On the Poem by Boris Slutsky “They shot Van’ka, the platoon commander…”. Problems of Understanding

Abstract

The article is devoted to analysis of a poem written by Boris Slutsky. Boris Abramovich Slutsky (1919–1986), Russian poet and a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, is an important figure in the Russian poetry of the second half of the 20th century. The article examines the poem “They shot Van’ka, the platoon commander…” that was not published until the late 80s. While very simple in form, the poem leaves a great deal of room for interpretation of its content. The author intentionally chooses a restrained tone and avoids judgmental vocabulary that could reveal his attitude towards the depicted events. The article attempts to expose the author’s standpoint by means of stylistic analysis (the poem incudes words and phrases from a wide range of stylistic registers: from obsolete words and bureaucratic formulas to colloquial and vernacular expressions, sometimes even deliberately violating grammatical rules) and by examining the text’s important syntactic features. It is argued that Slutsky’s military background is very important for analysis of his poems. During the war he was a secretary at a division prosecution office, later an investigator. Reflection of this experience that the author himself calls “painful and sordid” can be found in his verses.