Portraits without Frames [Paperback]

Isaac Babel, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Anna Akhmatova star in this series of portraits of some of the greatest writers, artists, and composers of the twentieth century.

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’sPortraits Without Framesoffers 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.“Ozerov’s [poems] provide a formula for reading life as art. Closing the book, I found myself viewing my own interactions with Ozerov’s empathetic eye. If literature cannot inspire this kind of empathy, what can?” —Amelia Glaser,Times Literary Supplement

“Attention. That word rings over and over through the poem-filled pages. This gentle attention is what makes the collection such a treasure.” — Alisa Goz, Russian Art & Culture

Few traces of youthful sentimentality are evident inPortraits without Frames, Ozerov’s last poetic work and first to be made available in English. Originally published posthumously in Russia in 1998,Portraitsis an anthology of fifty free verse tableaux based on encounters with Soviet writers, artists, and cultural figures ranging from the world-famous (Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Dmitry Shostakovich) to the lesser-known (Yiddish poets Leyb Kvitko and Dovid Hofshtelã#