Portraits without Frames, by Lev Ozerov

[Trevor]

Portraits without Frames



Publication Date: December 4, 2018
Pages: 280
Introduction by Boris Dralyuk
Edited by Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk
Translated from the Russian by Maria Bloshteyn, Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski

We stopped and Shklovsky told me
quietly, but clearly,
“Remember, we are on our way out.
On our way out.” And I recalled
...the wall of books,
all written by a man
who lived
in times that were hard to bear.

Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames offers fifty shrewd and moving glimpses into the lives of Soviet writers, composers, and artists caught between the demands of art and politics. Some of the subjects—like Anna Akhmatova, Isaac Babel, Andrey Platonov, and Dmitry Shostakovich—are well-known, others less so. All are evoked with great subtlety and vividness, as is the fraught and dangerous time in which they lived. Composed in free verse of deceptively artless simplicity, Ozerov’s portraits are like nothing else in Russian poetry.

The fifty figures are grouped into these sections:

The Poets
The Prose Writers
The Yiddish Poets
Soviet Ukraine
The Visual Artists
Music, Theater, and Dance