Boris Slutsky

Boris Slutsky (Бори́с Абра́мович Слу́цкий; 7 May 1919 in Slovyansk, Ukraine &mdash; 22 February 1986 in Tula) 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 Moscow, and he also studied at the Institute of literature "Maxim Gorky" from 1939 till 1941. He joined a group of young poets such as M. Kulchitzki, Pavel Kogan, S.Narovchatov, David Samoilov and others who became acquainted 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In 1956 Ilya Ehrenburg created a sensation with an article quoting a number of hitherto unpublished poems by Slutsky, and in 1957 Slutsky's first book of poetry, Memory, containing many poems written much earlier, was published.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 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.