Early activities Slonim was born in the
Russian Empire's port city of
Odessa (now in
Ukraine), although some sources mistakenly have
Novgorod-Severskiy,
Chernihiv Governorate. His elder brother Vladimir was also born in Odessa in 1887. Their parents were upper-middle-class
Russian Jewish intellectuals; Slonim's uncle was the literary critic
Yuly Aykhenvald. According to Russologist Michel Aucouturier, Slonim's memoirs show him as an erudite and an adept of
aestheticism, whose "socialist sympathies" were only cemented by the
Russian Revolution. While completing his secondary studies at a classical gymnasium in Odessa, Slonim came into contact with the Socialist Revolutionaries (or "Esers"), and, like his older brother Vladimir before him, became their follower. Their radicalism pitted them against their father, who supported the moderate-liberal
Kadet Party. Slonim, who regarded himself as a
libertarian socialist rather than a
Marxist, worked on establishing "self-instruction circles", circulating banned literature among students, artisans and workers, and traveled to Europe to meet with
Osip Minor. As he recalled in the 1960s, the Eser leadership was "appalled to discover than in Odessa and the nearby region most of the work was being done by boys and girls of 16 or 17." According to later sources, he was brought to the attention of the
Okhrana and left Russia surreptitiously. where he took his
Ph.D. In 1914, he published in Italy a translation of
Ivan Turgenev's poetry cicle,
Senility. Upon the start of World War I, Slonim followed the "defensist" line of the Eser mainstream, supporting Russia's commitment to the
Allies, and served in the
Imperial Army. The
February Revolution caught him on the
Romanian Front, but he soon returned to
Petrograd, where (Aucouturier writes) "his talents as a propagandist and an orator soon made him one of his party's celebrities". According to Slonim, he was one of the youths left in charge of party work: the more senior Esers were either in government or consumed by work in the
Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.
Constituent Assembly and Paris Conference In his memoirs, Slonim claims to have foreseen the danger posed by the reorganized
Bolsheviks, having heard their leader,
Vladimir Lenin, speak. He contrasts Bolshevik unity with the Esers' indecisiveness and factionalism. He was still active after the
October Revolution, which placed Russia under a Bolshevik
Council of People's Commissars. Slonim became an Eser candidate for the
Russian Constituent Assembly in the
November 25 election, running in the southwestern province of
Bessarabia. He took his seat in the Eser landslide win, and, aged 23, was the youngest parliamentarian. Days after, Bessarabia formed its own government as the
Moldavian Democratic Republic, and remained undecided about its future within the
Russian Republic. The elections for the Constituent Assembly were chaotic, and the results were never fully recorded. Slonim was present in the Assembly on the morning of January 19, 1918, when the Bolsheviks dissolved it by force and opened fire on the supporting crowds. He later fled to
Samara, where the Constituent Assembly had formed its own
"Committee of Members" government. He joined the latter, then, upon its merger into the
Provisional All-Russian Government, moved to
Omsk. As the
Russian Civil War took hold of the countryside, Slonim followed the
Czechoslovak Legion and became friends with its leaders, In November 1918, Slonim had lost his Bessarabian constituency, as the region
united with Romania. The writer became a strong critic of that merger, claiming that the Romanian identity in both Romania and Bessarabia had been recently fabricated by intellectuals, lacking popular support among the Moldavian peasants (
see Moldovenism). Slonim also claimed that the union process had been triggered by the
German Empire in late 1917, as an anti-Bolshevik move, and supported by Russians who had discarded "personal and national dignity." Building on such arguments, Slonim depicted the Russian Empire as a functional and organic economic entity, suggesting that Bessarabia had more in common with Ukraine than with Romania. Acknowledging that there was a "united front" between the
White movement and
Soviet Russia on the Bessarabian issue, he proposed to overcome the impasse by organizing a
League of Nations referendum in the former Moldavian Republic. Scholar
Charles Upson Clark, who sees Slonim's accounts as among "the best [...] from the Russian standpoint", rejects his theory about the German inspiration for the union, noting that it was in fact a traditional Romanian goal. Slonim joined a self-appointed team of politicians and landowners who claimed to speak for Bessarabia, and attended the
Paris Peace Conference to lobby for the Russian cause. Among the other members of this body were
Alexander N. Krupensky,
Alexandr K. Schmidt,
Vladimir Tsyganko, and
Mihail Savenco. Slonim, seconded by Tsyganko, circulated rumors of "unheard-of atrocities" committed by the
Romanian Army, such as the massacre of 53 people in one village of after the
Khotyn Uprising, and the torturing of many others. Interviewed by ''
L'Humanité, the French Communist Party paper, Slonim also claimed the socialists were being repressed, and that unconditional union had been voted on "under the menace of machine guns". These statements were rejected outright by the Bessarabian unionists: Ion Inculeț, the former President of the Moldavian Republic, called the interview "idiotic", while his aide Ion Pelivan wrote to L'Humanité'' to restate that the union was expressing the free will of the Bessarabian people. In his notes, Pelivan referred to Slonim as a "deserter", an "impostor", and a
Belarusian Jew.
Tuscany, Berlin, and Volya Rossii Slonim spent the years 1919–1922 in
Tuscany, becoming a regular contributor to the leftist daily
Il Secolo. That year, he published at H. Bemporad & figlio an Italian-language work on the revolutionary ideologies of
Béla Kun and the
Spartacus League, eponymously titled
Spartaco e Bela Kun, and two memoirs:
La rivoluzione russa ("The Russian Revolution"), and
Il bolscevismo visto da un russo ("Bolshevism as Seen by a Russian"). His thoughts on communism brought him to the attention of
Benito Mussolini, leader of the
Fasci Italiani, who invited Slonim to write for ''
Il Popolo d'Italia''. It was chronicled by the Romanian essayist
Vasile Lovinescu as a good introduction to the ideological threads connecting communism and
Tsarist autocracy; however, Lovinescu also introduced Slonim as a "militant communist", arguing that his perspective could be viewed as impartial, rather than as biased against Lenin. Slonim followed up with an essay on Bolshevik
Proletkult and
Futurism, taken up by
Henri Grégoire's monthly,
Le Flambeau (October 1921). At this early stage, he derided Soviet literary productions, and described the better poets (
Alexander Blok and
Andrei Bely) as incompatible with communist dogmas. Slonim settled in
Prague,
Czechoslovakia, where he taught at the Russian Free University and joined the local
Zemgor. He was also co-opted to write for the Russian-language émigré magazine
Volya Rossii ("Russia's Will", "Russia's Freedom", or "Russia's Free Will"). Its editorial board included Slonim (editorial secretary to 1923, later full editor), Occupying a Prague building which had reputedly housed
Mozart, and also gathering for conversations at
Národní kavárna café, the circle members networked with European policymakers such as
Aristide Briand,
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and
Émile Vandervelde. Although it published noted works of literature, including
Marina Tsvetaeva's
Rat-Catcher,
Volya Rossii had a small readership. It depended largely on Czechoslovak government support, but the subsidies grew thinner by the year. Originally a daily in 1920, it became a weekly in 1922, and a monthly in 1923. From its relaunch in 1923,
Volya Rossii was primarily noted as an exponent of the political left, and as such a rival of the more eclectic, Paris-based,
Sovremennye Zapiski. Its acceptance of various Bolshevik reforms made it close to the
Mladorossi émigrés, but the magazine saw itself as eminently
Narodnik, carrying through the ideology of
Alexander Herzen and
Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Beyond them, Slonim saw himself as a legatee of the
Decembrists. It also took a secular approach to anti-communism, decrying the émigrés' debt to
Russian Orthodoxy—the church, Slonim asserted, was not a true foundation of Russian identity and culture. These positions were summarized in Slonim's sarcastic characterization of
Sovremennye Zapiski, a "non-partisan voice of the liberal-democratic broad front, with some tendencies that are sometimes socialist, sometimes religious."
Literary columnist Volya Rossii stated its support for "
moral socialism", relying on "the spontaneous activity and creativity of the masses." Slonim himself was a noted adversary of
Eurasianism and theories of Russian exceptionalism, which understood Bolshevism as
compatible with nationalist ideas. He interpreted Bolshevism as a "
Jacobin" experiment in state control; he still believed in the regime's inevitable failure, and in the reemergence of democratic Russia. However, as he reported to
Alexander Kerensky, the Prague Esers feared the growth of the
Czechoslovakia's Communist Party, which could turn on the émigré community. While contributing articles on political news and historical sketches, as well as impressions from a 1926 trip to the United States and a 1928 homage to Prague, Slonim became the main literary chronicler at
Volya Rossii. He believed that the importance of
Russian literature was to be found in its ability to convey "the vital problems of individual and social existence", and hoped that this tradition would be carried on in exile: "We know that the best among [émigré writers] made their way through suffering and struggle." Before 1925, Slonim focused his polemics on
Zinaida Gippius, whose articles in
Sovremennye Zapiski prophesied the death of Russian literature. Chiding the "old guard" of Russian literati, he argued instead that modern literature was thriving both in Russia and in exile. From then on, Gippius came to regard Slonim with intense hostility, particularly since he also promoted Tsvetaeva, her personal enemy. While their
Acmeist rival
Georgy Adamovich wanted to see through the emergence of a Russian
psychological novel, Slonim and
Ivan Bunin believed that psychological introspection and
social realism could still blend into a coherent whole: "spiritual vicissitudes had to be illustrated from the outside so that the reader could see them." They urged émigrés to follow
modernist developments and replicate steps taken in Soviet literature. As a reviewer of Soviet works, Slonim identified echoes of the 19th-century philosophical and political epics, showing up in novels by
Yevgeny Zamyatin,
Boris Pasternak,
Vsevolod Ivanov and
Yury Olesha. He looked with political optimism to the unfolding of the
New Economic Policy, which took Russia back to grassroots capitalism. Slonim searched for clues that communist writers were growing disenchanted with the Soviet state, and kept records about the "more tiresome and woeful" literature of
agitprop. In order to illustrate such points,
Volya Rossii published fragments of works by Zamyatin, but also by
Isaac Babel and
Mikhail Sholokhov, alongside
Guillaume Apollinaire or
Karel Čapek.
Volya Rossii soon patronized a generation of émigré modernists, beginning with Tsvetaeva and
Aleksey Remizov, followed later by
Nina Berberova,
Dovid Knut,
Valentin Parnakh,
Vladimir Pozner,
Gleb Struve, and
Yuri Terapiano. However, Slonim's encouragement had a perverse effect: in Russia, authors praised by Slonim or sampled in
Volya Rossii were singled out as potential enemies of the regime. In 1927, the magazine hosted fragments from Zamyatin's novel
We, the first publication of that work in its original Russian. In order not to expose the author's direct contacts with the émigrés, Slonim claimed that these were back-translations from Czech and English reprints. Later, Slonim's positive reviews of ''
Krasnaya Nov''' magazine were used against its editor,
Aleksandr Voronsky, who was eventually purged from the
Soviet Communist Party. Slonim became a backer of Tsvetaeva and her husband
Sergei Efron, who had settled in Prague. Together with
Salomeya Halpern,
Hélène Iswolsky,
D. S. Mirsky and Lebedev, he organized a Committee to Assist Marina Tsvetaeva. He became a friend, confidant, and dedicated promoter of Tsvetaeva, even though she declined interest in Eser ideology and political matters in general. They continued to disagree over politics, whenever Tsvetaeva made a public show of her loyalty for the
House of Romanov. Their liaison had romantic undertones: to Tsvetaeva, he was "the dear one", and his departure to be with another woman inspired her to write the poem "Attempt at Jealousy". Thinking that she held an idealized view of him, Slonim, newly separated from his first wife, rejected her advances in 1924, but they remained friends. He was critical of her affair with K. B. Rodzevitch, whom he regarded as a "dull, mediocre" man.
Move to Paris By the late 1920s, Slonim had come to share Gippius' opinion that Russian literature in exile was doomed, its links with the Russian soil forever severed. He noted that, from 1926 on, the Foreign Delegation had only relied on Soviet publications for understanding the goings-on in Russia, and argued that Soviet literature could be followed for its documentary value. He himself published an introduction to Russian literature in the 1927 edition of
Slovanský Přehled. His skepticism was also showing in his political essays, where he asserted that the Eser cause had been stifled by the
1922 Show Trials. By then, the Esers' Prague group had become torn between two camps, each accusing the other of serving the Soviets. One was led by
Viktor Chernov, the other (comprising the
Volya Rossii group) was headed by Sukhomlin. Slonim also had a quarrel with writer
Vasily Yanovsky—reportedly, because he commented on Yanovsky's poor use of Russian and his borrowings from
Mikhail Artsybashev. In 1927, Slonim purchased a printing press in Paris, where he hoped to relaunch
Volya Rossii. They reinforced a Russian colony that was just growing in importance, as French interest in Russian affairs was about to peak.
Volya Rossii continued to appear in Prague until March 1932, In its last years, it supported the
Right Opposition and the
Five-Year Plan, seeing them as evidence of Soviet normalization, and a promise for Eser uprisings. Lebedev even claimed to have traveled inside the Soviet Union. Slonim remained skeptical of this "mysticism", while also noting that the expanding
Stalinist regime had emerged from industrialization as a "petty bourgeois" force, its appeal increased among émigré monarchists and Eurasianists. His articles were regularly featured in other émigré publications:
Sotsialist-Revolyutsioner,
Problemy and
Novaya Gazeta in Paris;
Russkiy Arkhiv of
Belgrade; and the American
Moskva. however, according to the Russian sociologist Evgeny Dobrenko, Slonim's contribution here "overstep[s] the boundaries of scholarship." Although he still upheld the old Narodnik values, Slonim favored aestheticism and
formalism over
social determinism, and, on these grounds, criticized
Pavel Milyukov's work in literary history. He also looked for tensions between the official dogma and writers who still cultivated individualism in its various forms, citing works by Pasternak,
Artyom Vesyoly,
Yury Libedinsky, and
Leonid Leonov. He welcomed Stalin's decision to disband the
Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, seeing it as a "Charter of Liberation" for the nonconformist authors. In Paris, Slonim set up his own literary society, ''Kochev'ye
("Camp of Nomads"), its name probably alluding to the primitivist aesthetics of the Left Esers. He was also close to avant-garde painters Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, whom he introduced to Efron and Tsvetaeva when the latter couple also settled in Paris. In 1933, he attended a symposium grouping Chisla'' magazine writers and members of the
French Communist Party, discussing
André Gide's account of life in the Soviet Union. The meeting veered into scandal when (according to Slonim's account) he took the rostrum and informed both camps that Gide was not in fact a convert to communism, and that "instead of making loud pronouncement they had better read Gide's oeuvre."
Impresario and Soviet "defensist" Slonim's work diversified, and he became a literary impresario, founding, with
George Reavey, the European Literary Bureau. It had contracts with Berdyaev,
Samuel Beckett,
André Malraux and
Jacques Maritain. Together with Reavey, he put out one of the first collections of Russian prose rendered in English (1934), which is also noted for its inclusion of Socialist Realists
Alexander Fadeyev and
Feodor Gladkov. Slonim and Reavey's anthology of Soviet literature came out at Gallimard in 1935, and possibly included unsigned translations by Tsvetaeva. Slonim was by then also publishing regular literary chronicles, turning his attention to works by
William Faulkner,
Peter Neagoe, and
D. H. Lawrence. Slonim was for years critical of émigrés who asked to be resettled in the Soviet Union, denouncing Efron's work for the
NKVD-sponsored
Union for Repatriation. In 1935, He finally met Zamyatin, who had escaped Russia, and they "became very good friends"—before Zamyatin's sudden illness and death. Slonim's own theories regarding the role of communism in interrupting the traditions of Russian literature was positively cited in the United States by
Max Eastman, whom the Soviets themselves regarded as a "
Troskyist". According to the official Soviet narrative, the Eastman–Slonim connection was central to the establishment of American
Sovietology, which the Soviets themselves regarded as a pseudoscience; Slonim matched "the strategic goals of anti-communist ideologists", namely "to compromise Soviet literature and Soviet cultural policy in the eyes of Western readers." In 1934, Slonim had resumed his conferencing on Lenin, networking with Italian anti-fascists such as
Oddino Morgari and
Alberto Meschi, and being followed around by Mussolini's
OVRA. After such geopolitical shifts, Slonim came to agree with the basic tenets of Soviet thinking: he believed that democracy was doomed, and that the world was becoming split into two camps, of communism and fascism. He formulated his preference into a
socialist-patriotic manifesto: The defensist joyfully greets all tidings of the internal and external successes of Russia. When a new factory is built in the Soviet Union, when a strong army is created, when a heroic flight is made, when important discoveries are made and when a talented book is written, the defensist feels a sense of pride. He put out in 1935 a sympathetic book on the ill-fated expedition of
SS Chelyuskin, followed in 1937 by
Les onzes républiques soviétiques ("The Eleven
Soviet Republics"), at
Éditions Payot. The latter book was well-liked in the Soviet Union itself, and recommended by
Intourist, In 1938, Slonim also translated
Viktor Shklovsky's
Voyage de Marco Polo. That year, Slonim also completed a version of Bunin's
Liberation of Tolstoy, published by Gallimard but disliked by the author. When Lebedev abandoned the REOD and moved to America in 1936, Slonim continued his work. This was an especially controversial decision, as the REOD became exposed for its links with the Union for Repatriation and the NKVD. Slonim ultimately presented his resignation in July 1938. In June 1939, he met Tsvetaeva one final time in Paris, as she and Efron began their return trip to the Soviet Union. Slonim was still in Paris after the
Nazi–Soviet Pact and before the
Nazi invasion of France. Arrested for his contacts with the French communists, he was sent to a French concentration camp. By August 1941, he was in Spain, taking the
SS Navemar from
Seville to New York City. He completed the journey, despite the
Navemars "criminally inadequate" facilities, alongside friends
Zosa Szajkowski and
Mark Zborowski.
Sarah Lawrence College Slonim initially lectured on Russian topics at
Yale,
Chicago and
Penn, before becoming, in 1943, a professor of Russian and
comparative literature at
Sarah Lawrence College,
Yonkers. he denied the existence of a separate
Jewish literature in Russia, proposing that Jewish authors were merely Russian authors. His stance in this far-reaching debate about
Jewish assimilation was similar to that of his uncle Aykhenvald, including their proposed reference to Jewish writers as "writers who are Jews". In late 1944, he lectured at the
Phillips Academy East and West Association on the issue of
Russia–United States relations. Slonim was viewed with caution by the American Esers. They investigated his REOD activity and concluded that he had shown callousness, and had mixed with NKVD envoys, but cleared him of allegations that he had been a spy himself. Following the
Nazi attack on the Soviet Union, Slonim and his colleagues, reunited in New York City, resumed the "defensist" line, unconditionally; Chernov took a more moderate stance.
Brian Boyd also notes that Slonim "was in fact firmly against Stalin and the Soviet system." In 1950,
Oxford University Press released Slonim's literary panorama,
The Epic of Russian Literature; from Its Origins Through Tolstoy. According to the
Revue des Études Slaves, it was an "intelligent and alert" work, appealing "to the cultivated public rather than the specialists".
The Epic, echoing the approach of
Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, focused on the 19th-century novels and debates, being more dismissive of earlier literature. He followed up in 1953 with a second volume,
Modern Russian Literature, covering the period from
Anton Chekhov to the 1950s, In 1959, he lectured at
Vassar on Pasternak's philosophical outlook. Also in 1960, he collected and edited for print selections from
Mikhail Zoshchenko's satires (as
Izbrannoe).
Final years According to Aucouturier, Slonim stands out as "one of the first independent critics of the USSR's literary output [and] a pioneer of Soviet literary historiography in the Occident." Philologist Melissa Frazier sees him as an "incredibly significant figure in the phenomenon of Russian émigré culture". She notes: Slonim did a lot more in the way of plot summary—but in the polarized world of the Cold War, even plot summary was hugely important. [...] He was one of the few in the West actually reading what was being written in the Soviet Union with the recognition that there were still great writers who had stayed behind. In 1963–1964, from his new home in
Geneva, Slonim worked on an English version of
Andrei Bely's
Silver Dove, and corresponded over literary details with Maria Olsufyeva, who had finished translating that same novel into Italian. Slonim's last standalone book was the 1964 textbook
Soviet Russian Literature. Writers and Problems, praised by
Revue des Études Slaves for its "sense of balance", but criticized for its "allusive nature". Social historian Lawrence H. Schwartz notes its "vitriolic" critique of the
Union of Soviet Writers. Slonim also contributed regularly to reviews and encyclopedias, answering queries posed by his younger colleagues, and supporting the Sarah Lawrence graduate program in Switzerland. His historical essay on
Volya Rossii was published in 1972, as part of Nikolai Poltoratsky's review of Russian literature in exile. He also arranged for print
Sofiya Pregel's
Last Poems (1973). The verdicts he had produced regarding the mainstream Soviet literary output continued to be viewed as unpalatable in the communist east. In 1975,
Bulgarian critic Alexander Dunchev described him as one of the "bourgeois authors [who] slander socialist realism". Slonim died in 1976 in the French resort of
Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Tatiana Slonim continued to live in Geneva. In 1986, she donated her husband's 16th-century copy of the
Theotokos of Vladimir to the city's
Art and History Museum. ==Notes==