Osip Mandelstam could never have painlessly fused with the times, just as he could not have remained uninjured by the distance he created between between himself and the times, because he himself was the times — a phenomenon you can only glimpse in a reverie and even then, only in those rare moments when you are truly yourself, when you rise above all conventions and, in a way, depart from your own body.

O, what a joy it is to know that such a man could appear among us, or rather, soar above us— like a meteor. It makes you feel helpless. It pains you, and you pity yourself and all those who were unable to deflect fate's iron sword and allow it to sever our deep kinship with this great poet, a poet without an equal -- this hole big child whom we abandoned in the street amid the throng of screeching tram cars… 

from the memoirs of Mandelstam's friend and contemporary, poet 
Riurik Ivnev, 1988