Tsypkin was born in Minsk, USSR (now the capital of Belarus), to Russian-Jewish parents, "both of whom were medical specialists." "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." "Two of Boris Tsypkin's sisters and a brother were also arrested, and were murdered by Stalin's NKVD."

His family suffered further during the German invasion (Wehrmacht) in 1941. "Boris Tsypkin's mother, another of his sisters and two nephews, perished in the ghetto." "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."

"When the war was over Leonid returned with his parents to Minsk, where Leonid graduated from medical school in 1947; despite Stalin's policies of anti-Semitism, Tsypkin became a noted researcher in polio and cancer, and published more than 100 papers in scientific journals in Russia and abroad." 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.

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." "Over the following decade he wrote sketches and stories, and two autobiographical novellas, none of which was published in his lifetime."

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.