The Sorrow of Soviet Poetry: On Lev Ozerov’s “Portraits Without Frames”

PORTRAITS WITHOUT FRAMES is a singular work of literary biography: a history of Soviet-era literature and culture that is also a masterful poetic sequence in its own right. In Portraits, Lev Ozerov (1914–1996), a relatively little-known Russian literary figure, recounts his personal encounters with a who’s who of 20th-century poets, authors, artists, composers, and musicians. It seems like he met everyone that was anyone, from Isaac Babel to Dmitry Shostakovich, from Boris Pasternak to the gr…