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Portraits Without Frames, Lev Ozerov.
[Potrety bez ram] Eds: Boris Dralyuk and Robert Chandler.
Translated from the Russian by Maria Bloshteyn, Robert Chandler, Boris Drayluk and Irina Mashinki.
Introduction by Boris Drayluk.
London: Granta (2018)
ISBN: 9781783784714
£14.99
New York: New York Review of Books (2018)
ISBN: 9781681372686
$16.95

Kiev, Ukraine was home to the writer Lev Ozerov (1914–1996) born Lev Adolfovich Goldberg. Early in the 1930s, he began publishing poems and as his literary career grew, he assumed a Slavicsounding alias—drawing inspiration from ozero, the Russian word for “lake”). Despite the change, he never spurned his Jewish roots.

In the 1980s and 90s, Ozerov created his now famous free-verse memoir cycle, Portraits Without Frames. A professional draughtsman, Ozerov gave instant sketches and fleeting caricatures to his friends, decorating the manuscripts with them—a long-standing tradition of Russian writers. Portraits Without Frames is a singular work of literary biography: a retrospective of Soviet-era culture that is also an exemplary poetic sequence. Ozerov recounts his encounters with notable 20th century figures: poets, authors, artists, composers, and musicians, each delineated in a free-verse poem, no more than 3 pages long, yet still capturing each person’s essence. One such individual, the subject of this essay, was Dmitri Shostakovich.

Ozerov’s book is divided into 6 sections: “The Poets,” “The Prose Writers,” “The Yiddish Poets,” “Soviet Ukraine,” “The Visual Artists,” and “Music, Theatre, and Dance.” This is the category in which Shostakovich falls, along with two other notable composers, Prokofiev and Khachaturian, with several comparisons being made between Shostakovich and the former.

The translators provide short introductions to each character and that to Prokofiev explains how “The Zhdanov doctrine” [Zhdanovshchina] became Soviet Cultural policy, meaning that Soviet artists writers and scholars alike had to conform to the Party line, affecting all the arts from literature to ballet. Prominent victims included poet Anna Akhmatova and satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko under the 1946 Resolution of the Central Committee. At the start of the “anti-Formalism” campaign, a Decree regarding music was issued (20 February 1948), marking the beginning of the long-term scheme of repression and scrutiny of the USSR’s leading composers, including Shostakovich. Dralyuk mentions in Shostakovich’s introduction that the composer “came under particularly heavy attack after 1948 as part of the Andrey Zhdanov’s campaign against formalism,” despite which “he spoke out against anti-Semitism after the Second World War when Stalin initiated his campaign against Soviet Jews and against the prosecution of Joseph Brodsky in the 1960s.”

The poem begins with the vivid portrayal of Shostakovich caught in a moment of pensiveness, the struggle with nervous energy is clear [lines 1–10, starting “With jerky movements / with twitching fingers”]. He is reviewing a composition by one of his students, Igor Boldyrev.1

All this creates a vivid and plausible picture of a person grappling with profound internal conflict—the physical discomfort expressed through the movements highlights his psychological strain. There are many descriptions of the “personality split” most biographers describe, with features including fidgeting, pacing, and frequent washing of hands. In Elizabeth Wilson’s A Life Remembered, Shostakovich’s daughter Galina mentions him keeping bowls of water on his desk and that hygiene was an “obsession” for him. This sense of “nervousness” is present as well in the parts where the composer speaks—it reflects from many personal accounts on Shostakovich’s way of speaking. Ozerov does an impressive job at this by using repetition of the words and caesura in Shostakovich’s dialogues, for instance, from line 38 on:

No! No! No!
He likes to repeat
Short words sharply. Three times.
‘Yes, a formalist.
Yes, muddle instead of music.
Yes, the devil knows what…
Yes, write it all down!’

This could be seen as an exact depiction: there are many accounts of his repetitive manner of speech, often saying something, and repeating it in a “patter” as noted in the poem, a habit Gabriel Glikman speculated was possibly picked up from Ivan Sollertinsky—the composer’s closest confidant, Ozerov manages to cleverly convey Shostakovich’s tendencies and personal features, consistently through the poem. However, we get to a point near the end where the viewer/reader appears to loiter as Shostakovich “writes something on a scrap of sheet music” [lines 51–52]. Ozerov repeats the fact that we, the readers, have been forgotten, and how we are lucky to be forgotten by the composer, “if only he wouldn’t remember us anytime soon” [lines 62–63]. Just when our hopes are down, there is a dawn of realisation in the last 5 lines; the passage evokes a sense of suspended time, capturing the moment when Shostakovich shifts from introspection to awareness. The image of him “emerging from a cloud or the sea” [lines 65–66] suggests a deep, almost otherworldly contemplation, emphasising the palpable tension between the quiet anticipation of the reader and his gradual return to the present. The focus of Shostakovich is finally upon us, where chaos of ideas and a whirlwind of thoughts begin to crystallise.

With a confused and guilty smile
on his wry lips,
he clasps our hands again
and shakes them, tugs at them.
Glad. Glad. Glad.

The poem ends with rhythmic insistence on the word “Glad” that contrasts with the initial confusion of guilt of the composer. Although, it comes across as friendly rather than a determination to assert happiness; it also nods to Shostakovich’s habit of profusely apologising at lateness, even when it was not his fault, as recounted by many, including the Beethoven Quartet. Overall, the passage encapsulates the interplay between assurance and uncertainty, much as in the years of the Yezhovshchina, especially in Shostakovich’s case. Ozerov conveys the image of Shostakovich meticulously, giving the composer fair justice in the work.

Ozerov created art out of interactions with artists from across the ideological spectrum, reviving a broad community of the Soviet thinkers who inspired him, so that together they form a poetic memoir, highlighting details that merge art and life. It is definitely worth the read and buy; the translations themselves, by Chandler, Dralyuk, Bolshteyn, and Mashinski, manage to sustain the lyricism. That alone speaks for the talents of all involved.

In many ways, Portraits Without Frames, which was published in Russia posthumously in 1999, continues that work by bringing to the fore the silenced, the long-forgotten, the unknown. Discussing Ozerov’s lifelong commitment to championing such figures, Dralyuk quotes from Ozerov’s 1965 poem “To History”: “We need to help the few with talent, the fools will make it on their own.”

Notes:

1. Igor Georgiyevich Boldyrev studied with Shostakovich in both Leningrad and Moscow in the 1930s and 40s. He went on to have a successful career as a music editor in chief at the USSR Ministry of Cinematography and the RSFSR Ministry of Culture.

Shambhavi Rana
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Extract from the book

By Lev Ozerov
translated by Boris Drayluk

With jerky movements,
with twitching fingers,
he touches his spectacles
as if they were scalding hot,
and he doesn’t know what to do
either with them
or with his constantly twitching hands.
His thumb and his pinkie
push the frames back up his nose
as if he were playing an octave. [10]
Shostakovich cringes, hunches his shoulders—
you’d think he was shivering.
He doesn’t look at us,
then fearfully looks up,
and through slitted eyes, through the panes,
stares at us painfully, probingly,
as if he can’t quite place us.
In a quick patter, with strange pauses,
he addresses his student,
my friend Igor Boldyrev, [20]
a young man from Petersburg
now living in Moscow,
who’s gone gray very young indeed:
“Igor Grigoriyevich, it’s all very good.
Very good.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Some things need work.
But don’t get carried away—
working things out. Working things over.
Otherwise you’ll be writing. [30]
One. Composition. All your life.
A waste of your gifts!
Better to realize
yourself in your next work.”
“Yes, Dmitry Dmitryevich.”
Someone calls Shostakovich to the phone.
“Interview?
No! No! No!”
He likes to repeat
short words sharply. Three times. [40]
“Yes, a formalist.
Yes, muddle instead of music.1
Yes, the devil knows what…
Yes, write it all down!”
It’s as if he’s tearing the words from his heart
and—tossing them aside,
He hangs up, asks for forgiveness.
He shakes our hands.
Good. Good. Good.
And then he turns his back on us. [50]
Bending forward, he writes something
on a scrap of sheet music.
On the windowsill. For a long time.
He walks over to the piano.
What we are hearing has, perhaps,
just been composed.
He has retreated into music, into another element—
and is now somewhere inside it.
We sit, holding our breath.
Shostakovich has forgotten about us. [60]
How lucky we are to be forgotten.
If only he wouldn’t remember us
anytime soon.
But then—it’s as if he’s waking,
emerging from a cloud
or from the sea.
His brow grows smooth.
His pupils grow bigger.
With a confused and guilty smile
on his wry lips, [70]
he clasps our hands again
and shakes them, tugs at them.
Glad, Glad. Glad.

Notes:

1. Muddle instead of Music” is the title of an editorial published in Pravda on 28 January 1936, criticising Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934). Some thought that  Stalin had written it; it is  more likely that he simply approved it. [BD]

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