Generational question. Hard for younger set to comprehend how a turn to the Russians might be driven by the double-whammy of personal history & literary climate.

I grew up in the Age of the Confessionals.

America was the House of Suicide. Russia - via Nadezhda Mandelstam - was the House of Life. Hope Against Hope.

Berryman, from Dream Song # 136:

The sage said 'I merit long life if only because
I have never left bread-crumbs lying on the ground.
We were tested yesterday & are sound,
Henry's lady & Henry.
It all centered in the end on the suicide
in which I am an expert, deep & wide.'

[it should be remembered that Berryman's father also committed suicide, with a shotgun, in Florida, & that his son found him.]

Whereas, from Mandelstam's Octets (translated by yrs truly):

I'll whisper it - in an outline.
Its hour has not yet come.
The chessgame of measureless heaven
is mated with sweat - and wisdom.

 
And under purgatory's transient sky
we grow absent-minded - forget
that lucky heaven-vault on high...
- is a limber, everlasting habitat.

                  
[ - 1937, in exile, a few months before his death in a labor camp]