Portraits Without Frames

A classic of Russian poetry, comprising fifty portraits of the great creative figures (some of them celebrated, many of them disappeared or suppressed) of Soviet culture.

Lev Ozerov's finest book, Portraits Without Frames comprises fifty intimate, skillfully 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.