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

Winestock, a Russian studies professor at Dalhousie University in Canada, debuts with a perceptive critical biography of Russian Jewish novelist Leonid Tsypkin (1926–1982). A native of Soviet-era Minsk, Tsypkin staked out a modest medical career despite widespread antisemitism limiting opportunities in the field. However, literature was his true passion, and after his aunt introduced him to Minsk’s literary scene, he started writing novels, poetry, and short stories. Struggling to break into the U.S.S.R.’s nepotistic literary establishment, he wrote “for the drawer,” hoping to one day secure publication of his work abroad. (He died a week after an émigré journal began serializing his novel Summer in Baden-Baden, his first published piece.) Winestock analyzes how Tsypkin’s major works each employ a “different literary (or visual) form to mediate between his characters and the society in which they live,” dissecting, for example, how Tsypkin’s 1973 novella The Bridge over the Neroch uses “different narratorial voices and the fragmentation of the protagonist into many different characters” to provide a “view on the self from the outside.” Discussions of “intermediality” and the “devices of co-creation, self-distancing, and self-othering” in Tsypkin’s writings will be tough going for lay readers, but his story serves as a rousing case study of how creativity persisted behind the iron curtain. It’s an incisive tribute to an overlooked Soviet author. (Dec.)