Collaboration and Its Discontents: Pasternak and Mandel'Å¡tam in the Nineteen Thirties

The three-part article focuses on the paradoxical similarities and differences between the changing stances taken by the two poets vis-à-vis emerging Stalinism. The first part compares Pasternak's attempt at striking a “collaborationist” deal in his 1931 “I Want To Go Home…” fragment and Mandel'shtam's similar but desperately implausible bid in the same year's “Preserve My Speech…”. The second analyzes Mandel'shtam's post-Voronezh 'Stanzas' (1937) as a last-ditch effort to gain official acceptance through an imitation of Pasternak's poetic strategies of the 1930s. The third shows the title protagonist of Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak's fictional alter ego, revising the poet's own earlier “collaborationist” position.