Semyon Lipkin

Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin

Lipkin and his wife, the poet Inna Lisnianskaya
Born (1911-09-06)September 6, 1911
Odessa, Russian Empire
Died March 31, 2003(2003-03-31) (aged 91)
Peredelkino, USSR
Occupation poet, translator, memoirist, prose-writer, soldier
Nationality Russian
Period 1911-2003
Genre literature
Subject World War II, History, Philosophy, Literature, Folklore, Jewish heritage, The Bible
Notable works Kvadriga Memoirs, The Lieutenant Quartermaster (An epic poem)

Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin (Липкин, Семён Израилевич) (6 September (19th New Style) 1911 – 31 March 2003) was a writer and poet.

Lipkin is renowned as a literary translator and often worked from the regional languages which Stalin tried to obliterate. Lipkin hid a typescript of his friend Vasily Grossman's magnum opus, Life and Fate, from the KGB and initiated the process that brought it to the West. Martin Amis remarked, "If it were for nothing else than the part he played in bringing Life and Fate to publication Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin would deserve to be remembered."

Lipkin's importance as a poet was achieved once his work became available to the general reading public after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the many years prior, he was sustained by the support of his wife, poet Inna Lisnianskaya and close friends such as Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (who thought him a genius and championed his poetry). Lipkin’s verse includes explorations of history and philosophy and exhibits a keen sense of peoples' diverse destinies. His poems include references to his Jewish heritage and to the Bible. They also draw on a first-hand awareness of the tragedies of Stalin's Great Purge and World War II. Lipkin's long-standing inner opposition to the Soviet regime surfaced in 1979-80, when he contributed in the uncensored almanac "Metropol" and then he and Lisnianskaya left the ranks of the official Writer's Union of the USSR.

Early years

Israel and Rosalia Lipkin were Semyon Lipkin's parents and he was born in Odessa. His father had a tailoring business.[1] His early education was disrupted by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and by the 1918-20 Civil War. Lipkin spent a lot of time reading and educating himself at home. In 1929 he left Odessa for Moscow where he studied engineering and economics and graduated from the Moscow Engineering-Economic Institute in 1937. While studying there he had begun to teach himself Persian followed by the other languages of the oriental regions which were disappearing as a result of Russification, including Northeast Caucasian languages, Kalmyk, Kirghiz, Kazakh, Tatar, Tadjik and Uzbek, together with their histories and cultures.

Military career

Lipkin's military career started with the German invasion in June 1941, when he enlisted as a war correspondent with the military rank of senior lieutenant, at the Baltic Fleet base in Kronstadt near Leningrad. Later he was transferred to the 110th Kalmyk cavalry division (with which he got into the German encirclement), and then to the Volga river flotilla at Stalingrad. He took part in the victorious Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43 and covered its events as a journalist. Lipkin was awarded 4 military orders and a number of medals.

Literary career

Lipkin published his first poem when he was aged 15 and Eduard Bagritsky recognised its merit. It was not until he entered his sixth decade until the regime permitted him to publish his own poetic work, and until his seventh decade for a recognition of his status as a poet to fully develop, despite the fact that Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky (the Nobel laureate) amongst others in his immediate circle acknowledged the greatness of his poems.

Having met in the 1930s the 20th century Russian poets Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva, along with the prose writers Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov, Lipkin later provided a masterly description of them in his memoir Kvadriga.

His extensive oeuvre of translation won many accolades. For his translations and literary work Lipkin was honoured with the title of Kalmykia national poet (1967) and later, Hero of Kalmykia (2001), People's Artist of Kabardino-Balkaria (1957), Outstanding Cultural Worker of the Uzbek Republic (1968), Rudaki State Prize of Tajik Republic (1967), Tukay State Prize of Tatarstan (1992), Andrey Sakharov "Courage in the Literature" Prize (1992), Literary Prizes of magazines Ogonyok (1989) and Archer (1994) and The Pushkin Prize of Alfred Topfer Foundation (1995).

Poetry

Prose

Translations by Semyon Lipkin

Abkhaz
Akkadian
Buryat
Dagestani
Kabardian
Kalmyk
Kirghiz
Sanskrit
Tatar
Tadjik-Persian
Uzbek
Other various languages

English translations of Semyon Lipkin’s work

French translations of Semyon Lipkin’s work

Referenced Works

Friendship with Vasily Grossman

In 1961 Lipkin's friend, Vasily Grossman's manuscript for the novel, Life and Fate, banned by the Soviet authorities, was confiscated by the KGB. Semyon Lipkin saved a copy of his friend's typescript in a bag hanging under some coats on a peg at his dacha at Peredelkino and later moved it to Elena Makarova and Sergei Makarov's attic in Khimki near Moscow for safe keeping. (Elena Makarova was the Lipkin's step-daughter, the daughter of his widow the poet Inna Lisnianskaya. Sergei Makarov is Elena's husband.) In 1975 Lipkin asked the writer Vladimir Voinovich and Academician Andrey Sakharov to help to smuggle the manuscript from the USSR and get it published in the West, which eventually happened in 1980. In July 2013, Grossman's own manuscript and other papers confiscated by the KGB in 1961 were finally released from detention and passed by the FSB secret service (former KGB) to the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI): see good news.

Chronology of historical events impacting Lipkin and his writing

References

  1. ↑ Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin
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