Written for the Drawer: Leonid Tsypkin, Uncensored Literature, and Soviet Jewishness (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780299350000)

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 indirection and referentiality. In the first book-length appraisal of Tsypkin and 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.

Author: Brett Winestock
ISBN-10: 0299350002
ISBN-13: 9780299350000
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Language: English
Published: 12/17/2024
Pages: 222
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/28/2024