[7] Slonim, who regarded himself as a libertarian socialist rather than a Marxist, worked on establishing "self-instruction circles", circulating banned literature among students, artisans and workers, and traveled to Europe to meet with Osip Minor.
[1][12] Upon the start of World War I, Slonim followed the "defensist" line of the Eser mainstream, supporting Russia's commitment to the Allies, and served in the Imperial Army.
The writer became a strong critic of that merger, claiming that the Romanian identity in both Romania and Bessarabia had been recently fabricated by intellectuals, lacking popular support among the Moldavian peasants (see Moldovenism).
[24] Slonim also claimed that the union process had been triggered by the German Empire in late 1917, as an anti-Bolshevik move, and supported by Russians who had discarded "personal and national dignity.
"[26] Acknowledging that there was a "united front" between the White movement and Soviet Russia on the Bessarabian issue, he proposed to overcome the impasse by organizing a League of Nations referendum in the former Moldavian Republic.
[27] Scholar Charles Upson Clark, who sees Slonim's accounts as among "the best [...] from the Russian standpoint", rejects his theory about the German inspiration for the union, noting that it was in fact a traditional Romanian goal.
[29] Slonim, seconded by Tsyganko, circulated rumors of "unheard-of atrocities" committed by the Romanian Army, such as the massacre of 53 people in one village of after the Khotyn Uprising, and the torturing of many others.
Interviewed by L'Humanité, the French Communist Party paper, Slonim also claimed the socialists were being repressed, and that unconditional union had been voted on "under the menace of machine guns".
[19] After a short stay in Berlin, during which time he issued his own journal, Novosti Literatury,[1][37] Slonim settled in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he taught at the Russian Free University[38] and joined the local Zemgor.
[40] Occupying a Prague building which had reputedly housed Mozart, and also gathering for conversations at Národní kavárna café, the circle members networked with European policymakers such as Aristide Briand, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and Émile Vandervelde.
Its acceptance of various Bolshevik reforms made it close to the Mladorossi émigrés,[45] but the magazine saw itself as eminently Narodnik, carrying through the ideology of Alexander Herzen and Nikolay Chernyshevsky.
[52] While contributing articles on political news and historical sketches, as well as impressions from a 1926 trip to the United States and a 1928 homage to Prague, Slonim became the main literary chronicler at Volya Rossii.
[53] He believed that the importance of Russian literature was to be found in its ability to convey "the vital problems of individual and social existence", and hoped that this tradition would be carried on in exile: "We know that the best among [émigré writers] made their way through suffering and struggle.
As a reviewer of Soviet works, Slonim identified echoes of the 19th-century philosophical and political epics, showing up in novels by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Boris Pasternak, Vsevolod Ivanov and Yury Olesha.
[59] In order to illustrate such points, Volya Rossii published fragments of works by Zamyatin, but also by Isaac Babel and Mikhail Sholokhov, alongside Guillaume Apollinaire or Karel Čapek.
[60] Volya Rossii soon patronized a generation of émigré modernists, beginning with Tsvetaeva and Aleksey Remizov, followed later by Nina Berberova, Dovid Knut, Valentin Parnakh, Vladimir Pozner, Gleb Struve, and Yuri Terapiano.
[80] Slonim remained skeptical of this "mysticism", while also noting that the expanding Stalinist regime had emerged from industrialization as a "petty bourgeois" force, its appeal increased among émigré monarchists and Eurasianists.
[1] Slonim was focusing his attention on writing counter-propaganda descriptions of Socialist Realism, which was entering the official Soviet literary and political discourse under Joseph Stalin.
Readers of his work provide contrasting reviews: Aucouturier finds his 1930 study on Stalinism in Literature "important";[82] however, according to the Russian sociologist Evgeny Dobrenko, Slonim's contribution here "overstep[s] the boundaries of scholarship.
"[83] Although he still upheld the old Narodnik values, Slonim favored aestheticism and formalism over social determinism, and, on these grounds, criticized Pavel Milyukov's work in literary history.
[84] He also looked for tensions between the official dogma and writers who still cultivated individualism in its various forms, citing works by Pasternak,[85] Artyom Vesyoly, Yury Libedinsky, and Leonid Leonov.
[89] In 1933, he attended a symposium grouping Chisla magazine writers and members of the French Communist Party, discussing André Gide's account of life in the Soviet Union.
[77] He also worked on translations and on editing books for print: in 1930, Čestmír Jeřábek's Svět hoří; and in 1934, Adèle Hommaire de Hell's Mémoires d'une aventurière.
"[99] He put out in 1935 a sympathetic book on the ill-fated expedition of SS Chelyuskin, followed in 1937 by Les onzes républiques soviétiques ("The Eleven Soviet Republics"), at Éditions Payot.
[111] Following the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, Slonim and his colleagues, reunited in New York City, resumed the "defensist" line, unconditionally; Chernov took a more moderate stance.
"[4] Before 1950, Slonim was again banned in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc: copies of Le Bolchévisme vu par un russe were confiscated on sight by the Romanian Propaganda Ministry.
[114] He followed up in 1953 with a second volume, Modern Russian Literature, covering the period from Anton Chekhov to the 1950s,[5] and a biographical study, Tri lyubi Dostoyevskogo ("Three Loves of Dostoevsky").
[1][5][11][38] He returned to Italy on a research trip, employed by La Sapienza University's Institute for Slavic Philology, and, in 1954, edited the collection Modern Italian Short Stories.
[119] In 1963–1964, from his new home in Geneva, Slonim worked on an English version of Andrei Bely's Silver Dove, and corresponded over literary details with Maria Olsufyeva, who had finished translating that same novel into Italian.
[122] Slonim also contributed regularly to reviews and encyclopedias, answering queries posed by his younger colleagues,[123] and supporting the Sarah Lawrence graduate program in Switzerland.