Description
New York Review of Books, paperback
Translated by Maria Bloshteyn & Irina Mashinski
Edited by Robert Chandler
Publication Date: December 04, 2018
Publisher Marketing:
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’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.
Explore more from our collection.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.