Portraits Without Frames

Lev Ozerov’s
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