“…Least of all, Sluchevsky was an artist. He wrote his poems somehow in a childish way, in scribbles—not in handwriting, but in expressions. In poetry he was tongue-tied, but like Moses. He needed his Aaron to convey divine words to others; he loved to perform under someone else’s mask: Mephistopheles, a “one-sided man,” a spirit (“Posthumous Songs”), he loved to borrow someone else’s form, even a Pushkin poem. When, in “Songs from the Corner,” for example, he spoke directly from himself, everything came out somehow awkwardly, almost funny, and at the same time often prophetically strong, fiery brightly. In the most fascinating parts of his poems, he suddenly strayed into prose, with an inappropriately inserted word he broke all the charm and, perhaps, it was precisely by this that he achieved a completely special impression, unique to him. Sluchevsky's poems are often ugly, but this is the same ugliness as that of twisted cacti or monstrous telescope fish. This is an ugliness in which there is nothing vulgar, nothing low, rather originality, although alien to beauty. ..." (V. Bryusov)