Complete Collection of Poems

"… Most of all, Sluchevsky wasn’t an artist. He wrote his poems in some childish way—scribbles, not a handwriting, but expressions. In poetry he was awkward, but like Moses. He needed his own Aaron to convey divine verbs to others; he loved performing under someone else’s mask: Mephistopheles, the "one-sided man," a spirit ("Posthumous Songs"), he liked to borrow someone else’s form—even a Pushkin poem. But when, in "Songs from the Corner," for example, he spoke plainly from himself, everything came out somehow awkwardly—almost funny—and yet often powerfully, prophetically, in a fiery, bright way. In the most fascinating parts of his poems, he suddenly slipped into prose, with an inappropriately inserted word breaking all the charm—and maybe that’s what created an entirely special impression, one that was his alone. Sluchevsky’s poems are often ugly, but it’s the same kind of ugliness as with twisted cacti or monstrous telescope-fish. This is ugliness with nothing vulgar, nothing low—more like a peculiar quality, though alien to beauty. …" (V. Bryusov)