Portraits without Frames

December 2018 selection for the NYRB Classics Book Club. 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