A novel about love, married love, and the love of literature, Summer in Baden-Baden is set partly in the present as the narrator crosses Russia in wintertime on a train to Leningrad (the once and future St. Petersburg) and partly in the past as he reimagines the passionate summer of 1867 when Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his young wife Anna travelled across Europe towards Baden-Baden. Dostoyevsky's reckless passions for gambling, for his literary vocation, for his wife, are matched by her all-forgiving love, which is in turn reflected by the love of Leonid Tsypkin for Dostoyevsky.