Written for the Drawer: Leonid Tsypkin, Uncensored Literature, and Soviet Jewishness by BrettWinestock. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2024. 222 pp. $99.95. ISBN 978‐0‐299‐35000‐0

This book is a multifaceted explication of four works of the enormously talented, strikingly original Soviet underground writer Leonid Tsypkin. Tsypkin, a doctor by day, never sought the kind of alternative publication that engaged the rest of his samizdat-era generation. He did not join that community. Until the emigration of his son to the United States and an attempt to follow him, which ended in refusal and a fatal heart attack, he did not seek publication abroad. He did not write “for the drawer” to outlive the censor. Brett Winestock argues that Tsypkin chose the drawer as a genre, of which he was the sole practitioner. Winestock notes early on that Tsypkin creates his stories by embodying—merging with—other lives and other written or visual material, like art or photographs, which become a complex commentary on his own obsessions. His most famous work, Summer in Baden-Baden, uses the diary of Anna Grigorievna Dostoevskaia and Dostoevsky’s own works and experiences to retell—really, reinhabit—the story of their 1867 gambling trip. One of the complications of Summer in Baden-Baden—though rather typical of the Soviet 1970s—is that Tsypkin was a Jew, and Dostoevsky, the beating heart of the Russian literary tradition, was an antisemite. Like many Jewish intellectuals of the period, Tsypkin was burdened with the Jewish label, without any Jewish content apart from his Jewish looks and the necessity of navigating the range of disabilities that entailed. He loved Russian writing; he was in fact a Russian writer, but Russian writing did not love him back. Not, of course, all Russian writing. Tolstoy never wrote about Jews; Chekhov was an equal-opportunity offender—but Tyspkin chose Dostoevsky. He chose, as Weinstock points out, to reproduce in his novel the most offensive of antisemitic slurs from Anna Grigorievna’s diary. In other words, Tsypkin did not overlook the antisemitism. He chose to reproduce and inhabit it. Winestock’s book begins with Tsypkin’s first major work, “Bridge over the Neroch” (1973), whose modernist, fragmented narrative voice Winestock compares to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror, which appeared just two years later. Tsypkin’s subject is a Russian-Jewish family before, during, and after the Nazi invasion, which Tsypkin experienced as a child in Minsk. His narrative, writes Winestock, “can be read like a family photo album” (p. 56). Photography comes up often in Winestock’s analysis, as it does in Tsypkin. Like the shifting narrative voice, it is a means for Tsypkin to look both inside and outside his characters, and himself. Winestock’s second chapter, “A Soviet Jew in Armenia,” is about the novella Norartakir. That book’s Tsypkin-but-not-quite narrator finds that Armenians look like him, but are, in their native land, far happier. Tsypkin and his wife endure a mix-up with a hotel and leave in distress. The Jew-Armenian identification does not pan out, nor does, in Winestock’s perceptive observation, the general idea of the travel narrative as productive self-exploration. Winestock compares Typkin’s story—its Soviet-Jewishness—to Vasily Grossman’s “Dobro vam” (the Russian rendition of an Armenian expression meaning “best wishes”). Here he goes astray: by the time of this nonfictional late work, Grossman was completely comfortable with his Jewish ethnicity. He was grateful to Armenians for courageously recognizing the Holocaust and extending friendship. Tsypkin’s third chapter, “Reading Tsypkin reading Dostoevsky,” is an analysis of Summer in Baden-Baden. Winestock is very good at untangling the labyrinth of self-reflection embodied in this work, in which there is both a first-person narrator—Tsypkin the reader—and a third person narrator “with full knowledge of the events and access to Anna Grigorievna’s thoughts” and also her husband’s (p. 97). Not only is Dostoevsky of the Baden-Baden trip here, but also the Dostoevsky of his novels, especially The Idiot and Notes from Underground. And there is also the fictional Dostoevsky, Tsypkin’s recreation of the writer who used himself in his works, his epilepsy, and his boundary crossing. The novel appeared in Novaia gazeta in 1982. The subject of the penultimate chapter is Tsypkin as photographer. We see him in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, engaging with that city’s literary myth and Dostoevsky as a dweller in that myth and creator of it. It is possible that Winestock makes too much of Tsypkin’s attempt to exclude the Soviet everyday from his Dostoevskian photographs: this is a choice he needed to make, and he strove, apparently for a separation of times rather than an amalgam. But the small chapter that follows, about Tsypkin and Sebold, among others, shows masterfully how Tsypkin, however isolated, was a consummate European modernist in his integration of photography and prose.