Buy Summer In Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin and get a copy of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment FREE
“The literature of the second half of the twentieth century is a much traversed field, and it seems unlikely that there are still masterpieces in major, intently patrolled languages waiting to be discovered. Yet some ten years ago, rifling through a bin of scruffy-looking used paperbacks outside a bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road, I came across just such a book, Summer in Baden-Baden, which I would include among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century’s worth of fiction and para-fiction.” - Susan Sontag
May’s Book of the Month is all about obsession. The late Susan Sontag’s obsession with the little-known work Summer in Baden-Baden led to its reissue, last year, in hardback and this month in wallet-friendly paperback. The book itself is a study of obsession: the author Leonid Tsypkin’s with Dostoyevsky, and, in turn, Dostoyevsky’s with gambling. Then there are Crockatt & Powell’s own obsessions of course: with good books, with superb writers, with the novel Crime and Punishment - without a doubt one of the finest ever written.
Summer in Baden-Baden imagines the chaotic affairs of a great writer in such a way as to bring further insight into the mind and life of Dostoyevsky whilst also being, in itself, a work of literature of considerable emotional power. Meanwhile, in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov’s unforgettable psychological struggle to justify murder seems to speak directly to our terrified times.
We agree with Susan. Summer in Baden-Baden is indeed a rare book and what is more, since it imagines a period in the great Russian’s life when he was working on Crime and Punishment, provides us with a good excuse to push one of our favourite writers ever - Dostoyevsky.
Buy Summer in Baden-Baden… get Crime and Punishment free!
