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Abstract:

The article examines the characteristic features of the poetic style of the outstanding poet of the frontline generation Boris Slutsky — first of all, his poems written in free verse — Slutsky has 35 of them. They maximally correspond to the idea of his contemporaries about the poet’s verse as extremely prosaic and ‘clumsy’, which is consistent with Slutsky’s ambiguous position in the literary process of his era: the official Soviet poet, regularly publishing poetry books in the capital, and, at the same time, the author of uncensored poems circulating in samizdat. Most of Slutsky’s free verse simultaneously contain relapses of traditional verse (random meters, metric insertions, etc.), which allows us to consider their transitional forms, characteristic of early Russian free verse. However, in his numerous poetry translations, Slutsky demonstrates a confident mastery of ‘international free verse’ (M. Gasparov’s term).

Keywords: Boris Slutsky, versification, free verse, poetic translation.