Most přes řeku Něroč a jiné prózy – Cypkin Leonid (2018)

Alongside the world-famous novel Summer in Baden-Baden (Czech: Prostor 2015), which depicts scenes from the life of F. M. Dostoevsky and his second wife Anna Grigorievna, Leonid Cypkin is the author of two autobiographical novels, Bridge over the River Neman (1973) and Norartakir (1976), as well as sixteen short stories written in the 1970s. This entire collection was first published in 2005 by the Moscow publishing house Novoje litěraturnoje obozrenije. In the most extensive novel, Bridge over the River Neman, Cypkin describes his childhood in pre-war Minsk and the tragic image of the escape of hundreds of thousands of people in June 1941 from Minsk, which soon fell into the hands of German occupiers. In his other texts, Cypkin also draws from the often tragic fates of his family; his father, a doctor, was arrested during Stalin's terror but was released thanks to the intervention of influential acquaintances, while his uncle and two aunts perished in a Soviet gulag, and his grandmother and other relatives died in the Minsk ghetto. The style of the collection is diverse, ranging from short plotless stories to longer tales with more complex narratives, culminating in extensive novellas, of which Norartakir particularly resembles the narrative flow of the author's novel Summer in Baden-Baden. The publication of this collection of prose thus...