Written for the Drawer
Leonid Tsypkin, Uncensored Literature, and Soviet Jewishness

Brett Winestock (Author)

9780299350000

Hardback, published 17 December 2024

232 pages, 9 b&w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.454 kg

“A valuable contribution that helps us better understand the complicated phenomenon that is Soviet Jewishness. This book will benefit scholars in Russian and Slavic literary studies, Jewish literary studies, and comparative literature, and will be a good addition to the bookshelf of readers interested in the ruminative twentieth-century prose that Tsypkin’s work represents.”—Sasha Senderovich, author of How the Soviet Jew Was Made

Russian-Jewish writer Leonid Tsypkin (1926–82), a doctor by trade, wrote primarily “for the drawer,” fearing professional consequences if he were to publish his fiction. Despite Tsypkin’s almost complete lack of readership during his lifetime, his work has received international posthumous recognition, with Susan Sontag calling his work “among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century’s worth of fiction.” 

Tsypkin’s autobiographical writing explored the impossibility of being both a Russian writer and a Soviet Jew, employing both indirection and referentiality. In the first full-length book on his work, Brett Winestock considers Tsypkin’s fiction as part of a transnational literary response to the horrors of the twentieth century, a reception that helps explain his much-belated international readership. Through close readings of Tsypkin’s work in the context of late-Soviet cultural worlds, Winestock makes an important contribution to studies of Jewish Soviet writing and identity.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: The Uncensored Man
1 The Uncensored Text as a Family Photo Album
2 A Soviet Jew in Armenia
3 Reading Tsypkin Reading Dostoevsky
4 Tsypkin in St. Petersburg
Conclusion: A Book’
s Journey
Notes
Bibliography
Index