Many of Slutsky's poems depict scenes of warfare, but almost always the focus is not war as such, but the paradoxicality of human behavior in extreme situations. At such moments, there is a kind of mismatch between the individual and the collective: the logic of war as a collective affair, which is part of a larger history, never completely coincides with the logic of individual participants. This mismatch is tragic: even if the individual understands how history works, this understanding does not help him or her to survive in a truly critical situation. It is impossible to play history.
And yet that is exactly what Major Petrov, the hero of Balladdy of Dogmatics, is trying to do - most likely not a real person, but a kind of generalized image in which Major Slutsky's features are guessed. Petrov, a convinced Marxist, is experiencing a kind of class enlightenment and decides to literally implement the principles of dialectical logic: proletarians from different countries must unite to defend the interests of their class. But the reality of war runs counter to the old slogan of the Communist Party manifesto, and the attempt to interfere in the course of history does not affect anything. The death of one person, however tragic and unjust it may be, cannot change the general direction of history.
This topic also arises in other verses of Slutskiy. Thus, in one of the poems written on the death of Kulchitsky, a close friend of the poet becomes a victim of impersonal and destructive forces of history, which perform their work on the restructuring of the world, without paying attention to individual people:
Among Slutsky's poems, many touch upon the theme of the Holocaust. The poet himself, if he had not studied in Moscow, could have been his victim: in the territories where he spent his childhood, the Holocaust unfolded in full force. Most of these poems were not published in the Soviet period - the legacy of Slutskiy in the drafts is tens of times greater than the volume of books published during his lifetime. But this poem appeared in the book "Modern Stories" in 1969, almost a quarter of a century after the end of the war, when the front theme in many ways has ceased to be new to Soviet literature.
Here the reader can see a picture familiar from the films and literature about Auschwitz: a column of doomed people slowly moves from the railway station to the camp gates. But Slutsky was not in Auschwitz, and the logic of this text is not the logic of memories, but the logic of dreaming: a specific camp of destruction becomes a generalized place, one of many possible.
It is the logic of sleep that leads to a strange doubling of the poet's gaze: he simultaneously walks along the road to the camp (the whole poem is written in the first person) and looks at what is happening from the outside. Duality is also evident in grammatical forms: it is not clear whose souls the "foul smoke of tomatoes" - those who have already burned in the ovens of the death camp, or those who are just moving towards the Auschwitz Gate: the entire temporal perspective would seem to be displaced. This scene is permeated by the feeling of endlessly lasting time: the road to the camp is endless, the resolution of the situation, even if tragic, is delayed, so that the poem leads to a paradoxical conclusion that the Holocaust is not over yet, it continues here and now.
The idea of history as a continuous spiral movement, where various social contradictions only seem to disappear at first glance, but in fact continue to influence modernity, is brought to the limit here. The downside of this understanding of history is its doomedness to eternal repetition, to the impossibility of achieving a true revolutionary breakthrough. This is history from the point of view of the melancholic, who is immersed in a constant yearning for the lost object.
Poems about literature are not usually very popular: they are believed to be addressed to a narrow circle. Slutskiy perceived such verses quite differently - as examples from recent history, which allow us to understand the major events of the twentieth century. He wrote about his teachers (a few poems about Selvinsky), senior poets (Ksenia Nekrasova, Alexander Tvardovsky, Nikolai Zabolotsky), friends in the poetic generation (Michael Kulchitsky), perceiving them as an integral part of the "we" that each of his poems narrates about.
This poem is a kind of epitaph of modernist prose of the 1920s. Many of the writers whose names were associated with this literature did not survive the year 1937. And not only the four mentioned here, but also the writer Boris Pilniak, the true star of Soviet prose, poets Osip Mandelstam and Nikolai Zabolotsky, prose writer and poet Varlam Shalamov and many others. Of all the writers listed in the poems, only Alexander Lebedenko returned alive from the camp: he was the first to tell Slutsky about the camp life.