Fiction: It was Vladimir Nabokov who observed that not the least among the crimes of the Leninist-Stalinists was the virtual destruction in the late 1920s and early 1930s of one of the most creative generations of artists that Russia had produced.
The Russian avant garde movement, comprising the Symbolists, the Futurists, the Acmeists and, especially in literature, the Formalists, was galvanised by the 1917 revolution, and had the potential to produce a revolution of its own in Russian culture which would have rivalled if not surpassed the achievements of Modernism in the West. With the accession to power of Stalin and his henchmen, however, the great night fell, a night which was to endure for many decades and which has even yet not seen its full dawn.
Anyone with the slightest experience of the realities of postwar intellectual life behind the Iron Curtain - and yes, Churchill was right, it was a curtain of iron which kept Russia and its unwilling satellites out of what Gorbachev called "our common European home" for so long - will recognise as not untypical the heartbreaking story of Leonid Tsypkin. He was born in Minsk in 1926, to Jewish parents both of whom were medical specialists. At the start of Stalin's Great Terror, in 1934, Tsypkin's father, Boris, an orthopaedic surgeon, was arrested on trumped-up charges, but was later released after a suicide attempt in which he broke his back. Two of Boris Tsypkin's sisters and a brother were also arrested, and were murdered by Stalin's NKVD.
Then came the Germans. In 1941 Minsk fell to the invading Wehrmacht, and Boris Tsypkin's mother, another of his sisters and two nephews, perished in the ghetto. The 15-year-old Leonid Tsypkin and his parents escaped when a grateful ex-patient of Boris Tsypkin's smuggled them out of the city hidden on the back of a truck. When the war was over Leonid returned with his parents to Minsk, where Leonid graduated from medical school in 1947; despite Stalin's policies of anti-Semitism, Tsypkin became a noted researcher in polio and cancer, and published more than 100 papers in scientific journals in Russia and abroad.
Alongside his work in science, Tsypkin from earliest days had a deep love of literature - no "Two Cultures" for him - and even considered abandoning medicine to become a writer. In his early years he had produced some poetry and fiction, but in 1969, after winning a Doctor of Science degree, he was granted a salary increase, which freed him from part-time work and thus allowed him to get down to writing in earnest. Over the following decade he wrote sketches and stories, and two autobiographical novellas, none of which was published in his lifetime.
Tsypkin saw no place for himself in the literary world of the Soviet Union of his day, when, just as in the 1920s, real writers were being destroyed, driven into exile, or, a "modern" twist, were flung into isolation wards of psychiatric hospitals, a peculiarly cruel form of incarceration. As Susan Sontag says in her introduction to Tsypkin's last and greatest work, the "dream novel" Summer in Baden Baden,
Tsypkin's fiction was, to be sure, a poor candidate for official publication. But it did not circulate in samizdat either, for Tsypkin remained - out of pride, intractable gloom, unwillingness to risk being rejected by the unofficial literary establishment - wholly outside the independent or underground literary circles that flourished in Moscow in the 1960s and 1970s, the era when he was writing "for the drawer". For literature itself.
As an artist Tsypkin was a man of the 19th rather than the 20th century, being "riven", as Sontag writes, "by the nineteenth century Russian soul questions (how to live without faith? without God?)", and his models were the mighty Russians of a previous age, in particular Dostoyevsky. Summer in Baden Baden is an impressionistic account of the five weeks that the 46-year-old Dostoyevsky and his second wife, Anna Grigor'yevna, 25 years his junior, spent in the German spa town in the summer of 1867, mainly because it had a famous casino, and Dostoyevsky was famously a gambler. The story of the Dostoyevskys' typically traumatic and strife-torn sojourn in the town, at the start of what was to be a four-year peripatetic exile for the writer and his wife, is mingled seamlessly with an account of a Winterreise Tsypkin made to Leningrad - Dostoyevsky's St Petersburg - in the depths of the Cold War.
As he journeys north from Moscow by train, and later wanders through the icy streets of Peter's city in the footsteps of his hero, or lies sleepless on a sofa in the apartment of an old family friend, Tsypkin muses, in a deceptively artless and apparently disjointed fashion, on Russia past and present - on Dostoyevsky and his fervent nationalism, his addiction to gambling, his rabid anti-Semitism, his bitter disputes with his fellow writers, particularly Turgenev, and on Dostoyevsky's intellectual descendants, such as Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Solzhenitsyn, and the physicist Andrei Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner. The result is, in Sontag's words, "a crash course on all the great themes of Russian literature" and "an extraordinary mental tour of Russian reality".
Summer in Baden Baden is written in a breathless, headlong style which is unique to Tsypkin, but which anticipates the driven monologues of such disparate writers as Thomas Bernhard and José Saramago. Through dense, clattering paragraphs, each one forming a sentence-chain linked by "ands" and dashes, the narrative, if such it may be called, wanders from past to present and back again, creating a dizzying, kaleidoscopic vision of two spheres of desperation, that of Dostoyevsky, the paranoid epileptic who sees slights and challenges everywhere his frantic gaze falls, and that of Tsypkin, bearing himself as best he can through the permafrosted dream-landscape of what is at once his native land and a kind of Boschean hell - "In our family," Tsypkin's son, Mikhail, said, "it was assumed without discussion that the Soviet regime was Evil incarnate."
Tsypkin's book takes it for granted that its readers will have a fairly detailed knowledge of the life and works of Dostoyevsky, as well as some acquaintance with postwar Soviet culture and society. It is a pity, therefore, that the present publishers - an earlier English edition appeared in 1987 - have not included at least a sketch of its subject's life and times. It helps to know that Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821, like Tsypkin the son of a doctor; that his mother died in 1837 and that two years after that his father was murdered by his serfs; that he graduated as a military engineer and officer in 1843; that his first publication, the story, Poor Folk, gained him instant recognition from his peers, who, however, quickly tired of him and his impossible personality; that in 1849 he was arrested for conspiracy and sentenced to death, and underwent a mock-execution in which he believed until the last moment that he would die; that he spent the next five years in exile in Siberia; that his first wife died and that in 1867 he married Anna Grigor'yevna Snitkina, who had been working for him taking dictation, and with whom he set out on a restless and impoverished tour of Europe that convinced Dostoyevsky that a dissolute and Godless Europe could only be saved from perdition by great-hearted Mother Russia.
Dostoyevsky is a hard man to like, as even his most sympathetic biographers admit. One of them, Joseph Frank, writing of that summer in Baden Baden, describes how Dostoyevsky, on the rare occasions when he managed to drag himself away from the gaming tables with a few coins left in his pockets, would return to the rented room he shared with Anna Grigor'yevna bearing gifts of fruit, flowers and wine. The money never lasted verylong, "and the couple went from relative plenty to total destitution from one day to the next; but these instants of fleeting festivity . . . showed that Dostoyevsky was not a completely self-preoccupied monster"; well, no, not completely.
Tsypkin the Jew can forgive his hero almost anything, but confesses to bafflement before the fact of Dostoyevsky's unrelenting anti-Semitism. Yet even here Tsypkin is mild. It strikes him as "strange to the point of implausibility"
that a man so sensitive in his novels to the sufferings of others, this jealous defender of the insulted and the injured who fervently and even frenetically preached the right to exist of every earthly creature and sang a passionate hymn to each little leaf and every blade of grass - that this man should not have come up with even a single word in defence or justification of a people persecuted over several thousands of years - could he have been so blind? - or was he perhaps blinded by hatred? . . .
Yet the portrait Tsypkin limns is wonderfully sympathetic overall; he shows Dostoyevsky as a man caught in agony between an awareness of his own gigantic talent and his conviction that he is being sneered at from all sides by lesser artists. The famous encounter in Baden Baden between Dostoyevsky the God-haunted Slavophile and Turgenev the atheist and cosmopolitan gentleman is sketched with an oblique delicacy which yet conveys the depth of the chasm between the two men, and in particular the bitterness which Dostoyevsky carried away from the quarrel; years later Dostoyevsky wrote a cruel caricature of Turgenev in the character of Karmazinov in The Possessed, including in it the story, possibly apocryphal, of a moment of panic and cowardice on the part of the young Turgenev when a ship on which he was travelling caught fire.
Summer in Baden Baden was first published by the redoubtable Quartet Books in 1987, when it was largely ignored. A couple of years later Susan Sontag chanced upon a copy outside a bookshop in Charing Cross Road, and made it her task to bring the book to the attention of as wide an audience as it was in her considerable power to do - one suspects it was she who suggested that the text be interspersed with a selection of Tsypkin's own, rather lifeless, photographs of places and buildings associated with Dostoyevsky, in an effort to make Tsypkin seem another W.G. Sebald, which he is not.
The story Sontag tells of the first publication of the book is as sad as most of the rest of Tsypkin's life. He wrote the book between 1977 and 1980, after years of research - he had never been outside Russia, and had to invent Baden Baden from documents, photographs, and his own imagination - and gave the manuscript to a friend to bring to the West in the hope it might be published. Meanwhile Tsypkin and his wife had been applying for exit visas so they could join their son and his family in the US. Not only were the visas refused, but Tsypkin was dismissed from the medical institute where he had worked since the 1950s. On the day of his dismissal, his son telephoned from Harvard to say that the first instalment of Summer in Baden Baden had appeared a few days previously in an emigré journal in New York. The publication date was March 13th; on March 20th, Tsypkin died of a heart attack.
"He had been," Sontag writes, "a published author of fiction for exactly seven days."
Susan Sontag, who died recently, was tireless in her championing of ill- considered or forgotten artists, and in the case of Tsypkin has brought back to public attention a writer whose finest novel, without her intervention, might have been lost in the general apathy of what passes for present-day cultural life.
Summer in Baden Baden, By Leonid Tsypkin, translated by Roger and Angela Keys, Hamish Hamilton, 285pp. £14.99
John Banville's new novel, The Sea, will be published this year by Picador