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Join Dostoevsky on his tumultuous honeymoon in this hypnotic cult classic , introduced by Susan Sontag.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-Badenwas smuggled out of the Soviet Union in 1981 and first published in a Russian emigre 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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Leonid Tsypkin was born in Minsk in 1926 to Russian-Jewish parents. After surviving both Stalin's terror and the upheavals of the Second World War, he graduated from medical school in 1947 to become a respected pathologist and medical researcher. Twice denied permission to leave the Soviet Union after his son and daughter-in-law emigrated to the United States, Tsypkin died in Moscow in 1982, at the age of 56. Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. Her non-fiction works include On Photography, Regarding the Pain of Others and At the Same Time. She is also the author of four novels, including The Volcano Lover and In America, as well as a collection of stories and several plays. She was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, and received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She died in December 2004.

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