The papers of Semyon Lipkin, Inna Lisnianskaia, Elena Makarova and the Makarov Family

Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin (1911-2003) was a prominent Russian poet and translator of poetry from Soviet Central Asian republics. A close friend of the writer Vasilii Grossman, Lipkin hid a copy of a typescript of Grossman’s magnum opus, Life and Fate, from the KGB. He was also instrumental in helping to smuggle it to the West.

Lipkin was born in 1911 in Odessa (now Odesa, Ukraine) into a Jewish family. In 1929, he moved to Moscow to pursue literary studies, but failed to be admitted to the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University. Instead, he enrolled into Moscow Engineering and Economics Institute. While at the Institute, he became active in Moscow’s literary circles, befriended many leading literary figures, and started publishing his poetry in newspapers and literary journals.

By the middle of the 1930s, as Stalin’s rule was increasingly affecting literature and the arts, Lipkin found it difficult to publish his own poetry and turned to literary translation. During the Soviet era, many writers and poets turned to literary translation as a practical and relatively safe way to make a living and avoid direct confrontation with state censors. Drawing on his knowledge of Farsi and other Oriental languages, Lipkin emerged as one of the finest translators of Eastern poetry into Russian. His translations included classical epics such as the Kalmyk “Dzhangar” (1940) and the Kyrguz “Manas” (1941), as well as classical and modern poetry from the Chechen, Ingush, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Uzbek, Iranian, Mongolian and other languages. During the Second World War, Lipkin served on the front lines as a war correspondent. Lipkin’s first book of his own poetry, “Ochevidets” [Eyewitness], came out only in 1967.

In 1980, Lipkin’s successful career as a literary translator was curtailed when he and his wife, poet Inna Lisnianskaia, resigned from the Union of Soviet Writers because they contributed to the uncensored almanac Metropol. As a consequence, Lipkin could publish his poetry, and fictional and biographical prose only in the West. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, most of his writings were published in Russia. Alongside his work as a translator, Lipkin gained wide recognition for his own poetry and prose.

Inna Lvovna Lisnianskaia (1928-2014) was an acclaimed Soviet-Russian poet and translator. She was born in Baku to a Jewish father, who was a military doctor, and an Armenian mother, an engineer by profession. In 1948, after graduating from high school, she briefly studied at Baku University. Her first poetry collection was published in Baku in 1957, her later books were published in Moscow. Her poetry and translations from Azerbaijani into Russian also appeared in leading literary journals and newspapers in both Baku and Moscow.

In 1961, Lisnianskaia moved to Moscow with her first husband, poet and translator Grigorii Korin (ne Godel Shabeevich Korenberg, 1926-2010), and their daughter Elena Makarova. At the end of the Khrushchev Thaw, Lisnianskaia found herself increasingly at odds with the official literary culture. She could not publish her work. When his work did appear in print, it was usually heavily edited.

In 1979, together with her second husband, poet Semyon Lipkin, Lisnianskaia participated in the unofficial literary almanac Metropol. In January 1980, she resigned from the Union of Soviet Writers, effectively ending her Soviet literary career. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, her poetry was widely published in Russia. She received numerous literary awards, including the 1999 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Literature Prize. She is now recognized as one of the major Russian poets of the late twentieth century.