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A review by screen_memory
Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin
4.0
This book has further solidified my reasoning for maintaining a strict measure of distance between the artist and their art--emphasizing the latter well above the former. Tsypkin deals heavily with Dostoevsky's gambling and marital issues in this novel, dealing only very lightly with other more widely discussed peculiarities of his, e.g. his seizures, his penal servitude, his separation from the more noble and higher-class authors of his time (Goncharov, Turgenev, etc.)
Certain emotional, psychological, historical, and other person and extant factors are important when considering an artist's work, but I personally like to deal with such considerations from a safe distance because it seems quite often that I dislike or downright despise an artist I love as an individual once I learn the more minute aspects of their lives, or how they are as people. Egon Schiele is a wonderful artist, but my God did he seem like a fucking baby. Dostoevsky is no doubt one of the world's greatest novelists, but what a miserable and insufferable son of a bitch. I found myself getting angry reading about him returning home to ask his wife for money or to pawn more of her jewelry or clothes for money time and again to gamble away so he could try and win what he had lost.
On this topic, is it any surprise when the public finds out what an asshole or what a scumbag an artist is? I take them all to be guilty until proven innocent in that regard, and, anyway, I don't see the artist as integral to their art. Rather, I see their art as existing other to the artist. It is a multifarious fracturing and fragmenting of the self, their world and their experience. I don't need to like Dostoevsky as a person to adore his works. He sounds like a total shitbag, and seemed to have often treated his wife poorly, but his novels will always be canonical. This was an interesting read, of course, and Tsypkin seems to have done an extraordinary amount of research into the minutiae of Dostoevsky's life, but this novel is another exhibit in the case of art v. artist; of why the two must exist with some considerable distance from one another.
Certain emotional, psychological, historical, and other person and extant factors are important when considering an artist's work, but I personally like to deal with such considerations from a safe distance because it seems quite often that I dislike or downright despise an artist I love as an individual once I learn the more minute aspects of their lives, or how they are as people. Egon Schiele is a wonderful artist, but my God did he seem like a fucking baby. Dostoevsky is no doubt one of the world's greatest novelists, but what a miserable and insufferable son of a bitch. I found myself getting angry reading about him returning home to ask his wife for money or to pawn more of her jewelry or clothes for money time and again to gamble away so he could try and win what he had lost.
On this topic, is it any surprise when the public finds out what an asshole or what a scumbag an artist is? I take them all to be guilty until proven innocent in that regard, and, anyway, I don't see the artist as integral to their art. Rather, I see their art as existing other to the artist. It is a multifarious fracturing and fragmenting of the self, their world and their experience. I don't need to like Dostoevsky as a person to adore his works. He sounds like a total shitbag, and seemed to have often treated his wife poorly, but his novels will always be canonical. This was an interesting read, of course, and Tsypkin seems to have done an extraordinary amount of research into the minutiae of Dostoevsky's life, but this novel is another exhibit in the case of art v. artist; of why the two must exist with some considerable distance from one another.