[2] His poems reference his Jewish heritage and the Bible, and draw on his experiences in World War II and the Great Purge.

Lipkin's military career began with the German invasion in June 1941, when he was enlisted as a war correspondent with the rank of senior lieutenant at the Baltic Fleet base in Kronstadt.

In the 1930s, Lipkin met influential figures like poets Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Marina Tsvetayeva, and prose writers Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov, whom he described in his memoir Kvadriga.

[7] He also immersed himself in the cultures of the languages he translated, including Abkhaz, Akkadian, Buryat, Dagestani, Karbardinian, Kalmyk, Kirghiz, Tatar, Tadjik-Farsi and Uzbek.

[8] He famously hid a typescript of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate from the KGB, initiating its journey to the West.

Semyon Lipkin hid a copy at his dacha and later gave it to Elena Makarova and Sergei Makarov for safekeeping.

)[14] In 1975, Lipkin enlisted Vladimir Voinovich and Andrey Sakharov to smuggle the manuscript to the West, leading to its publication in 1980.