Volume 47, Number 4 · March 9, 2000
The Secret Sharer
By Aileen Kelly
Things That Happened commentaries by
by Volume 19. Glas New Russian Writing, by Boris Slutsky, edited, translated, and with an introduction and G.S. Smith
Moscow/Birmingham: Glas (distributed in the US by Ivan R. Dee), 314 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
Oxford University Press, 288 pp., $13.95 (paper)
These lines on the constraints of authorship under the Soviet system first appeared in print in Russia in 1987, three decades after they were written. Their author, Boris Abramovich Slutsky, had died the previous year. Perceived as an orthodox Soviet writer, he was largely ignored by the critics until it was discovered after his death that an estimated 60 percent of his poetic output remained unpublished. His defiant promise has now been fulfilled for him by others. More than a thousand of his 'hidden' poems were published in Russia in the first five years after his death; they encompass Stalin's Terror, the Nazi invasion and the war, the 'Thaw' of the 1950s, and the system's decline into senile decay. According to Gerald Smith, who has translated and annotated the first selection of his work available in English, although we are only beginning to see it whole, '[it] stands indisputably as the most valuable body of individual poetic testimony to the experience of the Russians under Soviet rule.'
Review, 5595 words
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