Mandelstam's life & fate take on a clearer resonance when you see that he was re-enacting, with some solemnity (as was Akhmatova), Pushkin's war of independence - for a free literary culture, for the dignity of the (raznocinets, un-privileged, non-elite, egalitarian) writer - for free literature, free speech... & his poems (Mandelstam's) meanwhile form a very special & complex Petersburgian isomorph or palimpsest interwoven with Pushkin's... (like Nabokov, in another key)...

(something addressed, sort of mock-epic fashion, in "Henry's" search for "Pushkin the cat", in Stubborn Grew...)