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Things That Happened

Boris Slutsky has now emerged as one of Russia's great twentieth-century poets. Unlike his contemporary Solzhenitsyn, this once ardent Stalinist remained inside the Soviet literary establishment, and kept his unacceptable work to himself. His best poetry and prose were published only after his death. In «Things That Happened» the innermost thoughts of this clear-eyed tragedian are revealed as he enthused during the dynamism and terror of the 1930's, fought heroically in Russia, Romania, and Yugoslavia during the Second World War, and then became an increasingly sceptical witness to the de-stalinizations and re-stalinizations that preceded the terminal senility of the Soviet system under Brezhnev. Gerald Smith, Professor of Russian in the University of Oxford, supplies a detailed running commentary to a testament that appears for the first time here in English.