Written for the Drawer

Leonid Tsypkin, Uncensored Literature, and Soviet Jewishness

Brett Winestock

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780299350000
• eBook ISBN: 9780299350031
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Contents
• 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