Whilst visiting Venice in 1911 Thomas Mann's eye was drawn to a young sailor-suited boy of almost supernatural beauty, and was inspired to write "Death in Venice". This is a biography of that boy, who went on to lead a life as rich and as full of twists as any piece of fiction.Gilbert Adair describes The Real Tadzio not so much as a biography but as, at least in part, a belated obituary to Wladyslaw Moes, the boy who inspired Thomas Mann to write Death in Venice. Like that novella, this is a slim volume; one in which Moes' actual life story only takes up a fraction of what is an impressive, 100-page or so, meditation on the lasting influence of Mann's half-factual, half-fictional creation.

As Adair reveals, "virtually everything experienced by Gustav von Aschenbach in the novella, short of his premature death on the beach, had first happened to the author." In the summer of 1911 Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he'd became enraptured by the angelic figure of Wladyslaw Moes, a fey 11-year-old Polish nobleman with a penchant for sailor suits. (In Mann's svelte masterpiece the object of von Aschenbach's interest, Tadzio, is the slightly more respectable age of 14. While in Luchino Visconti's cinematic version of the book Bjorn Andresen, the actor in the role, was a positively ancient 15 year old). Unfortunately, a week into the Manns' Venetian sojourn rumours of a cholera epidemic in Palermo, actually some distance away, panicked them into returning to Germany. Back in Upper Bavaria, Mann set to work on transforming his brief infatuation into a work of (very thinly embellished) fiction. Moes--the real Tadzio--despite being depicted by Mann as a boy who "would most likely not live to grow old", died in 1986 after fighting in the 1921 Russo-Polish war, being interned by the Nazis and enduring Poland's repressive Communist regime. Although the book was translated into Polish shortly after its initial German publication in 1912, Moes only really became aware of his fictional counterpart when Visconti's film appeared in 1971. Infuriatingly Adair, who convincingly argues that Visconti's film is largely a success because of Andresen's "godlike beauty", did not discover quite what Moes thought of his celluloid double (or slightly more annoyingly what befell Andresen after his mid-20s.) The real Moes (and for that matter Andresen) will always be overshadowed by Tadzio but Adair deftly sifts the myths from the men.--Travis Elborough