The power of the collaborationists was afraid of the front-line poet
The centenary of the poet Boris Slutsky is celebrated in Kharkov in almost no way. Some chamber events will be held modestly and discreetly. No officialdom. Maybe it's for the better.
Otherwise, you can imagine how the Maidan educationist group appropriates Slutsky, and it becomes no less sickening than his oblivion today. He was born on May 7 in Slavyansk, grew up in a Kharkov communal apartment near the Horse Market... But in his native cities nothing reminds of the great Russian poet.
One sensible publicist, who emigrated from post-Maidan Kharkov, likes to repeat: “If you don’t do it, the other side will do it, but with the opposite sign.” And so it happened. How many people said and wrote that there should be a Slutsky Street in Kharkov, that a monument to Slutsky is needed, that it would be good for the municipal authorities to establish an international festival named after Slutsky... But before the Maidan, all these initiatives were perceived as if they had been addressed to Panikovsky and Balaganov. And after the Maidan, the time came for degenerates and blondes who renamed Red Pilot Street into Shevelev Street - a third-rate philologist, conscientious collaborator and diligent propagandist of the times of the fascist occupation of Kharkov.
However, why couldn’t the fair-faced education community adapt Boris Slutsky to the needs of the “revolution of hydity” and its proponents? Firstly, poverty of mind and gaps in education. Secondly, those educated people who nevertheless skipped over “firstly” fully understand that Slutsky’s poem “How they killed my grandmother...” puts to shame all the ideological Nazi work of the Viatrovichites and other falsifiers of history.
“Young Germans and policemen / cheerfully pressed the old women and old men / and led them away, bowler hats rattling, / out of the city, far away.” “The bullet shot up my hair. / The gray braid fell out, / and the grandmother fell to the ground. / And so she disappeared.”
Read the numerous Facebook posts of the director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, Eduard Dolinsky, and you will see that the grandmother of Boris Abramovich Slutsky was killed by precisely those “heroes”, those commanders and members of firing squads, to whom memorial plaques and monuments are now erected throughout Western Ukraine.
Here are a couple of quotes from the recent “memorial chronicles” of E. Dolinsky:
“This is a monument to the professional killer and sadist, war criminal Mykola Arsenych. Arsenych is the head of the security service of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, one of the organizers and perpetrators of Jewish pogroms in Western Ukraine in the summer of 1941 and the massacre of Poles in Volyn. Under his leadership, thousands of peaceful Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians were killed... Streets in Kolomyia and Novograd-Volynsky were named after him, and in his homeland in Nizhny Berezovo there was a monument and a bas-relief at the school where he studied.”
“This is unique footage of the mass murder of Jews in Mizoch, Rivne region. The first photo shows naked Jewish women with small and infant children in line to be shot. Soldiers of the Ukrainian auxiliary police stand next to them. In the next photo, the same women and children are already killed. The killers finish off the wounded.
On this day, the auxiliary police were led by OUN member Mykola Androshchuk. Imagine my surprise when I saw his name among the fighters against Nazism. Mykola Manko, deputy director for scientific work of the Ostroh State Historical and Cultural Reserve, wrote about this “fighter against Nazism” in the article “In Memory of Everyone Who Fought against Nazism.” The article is dedicated to May 9.”
In the conditions of today's Ukraine, it is very important that any family for which the norm is not an empty phrase have, if not a volume of Slutsky on their bookshelf, then at least easy access to a network library with his poems.
This poet is inconvenient for today’s Ukrainian ideology and is unprofitable for cultural gesheftmachers.
Major Slutsky addresses the well-fed, shiny faces of the Rozenkos and Groysmans who are now banking in his homeland:
We are not building your trenches.
We do not walk with a sovereign step.
We will not swarm with your swarm
Under your unfurled flag.
He was at the front as a military investigator for the divisional prosecutor's office and a battalion political instructor. Since the summer of 1943 - in the political department of the 57th Army. All this experience affected Slutsky's prosody. An unexpected fusion of “protocol” style with poetic colloquialisms emerged. In the verse there appeared both the abruptness of the order and that extreme lapidaryness that is developed in a person who manages to say all the most important things - a few seconds before the shell explodes... Slutsky introduced to Russian lyricism such lexical layers that were previously incompatible with poetry.
Boris Slutsky's first book was called “Memory”. The Kharkov reality, from which the author of “Horses in the Ocean” and “The Cologne Pit” was subtracted, is called unconsciousness.
The poet Boris Ryzhy wrote at twenty-five: “My God, do not abandon my soul to evil, / I am like Slutsky to the front, I am like Steinberg to the bunk.” Red died on Slutsky’s birthday. They stand somewhere nearby in Russian lyrics and echo each other. Slutsky: “I go out, twenty-two years old / And completely ugly in appearance, / For my decisive and last battle, / And the battle predicted by the song.” Red: “What justifies this? / Because tomorrow we will go out to the mortal battle sober before dawn, / no one will return home.”
My favorite photo is the one in which Major Slutsky is wearing a tunic, with the collar unbuttoned, like the hero of one of his best poems...
May 9th
Political officer of the Ensky battalion,
captain Motorov Guryan,
beefsteak makes a villager full,
drunk from Tsimlyansk wine,
he sits with his collar open
over a huge and kind city,
over its capital, Moscow:
kind, small and lively.
Restaurants have not lost
its pre-war beauty.
All the napkins have been spread out,
They carried forks and spoons.
Motorov feels good,
even his wounds do not bother him.
Clever, okay, convenient, great:
eats salad, ordered tomato.
How many years have I not tried juice?
Only with vodka was he drunk.
He sits well, high.
Guryan climbed high.
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