The fate of the genre memory of Pushkin’s motive “the poet and the power”
in the poetry of B. Pasternak and O. Mandelstam of the 1930s
The paper considers the role of a motive in genre-generating processes of the Russian poetry
of the 19−20th centuries. It is known that along with established genres with sharp structural at-
tributes, some forms could be found which have certain potentials but did not become genre for-
mations. Stanzas are included in a number of such forms. When discussing stanzas, we are not
concerned with syntactic attributes but with certain semantics defined by poetic tradition.
In Russian poetry, this tradition originated from Pushkin’s “Stanzas” (1826) and extended in
the poem “K druz’yam” (“To friends”) (1827). The semantics of both poems is related to the mo-
tive of the dialogue between the poet and the governor. It differs significantly from the semantics
of the solemn ode by two attributes: a) the affirmation of the equality between the poet and the
governor in the dialogue; b) the direction of the dialogue towards the future.
Without any noticeable development in the 19th-century poetry, this motive was in demand in
the 1930s, as expressed in the works of B. Pasternak and O. Mandelstam. In the poem “Stolet’e
s lishnim – ne vchera...” (“More than a century ago – not yesterday”), Pasternak refers to the allu-
sions of Pushkin’s “Stanzas” and gives them a different meaning. Pushkin’s “Glyadet’ vpered
bez boyazni” (“Looking forward without fear”) is some kind of future without any doubts. How-
ever, for Pasternak, it is a temptation that led to a dead end “pri vstreche s umstvennoyu len’yu”
(“when faced with mental laziness”).
The fate of the motive becomes more complicated in Mandelstam’s work. Beginning with
harsh anti-Stalin injection “My zhivem, pod soboyu ne chuya strany...” (“We live without feeling
the country behind us...”) (1933), the poet rewrites spiritual and creative evolution later. “Stan-
zas” (1935) is a result of this evolution, describing the necessity of dealing with Stalin’s regime.
In the next poem with the nominal title “Oda Stalinu” (“Ode to Stalin”) (1937), Mandelstam re-
turns stanzas of a solemn ode attributes with a required distance between a poet and a governor.
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The fate of the genre memory of Pushkin’s motive “the poet and the power”
in the poetry of B. Pasternak and O. Mandelstam of the 1930s // Сибирский филологический журнал. 2020. № 1. Pp. 151–158. DOI: 10.17223/18137083/70/11.