It is common for English-language accounts of Mandelstam’s life to begin with an account of his death. Consider the first sentence of a twosentence biography that appeared in The New York Review of Books in 2016 to preface a translation by Andrew Davis:
Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was persecuted for his poetry and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok, Russia.1
Or the subtitle of a piece by Eimear McBride in The New Statesman in 2017:
The cat-and-mouse game between the poet Osip Mandelstam and the Soviet dictator could only end in death.2
Elsewhere writers take up Mandelstam’s biographical circumstances as a lens through which the supposed obscurity of the later poems can be understood:
The later poems of Osip Mandelstam, whose poems were never easy, are in part obscure because what he wished or had…
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The American Poetry Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, May/June 2020