Boris Slutskii (1919-86) spent his childhood and youth in Kharkov, in what is now Ukraine; his father was a manual worker. From 1937 he studied at the Moscow Institute of Law; from 1938 he combined this with studying at the Gorky Literary Institute. During the War he served as a political instructor, joining the Communist Party in 1943. He was awarded several decorations and was wounded, suffering severe concussion. Two trepanations in the late 1940s left him with unrelenting headaches and severe insomnia.
After being demobilized in August 1946, Slutskii lived on a small disability pension, and on what he earned from radio work and as an editor and translator; the anti-Jewish campaigns of the time made it impossible for him to find full-time employment. He wrote poems criticizing Stalin as
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Citation: Chandler, Robert. "Boris Slutskii". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 29 March 2014 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13312, accessed 19 April 2024.]
