Boris Slutsky was
born this day. He was a Soviet poet of Russian
language.
During his childhood and
youth he lived in Harkov. In the year 1937 he entered the law institute of
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hitherto unpublished poems by Slutsky, and in 1957 Slutsky's first book of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 Leib Kvitko, Aaron Verghelis, Shmuel Galkin, Asher Shvartsman, Yakov
Sternberg.
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.
