Slonimski, Mikhail Leonidovich
SLONIMSKI, MIKHAIL LEONIDOVICH
SLONIMSKI, MIKHAIL LEONIDOVICH (1897–1972), Soviet Russian author and critic. Born in Pavlovsk, of a prominent, highly assimilated family, Slonimski was the son of Leonid *Slonimski, nephew of the literary historian Semyon Vengerov, and a cousin of the famous Polish poet Antoni *Slonimski. He was one of the founders of the Serapion Brothers, a loose association of writers that came into being in 1921 for the purpose of protecting the autonomy of a literature already threatened by political pressures.
Slonimski's best work was written early in his career. In addition to some investigations of literary theory, this includes Shestoy strelkovy ("The Sixth Rifles," 1922), a collection of tales about the senseless horror of war and the Revolution; the autobiographical novel Lavrovy ("The Lavrovs," 1927), which portrays a young man who breaks with his petty, ineffectual, and selfish family to join the Revolutionary cause; and its less successful sequel, Foma Kleshnyov (1930). In 1949, at the height of the Stalinist terror, Slonimski published Pervye gody ("First Years"), a revised and more militantly Communist version of Lavrovy.
[Maurice Friedberg]