Vysotsky, Vladimir

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Vladimir Vysotsky

Russian performer Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-1980) was an underground folk hero in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, and attained genuine icon status after his untimely death at age 42.

The widely admired poet, singer, and actor is sometimes referred to as the “Bob Dylan” of Soviet Russia for the subversive themes in the lyrics of his songs and in his poetry. In 1981, on the first anniversary of his death, Serge Schmemann wrote in the New York Times about the stature accorded Vysotsky both during his lifetime and now, as fans flocked to his gravesite. “Vysotsky's remarkable popularity was, and remains, in the uncanny power of his ballads to reflect the hardships, degradation, hope, humor, profanity, weariness and drunkenness that officially do not exist,” Schmemann noted, “but that so many Russians live by.”

Origins Obscure

Vysotsky was born on January 25, 1938, in Moscow, during the darkest period of Soviet history, when the country's increasingly authoritarian leader, Josef Stalin (1878–1953) carried out a plan to root out dissent within the party ranks that sent thousands to labor camps for political reeducation; countless others were summarily executed. Vysotsky's family was fortunate to escape relatively unscathed, though his father's status as an officer in the Red Army offered little protection in the Stalinist purges. Other sources claim that Vysotsky probably never knew either of his parents. The official story claims that he was half-Jewish, that his bilingual mother worked as a German translator, but his parents divorced when he was still quite young. Another detail notes that he lived in East Germany for a two-year period when his father was stationed at the Soviet military base in Eberswalde, Brandenburg State.

A few sources claim that Vysotsky spent time in a “corrective” colony while still in his teens in the early 1950s, and another asserts that just a few years later he was briefly enrolled at the Moscow Institute of Civil Engineering. His career as a musician seems to have started in Riga, the capital of Latvia—a country that was once part of the Soviet Union—when he began playing the piano in a restaurant, and drew customers with his skillful imitation of American jazz artist Louis Armstrong (1901–1971). After 1959, he began appearing on the stage of the Aleksandr Pushkin Theatre in Moscow, and five years later graduated from the Moscow Art Theatre Drama School.

That same year, Vysotsky joined the company of the newly formed Moscow Theatre of Drama and Comedy on the Taganka, named after the city square it bordered. The Taganka Theater was founded by director Yuri Lyubimov (born 1917), who became an important friend, mentor, and collaborator to Vysotsky. Lyubimov staged avant-garde productions that borrowed heavily from German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)'s idea that theater should spur intellectual debate among the audience. Despite the strong leftist ideals behind Brechtian epic theater, as it was known, Lyubimov and his corps of actors were often the victims of state censorship for being too iconoclastic. “Distinctly dissident in flavor, the theater fought an endless war against Soviet officialdom, which did its best to emasculate the Taganka's productions or ban them altogether,” noted Sergie Roy in Russian Life. “No wonder people, especially young people, spent endless hours, sometimes whole nights, in lines, waiting for a chance to get a ticket.”

Became Popular Film Actor

Two of Vysotsky's best-known roles at the Taganka were as a guitar-playing Hamlet in a 1971 revival of the Shakespeare classic, and in another title role in Life of Galileo, a Brecht play that dramatized how the Italian Renaissance-era scientist and thinker was persecuted by church authorities for his theories—an irony not lost on most Soviet citizens. By this point Vysotsky had also established himself as a film actor as well as both an official and an unofficial recording artist: he appeared in wholesome dramas produced by Mosfilm or Lenfim, the largest of the state-run movie studios, and also enjoyed official sanction with the release of “wholesome Soviet tunes about alpinists, friendship, space heroes and the war dead,” wrote former New York Times bureau chief in Moscow, Hedrick Smith in his 1976 book The Russians. Smith named him as one of a trio of subversive singer-songwriters then enjoying tremendous, though unofficial popularity in the Soviet Union at the time, along with Bulat Okudzhava and Aleksandr Galich.

Vysotsky's scores of unofficial tunes, far more biting in their political viewpoints, were originally heard only among the close-knit circle of the Taganka company regulars late at night at alcohol-fueled affairs. He had started to write them back in the early 1960s, and performed them on a slightly out-of-tune acoustic guitar—itself a prized possession in the Soviet world and a symbol of defiance for its connotations to the West and rock 'n' roll. One early example was “The Song of the Criminal Code,” in which he sang:

We don't need novels, stories and inventions. We keep ourselves enlightened all the time. The best of books to me is the collection Of laws that deal with punishment and crime …. Just think about these lines, they are quite simple But more expressive than all novels of the world. Behind them there are barracks, wretched people, Cards, fights and scandals, cheating, and harsh word …. My heart jumps moaning like a wounded pigeon When I read articles concerning me. Blood hammers in my temples,—I envision: It's cops who hammer at my door, I see.

In discussing these underground songs, the New York Times's Schmemann noted that Vysotsky's “hoarse voice and poorly tuned guitar recalled the tradition of ‘Blatnye’ songs, the bawdy and profane ballads of inmates and thieves, but his themes were drawn from everyday life: drunks, bad television shows, jealous wives, prison life, trips abroad, pampered intellectuals, war and food lines. The people grumbled and grumbled, the people wanted fair play.” Smith, in The Russians, wrote that other Vysotsky tunes were especially appealing to intellectuals and artists. “One writer raved to me about a Vysotsky routine aping the clumsy, ungrammatical talk of a factory director,” wrote Smith, “an act with calculated appeal for the Moscow intelligentsia who look down their noses at ‘our peasant bosses.’ ”

Married French Actress

Over the years Vysotsky's underground songs were works recorded on reel-to-reel, and then cassette tape recorders, with copies made for trusted friends. This illegal form of distribution was known as magnetizdat, and made Vysotsky an underground folk hero throughout the Soviet Union. “The KGB themselves collect his songs,” a journalist told Smith. “They know all those camp tunes of his. They like the jargon of thieves that he uses—they are thieves themselves. Vysotsky knows you can criticize different things here and there, but you can't criticize the system, the Party.”

Vysotsky seemed to be walking an ideological tightrope in the decade before his death. After marrying Marina Vlady, a French actress, he was allowed to travel back and forth to the West, but occasionally ran afoul of authorities and the privileges he enjoyed would be temporarily revoked. The dual allegiances may have driven him into the singular refuge of the Soviet citizen, vodka, though Vlady later claimed that he became addicted to morphine, too, in his later years.

In early 1979, Vysotsky was allowed to travel to the United States for several concert dates that kicked off with a performance at Brooklyn College and brought him to audiences in Boston and Philadelphia. Eighteen months later, he was dead of heart failure at the age of 42, a premature passing said to have been brought on by substance abuse. He died during the last week of July, just as Moscow was in the full throes of hosting the 1980 Summer Olympic Games. The sole announcement in the state-run news media came in the form of a small notice mourning the loss signed by the Taganka Theater, which his longtime friend Lyubimov had had to battle with authorities to earn permission to have appear in print.

Vysotsky's memorial service at the Taganka Theatre, attended by the leading names in Soviet performing arts, attracted a crowd of 30,000 mourners outside who convened on Taganka Square—a significant event in a society where all public gatherings were tightly controlled. The event took on a subversive air, and the New York Times's Moscow correspondent, Craig R. Whitney, reported that crowds jeered at police, yelling “Shame, shame, shame!” The journalist noted that “the extraordinary scene, with few parallels in modern Soviet history, was a vivid demonstration of the power of the word in this country.” It was also believed to be the largest unofficial public demonstration since 1953, when thousands of Soviet citizens genuinely mourned the death of Stalin.

Anniversaries Became Public Spectacles

When Vysotsky was buried at Vagankovskoye Cemetery a few days later, the crowds swelled to an estimated million in number along with those who lined the roads of the procession route. His friend Vadim Tumanov recalled in an interview with the Russian Life writer Roy that the vehicle bearing the coffin was swallowed by the crowd. “Flowers hit against the glass of the hearse like clumps of earth,” Tumanov said. “They came flying from every side, thrown by thousands of hands. The car could not start—not only because the whole square was packed with people, but because the driver could not see the road. The flowers covered the whole of the windshield. It became dark inside. Sitting next to Volodya's coffin, I felt as if I was being buried alive together with him.” Soviet officials reportedly feared that the funeral would become the catalyst for demonstrations against Soviet control, and shifted some troop divisions nearer to Moscow in the event that the crowds of mourners turned into a genuine uprising.

A year after Vysotsky's death, his grave at the Vagankovskoye Cemetery—a burial site dating back to 1771 that is the traditional resting place for Muscovite poets, painters, and singers—was already becoming a shrine and site of pilgrimage. In July of 1981, police barricades were erected to manage the crowds that came, and the crowds grew as the years passed. Vlady had a spectacular statue erected, depicting him as enclosed by angel wings that also seemed to be stifling his spirit. On what would have been his fiftieth birthday, in January of 1988, thousands of Vysotsky's fans turned up, and the occasion seemed to mark a symbolic turning point for the Soviet Union that year: three years into the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, the country was becoming more open to new ideas and more honest in discussing its shortcomings. Within a year, private-enterprise initiatives and multiparty elections would hasten the end of the Soviet era. On the January 1988 anniversary, state media outlets featured programming devoted to Vysotsky's life and art. “On Moscow radio, an announcer said Monday that Mr. Vysotsky had ‘offered scathing criticism of the problems we are now living with and fighting against,’ ” wrote New York Times journalist Felicity Barringer.