Tsypkin, Sontag, and the Ol' Desk Drawer

22 Dec, 2024

Pathologist Leonid Tsypkin was one of oodles of Soviet writers who filled their drawers or other hidden repositories with pages and pages they just couldn’t stop themselves from writing, even while knowing there may not be a single person who’d ever see it all—or that if their musings were seen, might result in the literal death of their author. The symbol of the desk-drawer writer is well known, even hackneyed, by now, often providing a hopeful image for present-day scribblers for whom the stakes are far lower: they just can’t get published, and forget to be oddly thankful that if no one seems to care about what they’re doing, that neglect is something the for-the-drawer writers of the past might have welcomed, at least where the censors were concerned.

Susan Sontag’s introduction to Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden-Baden somehow offered not exactly a new view of why this particular writer might have bothered at all—but at least a reminder I needed to hear. Tsypkin, who wasn’t part of any literary crowd, whether official or underground, who had no useful connections, and who was pretty much damned to career death and financial precarity after his son and daughter-in-law emigrated to the US, just kept on writing on evenings and weekends, not even letting what he wrote take its chances as samizdat. Seven days before Tsypkin died, his son called from the US, where he’d succeeded in getting Baden-Baden serialized. From Sontag’s intro, it seems publication was never really anything Tsypkin ever expected—so why did he keep at it? As Sontag says, and here’s what somehow hit me, he did it “For literature itself.”¹

I keep hearing more and more about how literary fiction, at least, is being chased out of the reading world by the increasingly pernicious Big Five; the other day, a Persuasion article revealed how the conglomerates seem to be welcoming in AI to churn out more and more of what they consider sure things, at the lowest cost and with the least amount of trouble possible.² This is really no surprise, nor is the article’s hailing of small presses and the need to support them in their collective role of beleaguered guardian of reading that matters. For the most part, I’ve come to pay ever less attention to whatever’s going on in that high-profit realm; although some occasional good stuff can come out of what I think of as shareholder-focused publishing, my aims and interests are not theirs, so I’m not going to spend my time worrying about them. The analogies are ready to hand, from scriptural false prophets eager to feed rulers reassuring news; to officially acceptable, predictably crappy Soviet literature; to prime-time shitcoms that make you worry about people who honestly find them hilarious. Good art, literature, music, and film have usually always run under the radar of popular and corporate taste, and if they don’t earn their creators a living or make them (very) famous, they at least might result in meaningful connections being formed around them.

Sontag’s “for literature,” though, made me consider with renewed spirit my semiregular pronouncements about why I want to keep writing one way or another, her observation combining with a remark that jumped out at me from David Malouf’s afterword to Ransom, his brief and beautiful imagining of Priam’s meeting with Achilles to try and get back Hector’s body. The Iliad (and The Odyssey, and so many ancient Greek legends and dramas) have been told and retold and told over again—and that was the case even before there was such a thing as a publishing industry anywhere. And yet, the way we can’t help but reimagine and continue to ponder, or even just repeat, intimately known tales shows up Malouf’s and our “primary interest… in storytelling itself—why stories are told and why we need to hear them, how stories get changed in the telling.”³ Central to Baden-Baden is an imagined account of Fyodor and Anna Dostoevsky’s travels in Germany, itself based on Anna’s journals and Tsypkin’s own thorough research into Dostoevsky’s life. Nothing that wasn’t known, nothing that hadn’t already been told. But it hadn’t been told in Tsypkin’s fashion, or in a way that met his own needs, and so there we have it: a book constructed out of his own imperative to show why Dostoevsky, and his life, and his literature, and literature itself, were so central to his own existence that they had to be worked out on paper, shaped and perfected until the author had made his own particular case. (And so far, that book is truly fantastic.)

I know I can’t help but continue my own working-throughs, my attempts to be more than, as a description of a character in a novel whose title and author I can no longer remember has it, a mere beginner of countless stories. I think I’m gradually settling more deeply into acceptance of the knowledge that none of this will ever end up in a place more public than my little algorithm-shunning blog. Along with that letting-be is the sense that the metaphorical drawer, in my own time and place, has become something less than a means of evading a life-risking move, and something more than cheap consolation for the fact that no outlet wants to broadcast my thoughts to the world. Instead, the drawer is starting to become a space of quiet contemplation in a very noisy, billion-voiced world of words in which branding those words and their producers is more important than the productions themselves, and consuming as much as possible (think the Goodreads yearly challenge) more important than the savoring of a single marvelous thing. I’m also hoping this isn’t all just a trick I’m playing on myself, of the sort handed out by certain smug advice purveyors, viz., that once you truly stop searching, whatever you’re looking for will come to you.

Here, then, is my declared hope: that whatever comes of them or doesn’t, we embrace and sustain those drawers that hold our workings-out, and in so doing, hold onto something more solid than the loud deadwood drifting and doing its thing around us.

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