Leonid Tsypkin

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Leonid Tsypkin (Леонид Борисович Цыпкин) (1926—1982) was a Russian writer, best known for his book Summer in Baden-Baden.

Tsypkin was born in Minsk, capital of Belarus, to Russian-Jewish parents. His family suffered during the German invasion in 1941. His father Boris Tsypkin was arrested by the police. Boris Tsypkin's mother and two nieces were killed. Thanks to the intervention of his friend, Boris Tsypkin was miraculously saved though with minor injuries. With the help of a farmer who was his patient Boris Tsypkin escaped from Minsk with his wife and eleven-year-old son Leonid.

Leonid returned to Minsk after the war to continue his studies and eventually became a doctor and practised in a nearby hospital. But in 1950 the family once again went to exile because of Stalin's anti-Semitic movement. In 1957 they got the permission to live in Moscow.

After his son and daughter-in-law emigrated to America in 1977, Tsypkin was demoted to the post of junior medical researcher. He and his family had been denied permission to leave the Soviet Union on two occasions, in 1979 and 1981. Tsypkin died at the age of 56 of a heart attack in Moscow.

Summer in Baden-Baden is a fictional account of Fjodor Dostoyevsky's stay in Germany with his wife Anna. Depictions of the Dostoyevskys' honeymoon and streaks of Fjodor's gambling mania are intercut with scenes of Fjodor's earlier life in a stream-of-consciousness style. Tsypkin knew virtually everything about Dostoyevsky, but although the details in the novel are correct, it is a work of fiction, not a biographical statement. Tsypkin writes long sentences, somewhat reminiscent of José Saramago's style.