Leonid Borisovich Tsypkin (Russian: Леонид Борисович Цыпкин) (Minsk, March 20, 1926 - Moscow, March 20, 1982) was a Russian doctor and writer. Born in Minsk as a son of two Russian-Jewish doctors, he saw in 1934, the Great Terror period, his father arrested and returning to a post-mortem post-mortem. A large part of his family is killed in the Minsk Ghetto by the German occupier. Leonid and his parents know to escape the ghetto with the help of friends. As a graduate doctor, he enters into his parents' footsteps in 1947, while in the country more and more victims fall as a result of Stalin's anti-Semitic campaign. Tsypkin dives in the countryside, invisible in an insignificant position. In 1957, he obtained permission to settle in Moscow and begins a successful career as a pathologist in one of Russia's famous research institutes in the field of infectious diseases.
As a passionate reader and fan of Russian literature, other literature was not available, he makes an early attempt at writing prose and poetry at a young age. His great examples are Tolstoy and especially Dostoevsky. In the early sixties he began to apply more seriously to writing, especially in poems strongly influenced by Boris Pasternak. During this period he is experiencing repression from the state: if he finally wants to submit his verses to a colleague writer for the first time, it has been arrested the day before and will never appear again. Tsypkin becomes very careful, partly feared for his career, and secretly writes a modest oeuvre, including Summer in Baden-Baden. Every single moment is spent on this book until it is finished and the script is put out as a manuscript. A writer who will never be published in Russia. Several times, Tsypkin asks for himself and his wife an expatriation visa for emigration to the United States. It is refused until the end of its short life. On March 13, 1982, he hears that a well-known journalist, Summer in Baden-Baden, is published as a feuilleton in a weekly magazine for Russian emigrants in New York. Seven days later Leonid Tsypkin died of a heart attack. Summer in Baden-Baden
In Summer in Baden-Baden, Leonid Tsypkin travels by train from Moscow to Leningrad, the city where his idol Fjodor Dostoevsky has lived and died. He reads the journal of Anna Grigorevna, Dostoevsky's second wife, and on the basis of that experience, he fictionalizes the trips made by Dostoevsky and Anna in 1867, probably one century earlier. Travel to resorts and spas, to avoid creditors and to play roulette with little leftovers. It's a story of intense love between an old man and a young woman, a love that cracks in her joints if even the pretty Anna's dress is brought to the lommerd to lust that money later. They have a great deal of effort to stay in the good German resorts, not only because of a lack of money, but also because they feel badly treated by hoteliers, retirees, waiters and shopkeepers. Indignation about this, Dostoevsky often drives into rage and, together with his regular seizures of epilepsy, he cares for Anna, who, despite his gambling addiction, has a very loving relationship with him. Their nightly love game is repeatedly described as swimming together, coming together and reaching that beautiful horizon. Almost to the ground they eventually involve an apartment in St. Petersburg, and with the limited income from books and articles they know how to get around. Unexpectedly, Dostoevsky, who initially seemed to feel an innocent cold, left Anna in great dismay. Tsypkin travels to Leningrad, reads the Diary and leaves his fantasy free. He visits the idol of his idol and reconstructs all his history in his head. He shows his love for the writer Dostoevsky by reflecting Anna's love for human Dostoevsky as a big mirror. Fiction or not, it's the generous unconditionality that binds the love between these two people.
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