Background
Boris Abramovich Slutsky was born on May 7, 1919, in Sloviansk, USSR (now Donetsk Province of Ukraine) and grew up in Kharkiv.
Boris Slutsky
Boris Slutsky
Boris Slutsky
Boris Slutsky
Boris Slutsky
Boris Slutsky
Boris Slutsky
Boris Slutsky
Boris Slutsky
Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya St., 9, Moscow, Russia, 123001
From 1937 to 1941, Boris Slutsky studied at Moscow Law Institute (nowadays Kutafin Moscow State Law University).
Tverskoy Blvd, 25, Moscow, Russia, 123104
Boris Slutsky studied at the Moscow Literary Institute (nowadays Maxim Gorky Literature Institute).
(Boris Slutsky, one of the most original of Russian poets,...)
Boris Slutsky, one of the most original of Russian poets, belongs to Solzhenitsyn’s generation, but unlike him Slutsky did not reveal publicly his disillusionment with Stalinism and Soviet labels. He remained a member of the literary establishment - if not entirely trusted by Soviet officials - until his mental breakdown in 1977.
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1999
Boris Abramovich Slutsky was born on May 7, 1919, in Sloviansk, USSR (now Donetsk Province of Ukraine) and grew up in Kharkiv.
Slutsky attended the literary seminar (lito) at the Kharkiv Palace of Young Pioneers. Succumbing to pressure from his father, who had trouble imagining (Russian) poetry as a career (for a Jew), Slutsky entered the Moscow Institute of Law (nowadays Kutafin Moscow State Law University) in 1937. The following year Slutsky was accepted to the Moscow Literary Institute (nowadays Maxim Gorky Literature Institute) on the recommendation of Pavel Antokolsky. He combined reading law with the study of creative writing.
In 1941 a poem of Slutsky appeared in the monthly October (Oktiabr'); he waited twelve years for his next publication of poetry. Slutsky volunteered right after the Nazi invasion in 1941, serving initially as a military jurist and in 1942 switching to the track of a political officer. Slutsky spent 1942-44 at the southern fronts; in 1943 he learned about the murder of his family members in the Kharkiv ghetto.
Slutsky wrote virtually no poetry during the front years. He completed a book of documentary prose about his experiences in 1944-45 in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria. In the chapter "The Jews," Slutsky interspersed authorial observations with survivors' testimony. Lacking the pathos of Ilya Ehrenburg's essays about the Shoah published in the 1940s, Slutsky's book combined harsh truths about marauding Soviet troops with ideological window dressing and remained unpublished until the post-Soviet years. The complete text appeared in Notes about the War (2000), edited by Slutsky's longtime friend Pyotr Gorelik.
Slutsky ended his service in August 1946 as a decorated Guards major. Having been twice seriously injured, Slutsky spent two years in and out of hospitals. He returned to Moscow during the darkest years for Soviet Jewry. Receiving a small disability pension, he did hack literary work. An avant-gardist writer at the time when experimentation was deemed "formalist", "decadent," and "bourgeois," Slutsky had a perilous time. "Memorial" apparently his second published poem for adult readers, appeared in August 1953, after Stalin's death. In July 1956, Ilya Ehrenburg lauded Slutsky in Literary Gazette (Literaturnaia Gazeta).
Slutsky became an icon of the Thaw, an enemy of the entrenched Stalinists, and a hero of the liberal intelligentsia then overcome with the palliative optimism of the Twentieth Party Congress. Slutsky's first collection, Memory, selected by the critic Vladimir Ognyov from a "suitcase of manuscripts," appeared in 1957 to include elegantly roughen, street-smart, colloquial, photographically lyrical poems about the war and the shedding of illusions. Slutsky bridged "the generation of 1940" and the one entering the Soviet literary scene during the Thaw. Speedily accepted to the Writers' Union, in 1957 Slutsky traveled to Italy with a delegation of Soviet poets that included, as a calculated gesture, Jews (Slutsky and Vera Inber) and victims of Stalinism (Nikolay Zabolotsky).
Slutsky solidified his position as a leading anti-Stalinist poet with the publication in 1962 in Literary Gazette of the poems “God” and “The Boss.” Given the magnitude of his talent and influence, a reckoning of Slutsky’s career can be frustrating. The episode that most tarnished Slutsky’s reputation was his speech against Boris Pasternak during a meeting of Moscow writers on October 31, 1958, which “unanimously” passed a resolution to “expel” Pasternak from the Union of Soviet Writers. Apologism does no justice to the complexity of Slutsky’s nature and ambitions. Referring to the pressure that the Party’s central committee exerted upon him, Slutsky claimed that he spoke with “the least indecency.”
This act tormented Slutsky for the rest of his life. Titles of Pyotr Gorelik reported that in 1975 Slutsky had told him he had about five hundred unpublished poems-and this turned out to be a conservative assessment. Party functionaries and the KGB kept a watchful eye on Slutsky, especially in respect to his treatment of the Shoah and antisemitism, and his poems printed in the 1950s 1970s reveal censorial corruptions. Largely through the devotion of Slutsky's executor, the critic Yury Boldyrev (1934-1993), numerous magazine publications and a number of books appeared during the reform and the post-Soviet years, including Slutsky's three-volume Collected Works (1991).
Slutsky continued to write prolifically until 1977, the year he lost his wife. The poet wrote for three months after his wife's death, creating piercing love poems and several texts with Jewish themes, but then severe depression set in. After spending some time in mental institutions, Slutsky moved to Tula, a city south of Moscow, where he lived in his brother's family. He wrote no poetry for the rest of his life and died there in 1986.
(Boris Slutsky, one of the most original of Russian poets,...)
1999Slutsky joined the Communist Party in 1943 and was promoted to deputy head of the Fifty-seventh Army political department. Communist ideology was significant for Slutsky. He made the thesis of communism aesthetically expressive in his poetry. But this happened to him just because by the time of his appearance in literature - after Stalin, during the Khrushchev thaw - these theses, had lost their relevance. Communism appeared in a certain temporary distance, ceased to be the wickedness of the day. As a matter of fact, Slutsky himself greatly contributed to this process. He represented communism in a certain distant romantic haze.
Slutsky fought to exterminate the Third Reich only to find himself a target of Soviet antagonism in 1953. Caught in a sweeping arrest of Jews following accusations that Stalin’s Jewish doctors were plotting against him, Slutsky escaped relatively lightly. For six months he was banned from working for radio and thereby deprived of his only regular source of income. Consequently, some of Slutsky’s most powerful 'hidden' poems are on the theme of Russian anti-Semitism.
As a patriot transformed by politics into an "enemy of the people," Slutsky made it a point to distinguish between Party-approved themes and the reality he knew. In a set of prose memoirs, Slutsky remarked that the officially trumpeted heroism of Russian tank crews who burned to death in their tanks was in reality motivated by the fear of the punishment meted out to those who allowed equipment to fall into enemy hands.
Some of Slutsky's earliest Jewish poems (1938-40) have been lost. In 1938, he wrote The Story of an Old Jew (Story from Abroad) - his first known response to Nazism, it appeared fifty-five years later in Israel. After witnessing the immediate aftermath of the Shoah in 1944-45 and writing nonfiction about it, Slutsky returned to poetry as the anti-cosmopolitan campaign gained speed. Memories of the destruction of European Jewry became enmeshed in Slutsky's acutely political imagination with the antisemitic crimes of late Stalinism, giving rise to a conflation of Jewish questions that Slutsky put in verse in the 1950s and 1960s and later revisited in the 1970s.
The most outspoken of Slutsky's poems about the Shoah and antisemitism did not appear in the USSR until the reform years, although several circulated in samizdat and appeared in the West, some anonymously. Some of Slutsky's poems published in the USSR treated Jewish themes by employing Aesopian language and allegory. In the 1950s-1970s Slutsky steered into print more poems where the Shoah was memorialized, the Jewish question was explicitly debated, and the word "Jew" was used unabashedly than any of his Soviet contemporaries. Slutsky the legalist proceeded as though the official rhetoric on the Jewish question and antisemitism protected Soviet Jews.
Boris Slutsky was a member of the Writers Union.
Slutsky, indeed, was virtually a child of twentieth-century Russian history. Born in 1919 of a working-class background, he lived through Stalinism, World War II, the Communist USSR and the beginning of Glasnost, while helping define the century in his poetry. Slutsky’s life followed a trajectory that started with a rising curve during the 1930s, peaked with the victory of 1945, and was soon followed by crushing humiliation.
Quotes from others about the person
"Men born in Russia within five years on either side of 1917 were more than likely to meet a premature death. Boris Slutsky was an object lesson in what it could mean for writers of that generation to stay alive.” - G. S. Smith
Slutsky created his own family just in his mature years. His wife, Tatyana Dashkovskaya, became seriously ill and in 1977 died of cancer of the lymph nodes. For Slutsky, this was a real blow of fate, from which he no longer recovered. The poet fell into a severe depression, and stopped writing poetry.
Slutsky had no children.