A Close Reading of Fifty-Three Poems by Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin

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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, Tatars and in doing so became a living repository of their culture for which he risked censure and arrest from the Soviet authorities. The poems in this volume show the remarkable range of Lipkin's work: his Jewish faith, Stalin's oppression, the Holocaust, and the spiritual fate of mankind and reveal why as a poet he was revered by great Russian writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Anna Akhmatova and Josef Brodsky.