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.

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