Notes about Inna Lisnyanskaya and Semyon Lipkin

Abstract

Spanning over a decade from 1990 until 2003, the transcripts of interviews with Inna Lisnyanskaya and Semyon Lipkin mostly deal with literary topics. I. Lisnyanskaya discusses her works and poetic methods and talks about her friends and acquaintances in the literary world. Featuring on these pages are 20th-century authors: Sergey Averintsev, Vasily Aksyonov, Bella Akhmadulina, Anna Akhmatova, Eduard Bagritsky, Andrey Bitov, Joseph Brodsky, Elena Bulgakova, Igor Vinogradov, Andrey Vosnesensky, Rasul Gamzatov, Lidia Ginsburg, Evgeny Evtushenko, Olga Ivinskaya, Yury Kublanovsky, Feliks Kuznetsov, Vladimir Maksimov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Osip Mandelstam, Yury Nagibin, Boris Pasternak, Maria Petrovykh, Evgeny Popov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arseny Tarkovsky, Korney Chukovsky, Anastasia Tsvetaeva, and Marina Tsvetaeva. I. Lisnyan skaya’s opinions are often biased and extremely subjective: they are interesting not despite, but because of it. Another important topic is the repercussions of publishing the Metropol almanac. The transcripts also help reconstruct the history of some of Lisyanskaya’s poems.