Inna Lisnyanskaya

Inna Lisnyanskaya or Inna Lisnianskaya (; 1928–2014) was a Jewish-Russian poet from USSR, later Russia. Her most creative period of writing occurred in the village for poets and writers of Peredelkino near Moscow, where she lived with her husband and co-worker, Semyon Lipkin. Her daughter Elena Makarova is also a well-known writer. She was a recipient of the Solzhenitsyn Prize and Russia's Poet Prize.

Biography Lisnyanskaya was born in 1928, in Baku, Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, to a Jewish father and Armenian mother. Her Armenian grandmother baptized her in Armenian Orthodoxy when she was a child. Lisnyanskaya grew up in Baku, in a house where three languages were present: Yiddish, Russian and Armenian. In 2000, she said to Maxim D. Shrayer, editor of the Jewish-Russian anthology, that in 1944, when it became known about the Holocaust, she officially claimed that she was of Jewish ethnicity to protest the fascist murder of Jewish people; she believed in Jesus Christ as well and wrote about the Jewish culture in her poetry.

When Inna was a 5th grade class pupil, she worked as an aide in an Azerbaijani military hospital during the last period of World War II where Soviet soldiers with facial wounds were treated. Later she wrote a sonnet In Hospital of Facial Wound.

Inna Lisyanskaya spent a year in Baku State University, then dropped out. She began writing some poetry, as well as translations from Azerbaijani to Russian in 1948. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1957 in Baku.

Once, Inna Lisyanskaya was, in the early 1960s, listening to Semyon Lipkin reading his poetry about World War II in Moscow Central Writers' House, later they met in 1967 and married.

A collection of Lisnyanskaya's poetry was translated from Russian in English language by Daniel Weissbort (see Far from Sodom; Arc Publications, 2005) as well as by Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams (see Headwaters; Perpetua Press, 2008).

Selected bibliography

Poetry Rains and Mirrors; Paris, 1983 On the Verge of Sleep; Ann Arbor, Ardis, 1985 Poems (in Russian language); 1991 Without You; 2004 Dreams of an Old Eve; 2007

Books

(Name of Goodbye, book in Russian language, collections of correspondence between Lisnyanskaya, from Russia, and her daughter, Elena Makarova, from Israel)

Awards and honors

Solzhenitsyn Prize Russia's Poet Prize