Portraits without Frames Read online

  LEV OZEROV (1914–1996) was born Lev Goldberg in Kyiv, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. He began to publish poems in the early 1930s, and as his literary career took off, he adopted a Slavic-sounding pseudonym (from ozero, the Russian word for “lake”), though he never rejected his Jewish roots. Ozerov was a close friend of many prominent Yiddish poets, including Leyb Kvitko and Shmuel Halkin, whose work he translated into Russian. He was also one of the first to write, in both prose and verse, about the Babi Yar massacre in 1941. His commitment to giving voice to the voiceless also found expression in his work as a critic and editor. In 1946, while serving on the staff of the journal October, Ozerov helped the great poet Nikolay Zabolotsky return to print after eight years in the Gulag. Ozerov’s review of a 1958 collection of Anna Akhmatova’s verse broke the so-called “blockade” against her work, and the edition he published of Boris Pasternak’s poems in 1965 marked the beginning of that poet’s slow posthumous rehabilitation after the Zhivago affair of 1957–1958. But perhaps Ozerov’s greatest contribution—as both a poet and an advocate for the unjustly silenced—is his collection Portraits Without Frames, which was published in 1999, three years after his death.

  ROBERT CHANDLER’s translations from Russian include works by Alexander Pushkin, Teffi, Vasily Grossman, and Andrey Platonov. He has also written a short biography of Pushkin and has edited three anthologies of Russian literature: Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida, Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, and, with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. His translation of Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad will be published by NYRB Classics in 2019. He runs a monthly translation workshop at Pushkin House in London.

  BORIS DRALYUK is the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His recent translations include Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories and Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales. He is the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution.

  MARIA BLOSHTEYN was born in Saint Petersburg and emigrated to Canada when she was nine years old. She is the author of The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky and the translator of, most recently, Anton Chekhov’s The Prank (available from NYRB Classics).

  IRINA MASHINSKI was born in Moscow and emigrated to the United States with her family in 1991. She is the author of nine books of poetry in Russian and edits the journal Cardinal Points. Along with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, she edited The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry.

  PORTRAITS WITHOUT FRAMES

  LEV OZEROV

  Edited by

  ROBERT CHANDLER and BORIS DRALYUK

  Translated by

  MARIA BLOSHTEYN, ROBERT CHANDLER, BORIS DRALYUK, and IRINA MASHINSKI

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2014 by the heirs of L. A. Ozerov

  Translated poems copyright © 2018 by their respective translators

  Introduction copyright © 2018 by Boris Dralyuk

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Felix Lembersky, Stair, Nizhny Tagil, 1958; courtesy of the Estate of Felix Lembersky

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Originally published in the Russian language as Portrety bez ram.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ozerov, Lev, author. | Chandler, Robert, 1953– translator, editor. | Dralyuk, Boris, translator, editor, writer of introduction. | Bloshteyn, Maria R., 1971– translator. | Mashinskaia, Irina, translator.

  Title: Portraits without frames / by Lev Ozerov ; edited by Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk ; translated by Maria Bloshteyn, Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk, and Irina Mashinski ; introduction by Boris Dralyuk.

  Other titles: Portrety bez ram. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018. | Series: New York Review Books classics.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018024067 (print) | LCCN 2018027607 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372693 (epub) | ISBN 9781681372686 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Russian poetry—20th century.

  Classification: LCC PG3476.O95 (ebook) | LCC PG3476.O95 P6713 2018 (print) | DDC 891.71/42—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024067

  ISBN 978-1-68137-269-3

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  THE POETS

  Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova

  Boris Leonidovich Pasternak

  Titsian Iustinovich Tabidze

  Nikolay Alexeyevich Zabolotsky

  Nikolay Nikolayevich Aseyev

  Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky

  Georgy Arkadievich Shengeli

  Mikhail Arkadievich Svetlov

  Vladimir Alexandrovich Lugovskoy

  Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky

  Ilya Lvovich Selvinsky

  Semyon Petrovich Gudzenko

  Ksenia Alexandrovna Nekrasova

  Boris Abramovich Slutsky

  THE PROSE WRITERS

  Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

  Andrey Platonovich Platonov

  Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko

  Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel

  Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeyev

  Yury Karlovich Olesha

  Konstantin Georgievich Paustovsky

  Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin

  Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky

  Nikolay Osipovich Konrad

  Yevgenia Alexandrovna Taratuta

  THE YIDDISH POETS

  Leyb Kvitko

  Dovid Hofshteyn

  Peretz Markish

  Shmuel Halkin

  SOVIET UKRAINE

  Oleksandr Petrovych Dovzhenko

  Pavlo Grygorovych Tychyna

  Sydir Artemovych Kovpak

  THE VISUAL ARTISTS

  Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin

  Mikhail Ksenofontovich Sokolov

  Sergey Timofeyevich Konyonkov

  Vladimir Andreyevich Favorsky

  Fyodor Denisovich Konstantinov

  Mikhail Vasilievich Nesterov

  Nikolay Bagratovich Nikoghosyan

  Andrey Konstantinovich Burov

  MUSIC, THEATER, AND DANCE

  Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev

  Dmitry Dmitryevich Shostakovich

  Mikhail Fabianovich Gnesin

  Emil Grigoryevich Gilels

  Miron Borisovich Polyakin

  Aram Ilyich Khachaturian

  Vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold

  Alisa Koonen

  Galina Sergeyevna Ulanova

  Father

  INTRODUCTION

  Compassion, Pain, and Respect: Lev Ozerov (1914–1996) and His “Portraits”

  LEV OZEROV was, in a number of ways, a typical Soviet Jewish man of letters. Born Lev Adolfovich Goldberg in Kyiv, Ukraine—then part of the Russian Empire—on August 10, 1914, he adopted a Russian-sounding pseudonym in the middle of the 1930s, a common practice among Soviet public figures of Jewish origin. Trained at the prestigious Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History (MIFLI), he built an exceptionally productive career as a poet, translator, critic, editor, and teacher. He was targeted in the anti-Semitic campaigns of Stalin’s last years, but he won back the tolerance, if never quite the favor, of the authorities after Stalin’s death. Elemen
ts of this brief sketch can be mapped onto the careers of many other Soviet Jewish authors born between the 1890s and the 1920s: Ilya Selvinsky, Mikhail Svetlov, and Boris Slutsky—to name only those depicted in this volume. But Ozerov was far more than a representative of a given phenomenon. For nearly half a century he stood out as a quiet yet persistent voice of conscience in an atmosphere where such voices were all too easily silenced. And in his last two decades he made a strikingly original and still-underappreciated contribution to Russian poetry: a sequence of finely crafted free verse, Portraits Without Frames (published posthumously in 1999), which constitutes an intimate, penetrating mini-encyclopedia of Soviet culture. Ozerov’s “portraits” are the crowning achievement of his tireless efforts to dignify those “who lived / in times that were hard to bear” (see p. 122).

  The son of a pharmacist, Ozerov finished the mandatory seven years of primary education and tried his hand at various trades before taking up literature. At sixteen he began working at the Arsenal factory in Kyiv, first as an unskilled laborer, then as an electrician, and finally as a draftsman, making use of his natural gift for drawing. After leaving Arsenal, he spent some time designing posters and book covers, as well as playing violin in an orchestra; he had a lifelong passion for music, and, as a child, had dreamt of becoming a composer and conductor.1 He joined the staff of a local newspaper and published his first poems in 1932; for the next few years, he published under his real name, Lev Goldberg, as well as the abbreviated “Lev Berg” and a number of other pseudonyms. In 1934 he moved to Moscow and enrolled at MIFLI, which from 1931 to 1941 was the training ground for many of the leading poets of Ozerov’s generation, including David Samoylov (né Kaufman), Alexander Tvardovsky, and Konstantin Simonov. Ozerov graduated in 1939 and enrolled in the doctoral program, completing his coursework in 1941; in 1943 he returned from the front, where he was serving as a military journalist, to defend his dissertation.

  It was during his student days at MIFLI that Ozerov settled on the pseudonym—suggested by Svetlov—by which we now know him. Ozerov’s early poems were filled with natural imagery and suffused with romantic nostalgia. For Svetlov, they called to mind the work of the Lake School of British poets; Ozerov, from the Russian ozero (lake), can be read as “of the lakes.”2 Though this Russian-sounding name may have obscured his ethnicity, Ozerov was not ashamed of his Jewishness. He was a friend and translator of several prominent Soviet Yiddish poets, including Leyb Kvitko and Shmuel Halkin, both members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee that was formed in 1941 to drum up international support for the Soviet struggle against Nazi Germany. And Ozerov was one of the first Russian-language authors to write about the slaughter of nearly 90,000 Soviet Jews, along with another 10,000 non-Jewish citizens, at the Babi Yar ravine near his native Kyiv in the autumn of 1941—the most catastrophic episode of the Shoah on Soviet soil. He commemorated the tragedy in his poem “Babi Yar” (1944–1945, published in 1946) and in “Kiev: Babi Yar,” an article based on testimony collected during his visit to the site in 1943; the article was to open the “Ukraine” section of Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman’s The Black Book, a document of Nazi crimes against Soviet Jewry.3

  Soon after the war’s end, however, Soviet Jews who had survived and fought against the Nazi occupation suffered a wave of persecution at the hands of their own government. In 1948, permission to publish The Black Book was rescinded, and the complete edition did not see the light of day until 1993. Many members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, including Kvitko and Halkin, were arrested and sentenced to either death or imprisonment. And Ozerov, who was teaching at his alma mater—by then part of Moscow State University—and serving as the poetry editor of the journal October, was dismissed from both of these posts. He returned to teaching after a seven-year hiatus, during the post-Stalin thaw, taking a position on the Translation Faculty at Moscow’s Maxim Gorky Literature Institute.

  The poem and article on Babi Yar were but one example of Ozerov’s work on behalf of those who had been denied a voice. In 1946, while still the poetry editor of October, Ozerov had helped Nikolay Zabolotsky break back into print after eight years in the Gulag, publishing his modern Russian translation of the medieval Old East Slavonic epic The Lay of Igor’s Campaign.4 These acts were part and parcel of a general mission, summed up memorably in the last two lines of Ozerov’s epigram “To History” (1965): “We need to help the few with talent, / The hacks will make it on their own.”

  After regaining his footing in the Soviet literary establishment, Ozerov affirmed his commitment to this cause—proceeding bravely but shrewdly. Unlike the “unofficial” poets and outspoken dissidents of the postwar era, he neither withdrew from the Soviet system nor confronted it head-on. Instead, he worked from within, using every means at his disposal to correct injustices and set records straight. Ozerov’s review of Anna Akhmatova’s collection Poems (1958) in the Literary Gazette, the official organ of the Soviet Writers’ Union, “broke the blockade” around her name, as Akhmatova herself described it; this “blockade” had been in place since 1946, when Akhmatova was viciously denounced by Andrey Zhdanov, Stalin’s director of cultural policy.5 Ozerov’s scholarly edition of Boris Pasternak’s Shorter and Longer Poems (1965) marked the beginning of Pasternak’s slow posthumous “rehabilitation” after the Zhivago affair of 1957–1958 and his expulsion from the Writers’ Union.6 And for twenty-seven years, Ozerov ran the Oral Poetry Library, a regular series of readings at Moscow’s House of Actors, where poets who found it difficult to publish could present their work.

  Ozerov’s quiet activism, teaching, and scholarship—which included studies of the Russian poets Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet and the Ukrainian Pavlo Tychyna, as well as several collections of essays— did not interfere with, and indeed fed, his own poetry. His first volume, The Dnieper Basin, appeared in 1940 and was followed by fourteen more collections during his lifetime, along with two volumes of selected verse.7 Ozerov’s poems earned the praise of many senior figures in Soviet poetry, like Svetlov and Nikolay Aseyev, and his translations from Yiddish, Hebrew, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian are among the best in the Soviet tradition. But, as Igor Nepomniashchii argued persuasively in 2008, it is only towards the end of Ozerov’s life, in the 1980s and ’90s, that the poet managed to create “lyrical works of such confessional depth and power that they should not remain outside the purview of twenty-first-century readers.”8 These include his late love lyrics, published posthumously in Germany under the title At a Soul’s Distance (2006), and his Portraits Without Frames.

  The portraits draw on a lifetime’s worth of encounters with Ozerov’s fellow poets and prose writers, visual artists, composers, musicians, and performers. The poems evoke the whole world of Soviet culture by paying close attention to its infinitesimal parts and calling as little attention to themselves as possible. They are colloquial, incidental, but—true to their genre—remarkably exact and rich in tone. Many are devoted to those who were once repressed and whose reputations are now restored, like Zabolotsky, Akhmatova, and Pasternak, or the Yiddish poets who fell victim to Stalin, like Kvitko, Halkin, and Dovid Hofshteyn:

  “Oh, time! Oh, space! Oh, terrible year!”

  he said, holding a handful of dust on his palm,

  and then he himself became a handful of dust on our century’s palm.

  His own dust is mixed with the dust of others

  who perished in August of 1952.

  The location of his grave is unknown.

  But Ozerov also makes room for those whose legacies were undermined by the compromises they made with the system, like Tvardovsky and Alexander Fadeyev, the longtime head of the Writers’ Union. In his portrait of Fadeyev, Ozerov’s recalls his own last meeting with the man’s lover, Klava:

  I have thought a lot about Fadeyev.

  Suicide is never

  for a single reason.

  If someone shoots himself,

  it is always

  for at least a dozen reasons.r />
  The reasons come together,

  they join up, interlace—

  interlock in an iron grip.

  Klava brought me a great

  heap of Sasha’s letters.

  They overwhelmed me:

  true, living words, cheap

  vulgarity, despair, faith, trembling

  reverence. When I tore myself

  away from these letters,

  I looked up at Klava.

  She was no longer crying;

  her whole face streamed with tears.

  All of her was weeping;

  all of her was a tear.

  When Klava left, she was a tear

  rolling over the face of the earth.

  “Poor Sasha!” Elsa Triolet

  wrote in a French obituary.

  Poor Sasha!

  Spoken with pity and compassion,

  pain and respect.

  The “pity and compassion, / pain and respect” that Ozerov detects in Triolet’s words are the dominant but not the only notes in his own recollections. Even when recounting events as bitter as Svetlov’s willful descent into alcoholism—in order to avoid collaborating with the secret police—Ozerov displays a lively wit, perfectly mimicking Svetlov’s own impish manner:

  “. . . The unresolvable can be resolved

  so unexpectedly,

  so accidentally

  by such a simple method.

  Moisture with degrees of proof,

  genuine, unfalsified proof . . .”

  Svetlov stalled forever

  on this simple, reliable,

  tried-and-tested method

  of answering the irrelevant

  and tactless questions

  posed by life . . .

  The view of the Soviet cultural landscape that Ozerov offers in Portraits may have been too nuanced for its time. In the late 1980s and ’90s, Russian readers had little appetite for balanced depictions of complicated figures like Fadeyev. The pendulum of history had swung strongly in the opposite direction; the victims of the regime were recognized as martyrs, while the compromisers and conformists—all those who were tainted by Soviet power—were consigned to the dustbin. But this black-and-white perspective does little justice to the complexity of the lives shaped and deformed by the Soviet era. Portraits does a great deal to correct the picture, restoring humanity to its subjects and to their vanished world.