NEW FROM NYRB CLASSICS

Lev Ozerov’s Portraits without Frames offers 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, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Andrey Platonov, Sergey Prokofiev, Varlam Shalamov, Dmitry Shostakovich, and Galina Ulanov,— 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 in these sections: The Poets

The Prose Writers

The Yiddish Poets Soviet Ukraine

The Visual Artists Music, Theater, and Dance “Ozerov’s poems offer the reader poignant Soviet portraits-in-poetry illuminated lives of the everyday and the literary Soviet saints. In these translations the finely wrought poems shine with their original wistfulness, love, and dedication: tramps, poets, and friends mingle in short deft snatches of stories.” —Sasha Dugdale PORTRAITS WITHOUT FRAMES Lev Ozerov Edited by

Robert Chandler & Boris Dralyuk Translated by

Maria Bloshteyn, Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski Paperback $16.95 Also available as an e-book On sale December 4th • Portraits without Frames is the December 2018 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club. To join, visit www.nyrb.com or call 1–800–354–0050.