to gamble his way out of debt, is a masterpiece, newly published twenty years after its author's death. With sensitivity and a feeling for suffering which may have come from similar frustration, Tsypkin reveals Dostoevsky's inner life, showing us a sensitive but driven man who is also insecure, rude, and arrogant, a man who dominates his wife, a man who suffers from the aftereffects of his imprisonment and his epilepsy, a man virulently anti-Jewish and anti-German and in the grip of compulsive gambling--and a man with whom every reader will ultimately feel empathy, if not complete sympathy.