Volume 49, Number 9 · May 23, 2002
In Search of Dostoevsky
By Joseph Frank
Summer in Baden-Baden
by Leonid Tsypkin,translated from the Russian by Roger and Angela Keys, with an introduction by Susan Sontag
New Directions, 146 pp., $23.95
During his all-too-brief life (he died at the age of fifty-six), Dr. Leonid Tsypkin was indistinguishable from many other middle-class professionals in the Soviet Union. He was born in Minsk of Jewish parents, both of them doctors; part of the family was wiped out in the Stalin terror, part after Minsk fell to the Germans in 1941. His immediate family escaped because a grateful ex-patient made room for them in a truck. The young Leonid himself went on to become a research doctor, a pathologist, a member of the Institute for Poliomyelitis and Viral Encephalitis, the author of a hundred medical articles on his specialties. But his scientific career suffered as a result of Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign and the emigration of his son and daughter-in-law to the United States in 1977. His own efforts to emigrate proved in vain.
Review, 4992 words
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