As Anninsky learned years later, he got injured during the German aviation raid in mid-1942 near Polotsk, was captured and was later shot dead by the Ukrainian polizei.

[1] In 1956, still a student at the Moscow University philological faculty, Anninsky debuted as a literary critic with the analysis of Vladimir Dudintsev's novel Not by Bread Alone.

Since the uprising there has been instigated by this country's literary elite, the CPSU decided to "brush the ideology up" in the Soviet academic circles and Anninsky found out that to re-join the university he'll have to do some practical work first.

Anninsky's books of the 1980s included The Leo Hunters (Lev Tolstoy in cinema), 1980, 1989; Leskovian Necklace (1982, 1885), Contacts (1982), Branches Full of Sunlight (a study on Lithuanian photography, 1984), Nikolai Gubenko (1986) and The Three Heretics (1988), a trilogy on the mavericks of 19th-century Russian literature: Pisemsky, Melnikov-Pechersky and Leskov.

[2] In 1990-1992, Anninsky worked in Literaturnoye obozrenye (The Literature Review), then joined the newly formed Rodina magazine and in 1998 became the editor of the short-lived Vremya i my (Time And Us) project.