Boris Slutsky

[1] His father, Abram Naumovich Slutsky, was a junior official and his mother, Aleskandra Abramovna, was a music teacher.

He first attended a lito (literary studio) at the Kharkov Pioneers Palace but left due to pressure from his father, who dismissed Russian poetry as a viable career.

In the autumn of 1939, he joined a group of young poets, including M. Kulchitzki, Pavel Kogan, S. Narovchatov, and David Samoilov, at the seminary of Ilya Selvinsky at the State Literary Publishing House, Goslitizdat.

Together with David Samoylov, Slutsky is representative of the War generation of Russian poets and, due to the nature of his verse, is a crucial figure in the post-Stalin literary revival.

In 1956, Ilya Ehrenburg created a sensation by quoting a number of previously unpublished poems by Slutsky in an article.

He also translated the Yiddish poetry of Leib Kvitko, Aron Vergelis, Shmuel Galkin, Asher Shvartsman, and Yakov Sternberg to Russian.