Boris Slutsky

(1919 - 1986), Russian poet and memoirist.

Brought up in Kharkov, Boris Abramovich Slutsky moved to Moscow in 1937 to study law and soon began a simultaneous literature course. On the outbreak of World War II he volunteered and went into battle as an infantry officer. Soon wounded in action, he spent the remainder of the war as a political officer, joining the Party in 1943. He ended up as a highly decorated Guards major, having campaigned all the way to Austria.

In 1945 he returned to Moscow and after convalescence made a living writing radio scripts, but in 1948 he was deprived of this work because of his Jewish origin. Sponsored by Ilya Erenburg, he was accepted in the Union of Writers in 1957 and thereafter was a professional poet. He made a lasting reputation with unprecedentedly unheroic poems about the war, but he was soon upstaged by the more flamboyant younger poets of the Thaw under Nikita Khrushchev, poets more concerned with the future than with the past. Slutsky steadily continued publishing original poetry and also translations, until on the death of his wife in 1977 at which point he suffered a mental collapse, which was underlain by the lingering effects of his wounds. Thereafter he was silent. From the beginning of his career Slutsky acquiesced in the censoring of his work, never moving into dissidence; notoriously, in 1958 he spoke and voted for the expulsion of Pasternak from the Union of Writers, an action for which he privately never forgave himself.

After Slutsky's death, it was found that well over half of his poetry had never been published. The appearance of this suppressed work in the decade after he died revealed that Slutsky had been by far the most important poet of his generation. In hundreds of short lyrics he had chronicled his life and times, paying attention to everything from high politics to the routines of everyday life and tracing the evolution of his society from youthful idealism through terrible trials to decline and imminent fall. He created a distinctive poetic language, purged of conventional poetic ornament, that has been highly influential. His prose memoirs about his military service, equally plain and unconventional, were only published fifty years after the end of the war.

Bibliography

Slutsky, Boris. (1999). Things That Happened, ed. and tr. G. S. Smith. Glas (Moscow, Russia), English; v. 19. Moscow, GLAS; Chicago: Ivan Dee.

—GERALD SMITH

Boris Slutsky

Boris Slutsky (Russian: Бори́с Абра́мович Слу́цкий; 7 May 1919 in Slovyansk, Ukraine — 22 February 1986 in Tula) was a Soviet poet of Russian language.

Lived his childhood and youth in Harkov. In the year 1937 entered the law institute of Moscow, and since 1939 studied also at the Institute of literature "Maxim Gorky" till 1941. Joined a group of young poets like M. Kulchitzki, Pavel Kogan, S.Narovchatov, David Samoilov and others who made acquaintance in autumn 1939 at the seminary of Ilya Selvinsky at the State Literary Publishing House Goslitizdat and called themselves "the generation of the year 1940".

Between 1941-1945 he served in the Red Army (he was a politruk of an infantry platoon), his war experiences colouring much of his poetry. After ending the war as major, he worked on the radio (1948-1952).

In 1956 Ilya Ehrenburg created a sensation with an article quoting a number of hitherto unpublished poems by Slutsky, and in 1957 Slutsky's first book of poetry, Memory, containing many poems written much earlier, was published. Together with David Samoylov, Slutsky was probably the most important representative of the War generation of Russian poets and, because of the nature of his verse, a crucial figure in the post-Stalin literary revival. His poetry is deliberately coarse and jagged, prosaic and conversational. There is a dry, polemic quality about it that reflects perhaps the poet's early training as a lawyer. Slutsky's search was evidently for a language stripped of poeticisms and ornamentation; he represented the opposite tendency to that of such neo-romantic or neo-futuristic poets as Andrey Voznesensky.

As early as in 1953 - 1954, earlier than the 20th Congress of CPSU, Slutsky wrote verses condemning the Stalinist regime. These ones have circulated in "Samizdat" in the 1950s and were published in the West (in Munich) in an anthology in 1961. He did not confirm and not deny his paternity of them.

In his works Slutsky approached also Jewish themes, including from the Jewish tradition, about the antisemitism, including the antisemitic phenomena in the Soviet society, the Holocaust etc

He translated to Russian from the Yiddish poetry, e.g. from works of Kvitko, Verghelis, Galkin, Shvartzman, Y.Sternberg. and others. In 1963 an exceptional performance was the editing under his guidance of the first anthology of Israeli poetry. ("The poets of Israel")

One of his cousins was the Israeli general Meir Amit.

External links

• Boris Slutsky. Poems
• Jewish Electronic Encyclopedia in russian

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