Portraits Without Frames: Selected Poems

Description

Lev Ozerov's finest book, Portraits Without Frames comprises fifty intimate, skilfully crafted accounts of meetings with important figures, ranging from fellow poets Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, to prose writers Isaac Babel and Andrey Platonov, to artists and composers Vladimir Tatlin and Dmitry Shostakovich. It is both a testament to an extraordinary life and a perceptive mini-encyclopedia of Soviet culture. Composed in delicate, rhythmic free verse, Ozerov's portraits are like nothing else in Russian poetry.

Lev Ozerov (1914-1996), born Lev Goldberg, was a poet and literary critic of Jewish Ukrainian origin, and a prominent name in Soviet literature in his day. He is justly celebrated for his efforts to preserve the creative heritage of poets of his own generation who perished in the years of Stalinist repressions.