The recently released film “Vysotsky: Thanks for Being Alive” (that’s a literal translation; I’d rather render it as “Thank God He’s Alive”) has produced at least one positive effect: it has started a fresh wave of the Vysotsky craze, even if with obvious commercial consequences. The film is a big box-office hit. Collections of Vysotsky’s songs are swept off the shelves of bookshops as soon as new print-runs come out; ditto for albums of his songs, pirated or not. TV and radio naturally add their strident voices to the hullabaloo.(1)
The most noticeable positive feature of this commercial success is that it engulfs not just Vysotsky’s contemporaries, men and women on whose lives he left an indelible imprint, but mostly the young. That’s great, you know. It tells us something of the quality of Vysotsky’s work, which survives the toughest test of all, the test of time. It also tells us something of the quality of Russia’s young people who prove receptive to real artistic merit, and that too warms the cockles of aging hearts worried about this land’s precarious future.
Those same old hearts, though, cannot but bleed at the sight of all the commercialization, especially in that damn film. I’ll save all the language I might use about that product; still, I have to say this. Vladimir Vysotsky of the film is a very distant relation of the man and artist we of his generation knew, a colossal figure that loomed vast on the Soviet scene. After all, there was that joke about future historians describing Leonid Brezhnev as a minor politician of the Vysotsky era in Russia’s history.
In the film (script by Vladimir Vysotsky’s son Nikita) he comes across as a hophead who just happens to be a popular singer, an underground star caught in a web of intrigue woven by a couple of slimy KGB colonels, one from Moscow, one from Bokhara, by slimy KGB stooges; by his true friends, treacherous friends, his women, etc.etc. Add to this the story of Vladimir’s paramour who heroically flies out to Uzbekistan with 40 ampoules of morphine to save the drug addict from clinical death but is nearly raped on the way by a slimy taxi driver and is saved in the nick of time by one of those slimy KGB colonels who then proceeds to beat up the slimy driver, and much more in the same vein – add it all up and you get imitation Hollywood that is barely saved by the high professionalism of the actors, especially of the lead – if he is the lead.
Well, that Vysotsky is not the hero of our times, of us his contemporaries. From the mid-1960s to his death in 1980 and beyond, our Vysotsky was above all a figurehead of nonconformism, a politico-moral-aesthetic phenomenon, in fact, without the tiniest smear of commercialism.
What follows is an attempt to show, if only in brief outline, what Vysotsky really was to millions of us in what then was the Soviet Union.
***
In the turbulent years that followed Vysotsky’s death, and soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, his fame somewhat waned, most likely because people were too busy surviving to care much about singer-songwriters, however great. In the mid 1990s, talking to an American intern at a Russian-English magazine I then ran, I happened to mention Vysotsky’s name in the same breath as that of the Russian rock star Boris Grebenshchikov, of whom she was an ardent fan.
“Who’s this Vladimir Whatsisname?” she innocently asked.
I just stared blankly. To someone of my generation, it was like asking, “Who are these Beatles?” in, say, the mid 1960s. But then I remembered that this wasn’t the 1960s, nor even the 1970s or ‘80s, and replied flippantly:
“Oh, just a Russian Hamlet with a guitar.”
In fact, the answer wasn’t all that flippant – it was the title of a book of Vysotsky’s songs and poems and memoirs devoted to him that I had translated into English and which was published in 1990 for the tenth anniversary of his death.(2)
About his death, now. He died in July 1980, presumably of a heart attack, at the age of forty-two. The only official notice of that event was a tiny announcement in a Moscow evening newspaper, placed there by the Taganka theater company after a great deal of string-pulling. The Soviet officialdom, always less than warmly disposed toward the singer-songwriter, was at that time busy celebrating the Moscow Olympics and didn’t want anything to mar the beauty of that triumph of Soviet sports.
The powers that be ignored Vysotsky in death as they had done their best to ignore him during his lifetime. That stance was stupid to the point of idiocy. The people learned of their idol’s death by a sort of subterranean telegraph, in the same way Vysotsky’s songs had miraculously spread overnight all over this vast, chaotic country – totally without help from radio or TV or the printed media. They learned of it, and they turned out to pay their last respects in their hundreds of thousands or millions – who knows? No one counted the multitudes, everybody was busy grieving. Take away the beautiful organization and the reserve of the British public during Lady Diana’s funeral, add about a sea of spontaneous, crazed emotion, and you’ll get a pale idea of what it was like on that day in July, 1980, at Taganka Square and all the way to Vagankovo Cemetery.
“Flowers hit against the glass of the hearse like clumps of earth. 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. The thuds against the glass and the roof of the hearse were endless. The human wall stood solid before the funeral procession. Police cars, with their sirens shrieking, could not clear a path for it. The square and all the streets adjoining it were flooded by a human sea. People stood on roofs of houses, even on the roof of the Underground station—“
That was how Vadim Tumanov, one of Vysotsky’s close friends and the hero of one of his best songs about life and death in the Stalin labor camps, described the scene.
Another friend, the writer Yuri Trifonov, mused: “How is one to die, after Vysotsky?” And the whole country kept repeating the poet Andrei Voznesensky’s apt phrase about the bard: “a chansonnier of All Russia.” It doesn’t sound quite good in English, as “of All Russia” in the original is in Old Church Slavonic, like part of the title of His Holiness the Patriarch of All Russia. Very blasphemous, I’m sure – but very true. For quite a long time Vladimir Vysotsky was the purest, if quite raucous, expression of the Russian soul and absolutely the most loved person in the whole land.
I mean it. Even the Party bastards he ridiculed in his songs treasured endless kilometers of his tapes. A high official at the Ministry of Culture, one of those who suppressed Vysotsky’s attempts to record his songs at Soviet studios, asked Vladimir for a record of his songs produced in France, but when the singer said no, the culture boss walked to his safe and took out that same record, which he had gotten through his own channels and at great pains. The Party bosses, mercilessly guyed in Vysotsky’s satirical skits, vied with each other trying to lure him to their sumptuous dachas for an evening’s soul-searching in truly Russian style.
As for the people, the whole of the people – intellectuals, working stiffs, homeless wanderers, prison inmates, cosmonauts, geologists, housewives, youngsters, war veterans, literally everybody – they totally identified with him and saw him as an intimate friend, even if they happened to see him once in their lives from afar. Vladimir himself took this adulation with a wry grin.
“So I’m sitting in a corner of this restaurant having lunch,” he once told a few friends. “Now this guy comes to my table – young, good-looking, built like a safe. He looks at me suspiciously, then bingo! He gives me one big bear hug, lifts me in the air, chair and all, practically, and kisses me most warmly: ‘Volodechka, old man, isn’t it great, meeting you like this…’ So we sit down and talk awhile, and then I pluck up enough courage to say, ‘Look, buddy, I can’t remember for the moment, just where was it that we first met?’ The guy is honestly amazed: ‘How could you forget? You came to Kemerovo, right? You gave a concert at the House of Culture, remember?’ ‘Well, yes, I do--.’ ‘So who was it in the third row, next to the aisle? Me, that’s who… I clapped louder than anyone else!…’”
There were untold millions of these fellows who “clapped louder than anyone else” or happened to drop a maudlin tear in their glass of vodka as they listened to the cracked, soul-squeezing voice telling them what they felt to be the real truth about life, the meaning of life and death, and about themselves. I remember a song of Vysotsky’s played on the BBC, and the DJ saying at the end, “What a baritone!” It seemed curiously irrelevant. Sure, the voice was “divine,” as someone remarked, but the main thing was what the voice said to your inmost self, not the tricks of singing.
From the rise of his star in about 1965 to the time of his death and a few years after, Vysotsky remained a sort of underground singer, the voice of the people, totally rejecting the System and the aesthetics of the System, singing of life in this country as it was, not of the lying picture the System made it out to be. All these years Vysotsky was taboo, but, in the schizoid frame of things of those times, a taboo broken even by those who imposed it.
Then, as perestroika came into its own, somewhere around Vysotsky’s fiftieth anniversary in January 1988, the dam burst, and there came a flood of total recognition: articles in practically all papers and magazines – local, regional, and national; TV serials; films; meetings of Vysotsky fan clubs; scholarly conferences; books; festivals; and I don’t know what else – a veritable craze.
It was against that background that I received an offer from Progress Publishers to translate some fifty songs and longer poems of Vysotsky, and also some of his interviews and other materials for the volume I mentioned before. I definitely think I paled at the news. I had by that time translated miles of poetry, mostly mediocre Soviet stuff but also some really worthwhile verse by, say, Anna Akhmatova or Boris Pasternak, to name but two – and still, Vysotsky was something special. In language, style, and content, Vysotsky’s songs were of a piece with Soviet realities of his time, and as such seemed virtually untranslatable into any other linguistic or cultural medium.
Then I took a look at some of the translations of Vysotsky that were then available – sloppy, wretched doggerel that had nothing to do with the bard except the name on top, full of mistranslations of the simplest passages – and decided, What the hell. I at least would know what I would be reaching at, even if it would be like reaching for the moon.
So I packed a few books and tapes and Xeroxed, home-made collections of Vysotsky’s texts (no other kind were then available) and headed for the Caucasus, where I had first heard his songs some twenty years before. There, at the foot of Mount Beshtau, I read a bit about Vysotsky – not much, just enough to learn a few more or less hard facts and not to spoil my own fond picture of what Vysotsky was or should have been if he had been me or I, him. You see, I, too, was a bit like that guy who “clapped louder than anyone else.” By that time, Vysotsky was firmly embedded in the nation’s soul as a myth and a legend, and I wanted to stick to a legend all my own.
The facts on which the legend rested were fairly simple, or rather they were familiar, recognizable, and easily identifiable with events and circumstances of one’s own life.
Born in Moscow in 1938 (just two years my junior), his very first childish memories must have been of war (like my own). His mother tells of a curious episode from 1941, when Germans started bombing Moscow. As a tiny tot, Volodya loved reciting poems, of which he knew quite a few, so whenever they went down to the air-raid shelter, he would climb on a stool or something and recite those poems, loudly and with great expression. On one such occasion a middle-aged gentleman came up to his mother and said, “Thank you for your son,” and kissed her hand. It’s the easiest thing to read a prophetic significance into an episode like that.
While his father fought at the front, his mother took Volodya out of wartime Moscow to the foothills of the Urals. After the war, the boy spent a few years with his father in Germany, then returned to Moscow and lived with his mother again in a tiny cubicle in a communal flat, which he later described in his “The Ballad of Childhood”:
Here, everyone lived modestly,
In comfort somewhat dubious:
There was just one amenity –
One loo to forty cubicles.
Teeth chattering, we’d curse the frost,
The kids would be too cold to bawl,
And here I learned how much it cost
To make two loose ends meet at all.
At school, he was lucky in his friends – some of the school friendships lasted his whole life. His classmate, the poet Igor Kokhanovsky, recalls that in their final year at school Vladimir and himself developed a serious enthusiasm for literature, particularly for poetry, studying the work of Velimir Khlebnikov, Igor Severyanin, Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva, Boris Pasternak, Sasha Chorny, and others. There’s one feature common to all these authors, despite considerable differences between them – they were all either forbidden or regarded as suspect by the Soviet authorities. So the list attests to at least two things about Vladimir – a clear tendency for nonconformism and excellent literary taste (probably not his own, to start with).
After school and a single term at a Civil Engineering Institute, Vladimir resolutely kicked over the traces, so to speak, and decided to follow a path in life of his own choosing. Over his parents’ protests, he joined the Moscow Art Theater drama school and put his whole heart in learning his profession. Curiously, his first success did not come with the first bit parts in the theater or films but at a Riga restaurant, where he asked the maitre d’s permission to “strum the piano” and sing a bit.
Volodya’s singing at the time was of a rather curious nature: He didn’t know a word of English yet managed to imitate Louis Armstrong, producing an impression of someone singing in English – the sort of English where you couldn’t make out a single word. He did that almost every night during the time he and his friends vacationed in Riga, to the audience’s wild delight.
Apart from these sound-imitations, Volodya sang, in the circle of his friends, a lot of street or “gutter” songs, underworld songs – anything but the official mumbo-jumbo. He wasn’t alone in that. Russia seems to be a unique country in this respect: With millions of innocent people doing time in labor camps under Stalin, and the rest more or less sympathizing with them, prison folklore had an immense impact on the songs sung and poetry composed outside the prisons.
It was therefore more or less natural that, when Vladimir began writing his own songs in the autumn of 1961, they were in this vein. He did the imitations so well that there were thugs who swore they knew people who had done time together with Vysotsky at such and such a camp in Siberia.
It may well be that Vysotsky was simply swimming with the current, doing what his friends liked and encouraged him to do, but in this he also responded to the dimly felt need for nonconformist songs that would replace the nauseatingly cheerful bravura noises coming over the radio what seemed like twenty-four hours a day.
This phase lasted until about 1965. By that time Vysotsky had already graduated from the Art Theater school and found his true career with Lyubimov’s Taganka theater, then newly opened. It soon became a sort of rallying point of the capital’s cultural life, with writers, artists and scientists often gathering there during rehearsals and backstage after performances. Distinctly dissident in flavor, the theater fought an endless war against Soviet officialdom that did its best to emasculate its productions or ban them altogether. No wonder people, especially young people, spent endless hours, sometimes whole nights, in lines, waiting for a chance to get a ticket.
Vysotsky played the title roles in two of the most popular productions, Brecht’s Galileo and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and also acted in The Fallen and the Living, a play on the theme of the war. For the latter, he wrote a few “war songs,” and these became part of a whole cycle – Vysotsky’s tribute to his father’s generation. Again, he did it so remarkably well that war veterans found it hard to believe that he hadn’t been, say, a fighter pilot during the war. I had never been in a dog fight, either, but I distinctly felt my flesh creep as I translated this:
Spring is here at long last, royal blue is the sky.
I called out, without thinking, most likely:
“Buddy, give us a light!” Not a sound in reply.
He was shot down in yesterday’s fighting.
Vysotsky worked feverishly on his songs, mostly writing at night and sometimes producing a new one every week or so, as if he knew that he wouldn’t have all that much time to pour out in song all that was burning inside him. It wasn’t all deadly serious, though. There was quite a lot of light-hearted, uproarious stuff, especially his so-called fairy-tale songs. Come to think of it, the first Vysotsky song I heard was precisely of this sort, “Song About a Wild Boar,” and that was quite a rounded experience in itself.
That must have been 1968 or thereabouts. I lived down south, in Pyatigorsk, at the time. One day a friend came back from Moscow, all bubbling with enthusiasm about a new singer-songwriter doing absolute wonders with guitar, lyrics, and an incredible, Louis Armstrong-type voice. The guy was supposed to be even better than Okudzhava -- something I flatly refused to believe until the friend performed for my benefit “The Wild Boar.”
The chap had neither voice nor ear, and he even couldn’t remember the words right, but the magnetism of the piece and the songsmith’s skill of handling the words, the intonations, the accents were so easily recognizable that we simply had to go and have a few drinks, congratulating each other and anyone who would listen on the birth of yet another Russian immortal.
The song is all about a terrible monster (“could be aurochs, could be bison, could be boar”) that kept eating “chicken and women,” the king, and “the king’s best shooter, now in disgrace,” living in terrible debauchery:
On the floor lay skins, old buddies and strumpets
Singing songs and drinking mead and what not.
There was suddenly a flourish of trumpets,
And the shooter was dragged straight to the
court.
The king bids his disgraced soldier to shoot the monster and promises to give him his daughter the princess for a wife, but the soldier scorns such an offer, insisting that he would “do it for a bucket of port.” So they scream and bawl at each other, but in the end
The shooter got what he ought to,
Shot the monster and skipped off to his place.
Thus he put to shame the king and his daughter –
Once the king’s best shooter, now in disgrace.
There were so many people wanting to put to shame the country’s kingpins of those times, if only in their imagination – no wonder songs like that travelled trough the country like wild fire.
Then there were the films, most notably The Vertical Line, a film about rock-climbers. Here my memory falters a bit: I can’t honestly recall whether I heard Vysotsky’s songs from that cycle at a rock-climbers’ camp (these were always hotbeds of unofficial or rather anti-official art) or at the cinema, but anyway it didn’t matter because the whole country was soon singing “If a chum begins acting rum…” and suchlike stuff, people who’d never been near a mountain, for goodness sake. It somehow didn’t seem fair to rock-climbing folks like myself.
Also about that time there appeared dozens of Vysotsky imitators, some singing his songs almost as well as Vysotsky himself, but none better. And that signalled the beginning of the Vysotsky craze that continued, unabated, for two solid decades. From time to time one heard fantastic stories about the way people expressed their adoration for Vysotsky, but, knowing something of the Russian soul, these stories were only too easy to believe.
In one city where he came for a concert with a group of other actors, the populace, consisting almost entirely of factory workers, could not think of anything better than picking up Vysotsky’s bus and carrying it bodily to the local hotel on their hands.
In another place where Vysotsky came on tour, all the windows in town flew open, and he was treated to a megaconcert of his own songs from thousands of tape-recorders on window-sills.(3)
Somewhere in Siberia, airliner crew and passengers alike refused to take off because Vysotsky was giving a concert in the city stadium, and they just couldn’t miss it, and to hell with flight schedules.
There was the darker side to his life, too: He drank. After his demise, there was talk that he’d drunk himself to death, not without help from some bastards calling themselves his friends who provided the liquor when he was not fit to take a single drop, with his bad heart. If we are to believe his wife, the French actress Marina Vlady (and why shouldn’t we?), toward the end of his life Vladimir was also a morphine addict. This country, though, which may yet be ruined by its drinking habits, found it easiest to forgive its idol this weakness, if weakness it was.
I’ve heard many people explaining that weakness away as a necessary relief from the incredible strain under which Vysotsky wrote and performed his songs, and I found that explanation all too easy to accept. After all, Vladimir did not exactly sing his songs as complacent tenors are prone to do, admiring their own voice. He rather acted them out in the true tradition of the Russian theater. In that tradition, if a character in a play is supposed to have hysterics, you may rest assured that the actress will have authentic, 100 percent genuine hysterics onstage. I’ve seen it, and it was scary.
And Vladimir Vysotsky sang his tragic songs as if he could spill his guts any moment now – the intensity of emotion seemed at times to be beyond the humanly possible. Surely he drank. And surely he knew he would not be able to live much longer at that pitch of intensity. But he found it in him to write a poem about it for his wife, a few days before his death. It ended like this:
I’m half my age – a little way past forty.
I’m living thanks to God and you, my wife.
I have a lot to sing to the Almighty.
I have my songs to justify my life.
Sergei Roy
Journalist, writer, translator
www.sergeiroysbooks.de
Notes:
(1) Earlier versions of this article were previously published in Russian Life magazine, The Best of Russian Life (Vol. 2), both edited by Paul Richardson, and on Johnson's Russia List.
(2) See: Vladimir Vysotsky: Hamlet with a Guitar. Translated from the Russian> by Sergei Roy. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1990, 422 pp. Price, 2 rubles 80 kopeks. The original Russian title of the book was typically Soviet-idiotic: Vladimir Vysotsky. Chelovek. Poet. Aktyor. (Vladimir Vysotsky. Man. Poet. Actor). I took a bit of liberty with it, as I assumed that anyone interested in Vysotsky (and who wasn't?) knew that he was a Taganka theater actor and his star role there was that of Hamlet in a Yuri Lyubimov production. Apart from the translations, I also wrote a sort of Preface to the volume.
(3) That was the way Vysotsky's songs travelled all over the country in those days, on tapes mostly recorded during his live, semi-official or underground concerts at Academy institutes, plants, factories, "palaces of culture," stadiums, and such. There was not a word breathed then of infringement of the author's rights. Vysotsky was the property of the people, and anything he produced was in the public domain in the best sense of the word. In fact, the phenomenon was a continuation of the tradition of uncensored poetry that existed since at least the early 19th century in myriad spiski, handwritten copies of verse travelling from one person's album to the next. In the Soviet Union, the practice was known as samizdat or self-publishing, typewritten copies of banned works travelling unstoppably from hand to hand. Curiously, the practice continues in this new, materialistic age. Say, my own translations of Vysotsky's songs wander all over the internet, and I am grateful if the poetry buffs so much as mention my name. They are also sung by various groups (as by some Swedish bunch a few years ago, at Taganka), and I have not seen a red cent in royalties, nor am I likely to, and that is right and proper, as I once told Paul Richardson, publisher of the Russian Life magazine where an earlier version of this essay appeared. Actually, I plan to publish my "singable translations," as an American student of Vysotsky's work called them, on a free website run for me by a German friend, www.sergeiroysbooks.de.
