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Doomed Poet: Osip Mandelstam by  JEFFREY MEYERS   Ralph Dutli, Mandelstam’s biographer and German translator, describes the poet as a sacrificial casualty: “In Russia, and all over the world, he is seen as a martyr for poetry, someone who paid with his life for his verses.  He is known, above all, as a victim of political persecution and the author of a trenchant poem exposing Stalin as the ‘corrupter of the human soul.’  His death in 1938 under appalling circumstances, in a forced labour camp, also contributed significantly to his worldwide fame.” In  Osip Mandelstam: A Biography  (Verso, 424 pp, £25), Dutli also claims that Mandelstam was “a fun-loving poet . . . who loved life and had absolutely no wish to become a martyr.”  But he also presents massive  evidence that undermines this  joie de vivre  image. The poet lacked material possessions, was socially isolated and lonely.  His life was a miserable, tragic and dreary nightmar...

  Marina Tsvetaeva   1 2. One great poet of her generation Tsvetaeva did meet; in 1916, she met young Osip Mandelstam. They had a brief affair during the Civil War. Mandelstam visited her so often-by train from St. Petersburg-that one friend joked, "I wonder if he is working for the railways." Years later, Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poet's widow, recalled: The friendship with Tsvetaeva, in my opinion, played an enormous role for Mandelstam 's work. It was a bridge on which he walked from one period of his work to another. With poems to Tsvetaeva begins his second book of poems,  Tristia.  Mandelstam's first book,  Stone , was the restrained, elegant work of a Petersburg poet. Tsvetaeva's friendship gave him her Moscow, lifting the spell of Petersburg's elegance. It was a magical gift, because with Petersburg alone, without Moscow, there is no freedom of full breath, no true feeling of Russia, no conscience. I am sure that my own relationship with Mandelstam ...