Boris Slutsky
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Boris Slutsky (Russian: Борис Абрамович Слуцкий; 7 May 1919 in Slovyansk, Ukraine — 22 February 1986 in Tula) was a Soviet poet.
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 the war 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 In 1956 Ilya Ehrenburg created a sensation with an article quoting a number of hitherto unpublished poems by Slutsky, and in 1957 Slutsky's first book of poetry, Memory, comtaining many poems written much earlier, was published.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.
