Lev Ozerov. Portraits without Frames. Bilingual poetry reading and book talk with the translators Boris Dralyuk, Irina Mashinski and Maria Bloshteyn. April 15, Monday. B126 (Chanin Language Center), 5:30-7:30 pm. With the New York Review of Books.

Lev Ozerov’s Portraits Without Frames (NYRB, 2018) offers fifty 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, Andrey Platonov, and Dmitry Shostakovich—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.

TRANSLATORS' BIOS:

Boris Dralyuk is a literary translator and the Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His recent translations include Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories (Pushkin Press, 2015 and 2016) and Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Sentimental Tales (Columbia University Press, 2018). He is also the editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016) and co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015).

Irina Mashinski was born in Moscow; she graduated from the Physical Geography Department of Moscow University where she later completed her Ph.D. studies, specializing in Paleoclimatology. She is the author of ten books of poetry and translations (in Russian). Her first English-language collection, The Naked World, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015), and co-founder (with the late Oleg Woolf) and editor-in-chief of the StoSvet literary project, which includes the Cardinal Points Journal, co-edited with Boris Dralyuk and Robert Chandler and currently published under the auspices of Brown University’s Slavic Studies Department.

Maria Bloshteyn received her PhD from Toronto’s York University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. Her main scholarly interests lie in the field of literary and cultural exchange between Russia and the United States. She is the author of The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and the translator of Alexander Galich’s Dress Rehearsal: A Story in Four Acts and Five Chapters (Slavica, 2009) and Anton Chekhov’s The Prank (NYRB Classics, 2015). Her translations have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015).

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