Overview

The Jewish, Odesa-born poet, Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin (1911-2003), was a central figure in modern Russian literature, although until recently, he was best known in the West for his role in preserving the manuscript of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate from the KGB. As a Soviet journalist in WW2, he witnessed and wrote about the horrors of Stalingrad, which led the Nobel Laureate Josef Brodsky to refer to him as 'Russia's war poet'. Later, during the years of Stalin's deportation of ethnic groups, Lipkin translated and preserved the language and writings of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Tatars and, in doing so, became a living repository of their culture for which he risked censure and arrest from the Soviet authorities. In this memoir, Lipkin's humanity, civic courage, and friendship with many important Russian writers - Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Andrei Platonov, and of course, Grossman himself - shine through the reports of terror and oppression that characterized this most turbulent period of Russian history.

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9781739778514

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A riveting exploration of an epoch through the eyes of a remarkable witness who met and befriended some of the most notable Soviet writers of the twentieth century. The story of Lipkin's friendship with Grossman, which takes up most of the memoir, not only brings to life Grossman's personality but also reveals that in the face of immense pressure, neither Lipkin nor Grossman 'lost the human in themselves'. - Professor Paolo Mancosu, author of Inside The Zhivago Storm (Feltrinelli, 2013). Semyon Lipkin was a gifted poet and one of the most sensitive Soviet translators of the classical and modern poetry of Central Eurasia. Green and Makarov have produced an extraordinary selection of Lipkin's keenly-observed literary encounters, from the painful (a meager cafeteria meal with Tsvetaeva in the last year of her life) to the marvelous (Grossman's letters from a stay in Armenia). At the center of the collection is the decades-long epic friendship between Lipkin and Grossman. Lipkin's sketches of the bureaucratic battles for Grossman's literary legacy constitute a classic of Russian satirical nonfiction while retaining a spirit of generosity and hopefulness. - Professor Samuel Hodgkin, author of Red Nightingales: The Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

A riveting exploration of an epoch through the eyes of a remarkable witness who met and befriended some of the most notable Soviet writers of the twentieth century. The story of Lipkin's friendship with Grossman, which takes up most of the memoir, not only brings to life Grossman's personality but also reveals that in the face of immense pressure, neither Lipkin nor Grossman 'lost the human in themselves'. - Professor Paolo Mancosu, author of Inside The Zhivago Storm (Feltrinelli, 2013). Semyon Lipkin was a gifted poet and one of the most sensitive Soviet translators of the classical and modern poetry of Central Eurasia. Green and Makarov have produced an extraordinary selection of Lipkin's keenly-observed literary encounters, from the painful (a meager cafeteria meal with Tsvetaeva in the last year of her life) to the marvelous (Grossman's letters from a stay in Armenia). At the center of the collection is the decades-long epic friendship between Lipkin and Grossman. Lipkin's sketches of the bureaucratic battles for Grossman's literary legacy constitute a classic of Russian satirical nonfiction while retaining a spirit of generosity and hopefulness. - Professor Samuel Hodgkin, author of Red Nightingales: The Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Author Information

Yvonne Green is a poet descended from Boukharian Jews. Her pamphlet, Boukhara (2007), won The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition. She has published four full-length collections with Smith Doorstop, including; The Assay, Honoured and Jam & Jerusalem. Her volume After Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin was a Poetry Book Society's Translation Choice in 2011. Son-in-Law of Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin.

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