'Until It’s Glorified in Rhyme'

I have just read Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad (New York Review Books, 2019), which leads me to the poetry of Boris Slutsky (1919-1986). Here is the co-translator (with his wife Elizabeth) of Grossman’s novel, Robert Chandler, in his introduction to the Slutsky selection in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Books, 2015):

“What nearly all his poems have in common is a focus on the specific and a wariness of dogma. Slutsky is a careful, modest explorer of human experience, closer to Chekhov or Vasily Grossman than to Tolstoy or Solzhenitsyn. Slutsky did, in fact, know Grossman. During the late 1950s, when both were living in the same building, Slutsky regularly read his new poems aloud to Grossman or left him copies of poems he had recently typed out.”

To call Stalingrad a war novel is misleading. Yes, the Nazis advance on the city and the Soviet military and civilians defend it, but much space is devoted to domestic and work life – parents, spouses, children, lovers, coworkers, neighbors. Family is the heart of the novel. No one is unimportant to Grossman. Don’t pigeonhole his novel with The Naked and the Dead. Similarly, Slutsky writes no hymns to hydroelectric projects. His themes are preeminently human and close to home. Chandler writes in his introduction:

“Slutsky wrote about the war, about the Shoah, about various aspects of his Jewish heritage, about Stalin, about returnees from the camps, about other writers, about almost every aspect of everyday life.”

In “All Rules Are Incorrect” (early 1960s, trans. Stephen Capus) Slutsky is at once defiant and traditional:

“All rules are incorrect,

all laws remain perverse,

until they’re firmly set

in well-wrought lines of verse.

“An age or era will

be merely a stretch of time

without a meaning until

it’s glorified in rhyme.

“Until the poet’s ‘Yes!’,

entrusted by his pen

to print, awards success

to this or that – till then

“the jury will be out,

the verdict still in doubt.”

Chandler tells us Slutsky’s wife Tanya died in 1977. For three months afterwards he wrote “some of the finest poems of love and mourning in the Russian language; these have yet to receive due recognition.” He then fell into a “depressed silence” for his last nine years. Here is “Relearning Solitude,” (trans. Marat Grinberg and Judith Pulman):

“Just as I once learned one ancient tongue

enough to read its texts,

and I forgot the alphabet –

I’ve forgotten solitude.

This all must be recalled, recovered, and relearned.

I remember how once I met

a compiler of words

in the ancient tongue that I had learned

and lost.

Turned out, I knew two words: ‘heavens’ and ‘apple’.

I might have recalled the rest –

All beneath the heavens and beside the apples –

But the need wasn’t there.”

An untitled poem dated 1977 (trans. Robert Chandler):

“I had a bird in my hand

but my bird has flown.

I held a bird in my hand

but am now all alone.

“My small bird has left me

full of anger and rage;

my blue bird has left me

alone in a cage.”

And this, from the same year, also untitled and saddest of all (trans. G.S. Smith):

“Always busy, plagued by anxiety,

guilt-ridden, duty to be done—

husbands should be the first to die;

never the ones who are left alone.

“Wives should grow old slowly. Aim

for the four-score-and-twenty mark, even;

not every day, but from time to time

remembering their men.

“You should not have left the way

you did. That was wrong.

with a kind smile on your face

you should have lived on,

you should have lived long.

“Until their hair turns white—

for wives, that’s the way to wait,

“getting on with things around the home,

breaking the odd heart if they can,

and even (well, where’s the harm?)

toasting the memory of their old man.”