Description
Why 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.
‘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 Aridjis
