Slutskii's Boss
Boris Slutskii, The Boss. November 24, 1962
Published in Izvestiia, Boris Slutskii’s “The Boss” bluntly captures the emotional logic of Soviet authority. The speaker works, suffers, and even carries his boss’s portrait through wartime life, yet remains suspect: tears are read as performance, humility as hidden mockery. The poem refuses to treat this as a private misunderstanding. Suspicion is the relationship, and loyalty does not dissolve it. That such a portrait appeared in an official government newspaper suggests the Thaw’s narrow opening, where criticism was safest when aimed at habits of power rather than the system itself.
Original Source: Izvestiia, 24 November 1962.
My boss had no love for me
Did not know me, hear or see me,
And yet he had a deathly fear of me,
And gloomily, sullenly hated me.
Whenever he would make me weep,
He thought that I was acting;
When I would bow my head to him,
He thought I was hiding a sneer.
Arid I worked my whole life for him,
Late to bed and early rising.
Loved him. And for him was wounded.
But all this was to no avail.
I carried his picture around with me.
Hung it in dugout and in tent,
Kept it constantly in view,
never tiring of the sight of it.
But less and less as the years went by
Did his dislike distress me.
And now it upsets me not a bit to recognize
The patent fact that from the start of time
Bosses bore no love for such as I.
Source: Current Digest of the Soviet Press, Vol. XIV, No. 48 (December 26, 1962), p. 19.