Lev Ozerov’s Portraits without Frames Readings

Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk will read from their recently published translation of Lev Ozerov’s Portraits without Frames. The original, first published in 1999, three years after Ozerov’s death, is one of the most remarkable books of Russian poetry to have been published since the collapse of the Soviet Union – both a moving, intensely personal document and a mini-encyclopedia of Soviet culture.

Born in Kiev, Lev Ozerov studied in Moscow, then worked as a front-line journalist after the German invasion.

From 1943 he taught poetry and translation at the Gorky Literary Institute. Ozerov himself translated poems from Yiddish, Hebrew and Ukrainian (languages he knew well), Lithuanian (which he could read) and other languages of the Soviet Union with the help of a crib. He also wrote many books of literary criticism and did much to enable the publication of writers who had suffered or perished under Stalin. He was the first editor to publish Zabolotsky (his translation of The Lay of Igor’s Campaign) on his return from the Gulag in 1946. That same year saw the publication of Ozerov’s long poem about the massacre of Kievan Jews at Babi Yar, one of the first works to address the subject in Russian.