Tsypkin was born in Minsk, Soviet Union (now the capital of Belarus), to Russian-Jewish parents, "both of whom were medical specialists.
"[1] "At the start of Stalin's Great Terror, in 1934, Tsypkin's father, Boris, an orthopaedic surgeon, was arrested on trumped-up charges, but was later released after a suicide attempt in which he broke his back.
"[1] While practicing medicine, Tsypkin "considered abandoning medicine to become a writer [and in] his early years he had produced some poetry and fiction, but in 1969, after winning a Doctor of Science degree, he was granted a salary increase, which freed him from part-time work and thus allowed him to get down to writing in earnest.
Summer in Baden-Baden is a fictional account of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's stay in Germany with his wife Anna.
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.