Vladimir Vysotsky

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky died on the 25th of July 1980, aged 42, in a Moscow apartment on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street, while his personal physician slept on the couch beside him. His neighbors had heard screaming through the walls for days. No official announcement followed his death. A brief obituary ran in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva. A handwritten note appeared at the entrance to the Taganka Theatre informing ticket holders that the evening's Hamlet performance was cancelled. Not a single ticket holder asked for a refund. By the end of that same day, millions of people across the Soviet Union had learned that he was gone. Tens of thousands lined the streets of Moscow to see his coffin pass. Attendance at the nearby Olympic Games dropped noticeably, as spectators left to attend the funeral. The Soviet cultural establishment had spent years treating Vysotsky as though he barely existed. It had never managed to make him disappear. How does a man who was never officially recognized as a poet, never allowed a television broadcast of his concerts in his lifetime, and never given more than a handful of sanctioned recordings, become one of the most beloved figures in Soviet history? The answer lies in a voice, a seven-string guitar, and a way of telling the truth that no official apparatus could contain.

• 2. Moscow Childhood

  ›

  Vysotsky was born on the 25th of January 1938, at the 3rd Meshchanskaya Street maternity hospital in Moscow. His father, Semyon Vladimirovich Vysotsky, was a Jewish man originally from Kiev; his mother, Nina Maksimovna, was Russian and worked as a German translator. The family lived in a communal flat at No. 126, 1st Meshchanskaya Street, the tight, shared domestic world that would eventually fill his songs.

  Nina was a devoted theatergoer, and from the earliest age she took Vladimir with her every Saturday. He later recalled that this habit "probably stuck." At two years old, irritated by the family's guests demanding poetry recitations, he sat under the New Year tree and sighed: "You freeloaders, let the child rest!" At three he would jeer at his father through the bathroom door with improvised verse, or appall unwanted visitors with street folk songs. The boy was performing before he had a word for it.

  World War II fractured the family early. Semyon was called up for the Red Army in March 1941, and Nina and Vladimir were evacuated to the village of Vorontsovka in Orenburg Oblast, where she worked twelve hours a day in a chemical factory while the boy spent six days a week at kindergarten. They returned to Moscow in 1943.

  In December 1946 his parents divorced. From 1947 to 1949 Vladimir lived in Eberswalde, in the Soviet occupation zone in Germany, with his father and his stepmother Yevgenya Stepanovna Liholatova, a woman just 28 at the time, whom he called "Aunt Zhenya." He later remembered her as a second mother: warm, kind, and a stark contrast to the cramped communal flat in Moscow. For the first time in his life he had a room to himself. In 1953, now back in Moscow and deeply interested in theater and cinema, he enrolled in drama courses led by Vladimir Bogomolov. That same year his mother gave him his first guitar as a birthday present, and his close friend Igor Kokhanovsky taught him basic chords.

• 3. The Making of an Artist

  ›

  In June 1956 Vysotsky joined Boris Vershilov's class at the Moscow Art Theatre School, having already abandoned a place at the Moscow State University of Civil Engineering after a single year. At the MAT School he met two people who would shape him profoundly. One was a third-year student named Iza Zhukova, who would become his first wife. The other was his Russian literature teacher, Andrey Sinyavsky, who invited students to his home for improvised disputes and concerts. Vysotsky also encountered Bulat Okudzhava there, already a popular underground bard.

  By 1958 he had his first role at the Moscow Art Theatre, playing Porfiry Petrovich in Crime and Punishment. His first cinema role came in 1959. He graduated from the MAT School on the 20th of June 1960 and joined the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre, where his time was troubled: administrative sanctions for lack of discipline, occasional drinking sprees, and a persistent inability to find roles that matched his capabilities.

  In 1961 he wrote his first proper song, called "Tatuirovka" ("Tattoo"), launching what would become a long cycle of artfully stylized criminal underworld stories laced with social commentary. That same year, on a film shoot in Leningrad, he met Lyudmila Abramova, a student at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. They married in 1965 and had two sons, Arkady and Nikita.

  In June 1963, using the Gorky Film Studio while shooting the film Penalty Kick, Vysotsky recorded an hour-long reel-to-reel tape of his own songs. Copies spread quickly across Moscow and beyond, though many listeners assumed the songs were folk music or anonymous. Only months later, chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal was heard publicly praising the author of "Bolshoy Karetny," and Anna Akhmatova, in conversation with Joseph Brodsky, quoted from Vysotsky's "Ya byl dushoj durnogo obshhestva," apparently believing it was a brilliant piece of anonymous street folklore. He had been famous without anyone knowing his name.

• 4. Taganka and the Rise

  ›

  In 1964 Vysotsky auditioned at the Taganka Theatre. Director Yuri Lyubimov recalled the encounter decades later: a young man arrived and, when asked what role he wished to read for, replied that he had written some songs of his own and asked if Lyubimov would listen. What was supposed to last five minutes lasted an hour and a half. Vysotsky debuted at Taganka on the 19th of September 1964, in Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan, playing the Second God.

  His major public breakthrough came through the 1967 mountain climbing film Vertical, which featured a cluster of his songs, many written on location on Mount Elbrus. Due to amateur recordings of his live performances that had been circulating for years, the songs were already widely known before the film opened. When Vertical was released, Vysotsky's popularity transformed almost overnight. In January 1968, thanks to the efforts of producer Anna Kachalina at the record label Melodiya, music from the film appeared on vinyl. The initial pressing sold out immediately, and record stores began ordering directly from factories without Melodiya's authorization.

  Marina Vlady, the French actress of Russian descent whom Vysotsky fell in love with in 1967 and married on the 1st of December 1970, described what his fame looked like on the streets: going for a walk on a summer night, she recalled hearing his distinctive singing voice from literally every open window.

  At Taganka, his stage work was equally ambitious. In January 1965 he received his first-ever songwriting credit in the avant-garde production The Poet and the Theater. His contributions to the World War II play The Fallen and the Living, which premiered at Taganka in October 1965, included songs later described as a completely new kind of war song. On the 17th of May 1966 he took his first leading theater role, playing Galileo in Lyubimov's Life of Galileo, requiring him to perform acrobatic tricks on stage. Press reaction was mixed, but for the first time his name appeared in Soviet newspapers.

• 5. The Songs and the Voice

  ›

  Over 600 songs survive. The earliest were blatnaya pesnya, outlaw songs rooted in Moscow street life and the criminal underworld, sometimes the Gulag. Veterans listening to his war songs, which he wrote not to glorify conflict but to inhabit the emotional reality of soldiers in life-threatening situations, repeatedly insisted he must have served on the front himself. Former prisoners were equally certain he had done time. Following his first solo concerts at the Leningrad Nuclear Physics Institute in April 1965, he published a note to his fans asking them not to confuse him with his characters: "I am not like them at all."

  Nearly all of his songs are narrated in the first person, but Vysotsky is almost never the narrator. When singing criminal songs he adopted the accent of a Moscow thief. In philosophical songs he voiced inanimate objects. Veteran screenwriter Nikolay Erdman said of his work: "I can well understand how Mayakovsky or Seryozha Yesenin did it. How Volodya Vysotsky does it is totally beyond me."

  He accompanied himself on a Russian seven-string guitar, which he tuned a tone to a tone-and-a-half below the traditional Russian open G major tuning. This reduced string tension colored the instrument's sound in a way that became inseparable from his style. Virtually all his songs were written in a minor key, drawing on three to seven chords. He used his fingers rather than a pick, alternating bass notes with his thumb while plucking or strumming with his other fingers. His voice was distinctively raspy, and he had an unusual habit of elongating consonants rather than vowels when holding a note.

  Because Melodiya, which held a monopoly on the Soviet music industry, largely refused to release his recordings, his songs spread through amateur reel-to-reel tapes and later cassettes, the quality often poor but the reach extraordinary. Cosmonauts carried his music into orbit. In October 1964 he recorded 48 songs in chronological order, creating a self-described Complete Works compilation, which further seeded his reputation as the voice of an underground Moscow folk revival.

• 6. Official Silence, Official Rage

  ›

  In June 1968 the Soviet press turned on Vysotsky with coordinated ferocity. Sovetskaya Rossiya condemned an "epidemic spread of immoral, smutty songs" promoting criminal values, alcoholism, and vice, and attacked their author for "sowing seeds of evil." Komsomolskaya Pravda linked him to black market dealers selling his tapes in Siberia. Composer Dmitry Kabalevsky, speaking at a Union of Soviet Composers conference, criticized Soviet radio for giving an ideologically dubious "low-life product" unwarranted airplay. A playwright who had used Vysotsky's songs in a production was officially chastised for "providing a platform for this anti-Soviet scum." Western commentators drew a direct comparison to how Mikhail Zoschenko had been officially labeled "scum" roughly two decades earlier.

  Two of his 1968 films were severely censored. Gennadi Poloka's Intervention was shelved for almost twenty years. Yet suppression and popularity proved impossible to reconcile. By the mid-1970s, Soviet authorities were openly divided on how to treat him at the highest levels. Mikhail Suslov detested the bard. Leonid Brezhnev, who loved his work, once asked Vysotsky to perform at the home of his daughter Galina so that he could listen over the telephone from his hospital room.

  In April 1973 difficulties obtaining travel permits for Vysotsky to visit France were resolved only after French Communist Party leader Georges Marchais made a personal phone call to Brezhnev. When a lawsuit followed over unsanctioned concerts in Siberia, Vysotsky wrote a defiant letter to the Minister of Culture, Pyotr Demichev. He was granted official philharmonic artist status, which guaranteed him 11.5 roubles per concert. The court nonetheless fined him 900 rubles, a substantial sum given that his monthly Taganka salary was 110 rubles.

  Of nearly 800 poems by Vysotsky, only one was published in the Soviet Union while he was alive. Not a single performance or interview was broadcast by Soviet television during his lifetime.

• 7. The Final Years

  ›

  On the 29th of November 1971, Lyubimov's version of Hamlet premiered at Taganka, with Vysotsky in the lead, playing the prince as a lone intellectual rebel rising against the machinery of the state. The role would define the last decade of his life on stage.

  By the mid-1970s his health was deteriorating visibly. He had struggled with alcoholism since at least his early Taganka years. Around 1977 he began using amphetamines and prescription narcotics in an attempt to counteract the debilitating hangovers and eventually to escape alcohol altogether. The attempt succeeded in trading one dependency for a worse one. He underwent an experimental blood purification procedure, spent time in isolated retreat in France with Marina Vlady in the spring of 1980, and repeatedly sought supply through his personal physician, Anatoly Fedotov, and through Leonid Sul'povar, a department head at the Sklifosovski hospital.

  In July 1979, during a concert tour of Soviet Uzbekistan, Vysotsky collapsed after injecting himself with a painkiller obtained from a dentist's office. He experienced clinical death for several minutes and was resuscitated by Fedotov, who injected caffeine directly into the heart, while colleague Vsevolod Abdulov assisted with heart massage. On the 22nd of January 1980, Vysotsky entered the Moscow Ostankino Technical Center to record his one and only studio concert for Soviet television. He could not hold concentration. He required multiple takes for each song. The recording was not broadcast until eight years after his death.

  His last public concert was given on the 16th of July 1980 in Kaliningrad. He played Hamlet for the last time at the Taganka Theatre on the 18th of July. The last song he performed was "My Sorrow, My Anguish." His final poem, written one week before his death, was "A Letter to Marina": "I'm less than fifty, but the time is short / By you and God protected, life and limb / I have a song or two to sing before the Lord / I have a way to make my peace with him."

• 8. What He Left Behind

  ›

  In the autumn of 1981 Vysotsky's first poetry collection, The Nerve, was officially published in the USSR. Its first edition of 25,000 copies sold out instantly. A second edition of 100,000 followed in 1982. A third, of 200,000 copies, appeared in 1988. The material was compiled by Robert Rozhdestvensky, an officially decorated Soviet poet.

  Also in 1981, Lyubimov staged a new music and poetry production at Taganka called Vladimir Vysotsky. It was promptly banned and did not officially premiere until the 25th of January 1989. In 1986 the official Vysotsky poetic heritage committee was formed, and despite opposition from conservative figures including Yegor Ligachev, Vysotsky was awarded the USSR State Prize posthumously. The formula cited his creation of the character Zheglov, the ruthless detective he had played in the 1979 television film The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed, alongside his achievements as a singer-songwriter.

  The official Vysotsky Museum opened in Moscow in 1989. His grave at Vagankovskoye Cemetery became a site of pilgrimage for generations of fans, including those born after his death. A monument at Strastnoy Boulevard was unveiled in 1995, near the Petrovsky Gates. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov noted during his speech that Vysotsky had once sung he would never have a monument erected in a square like that one. In July 2015, two former dead-end streets in Moscow were reorganized into Vladimir Vysotsky Street.

  His impact spread far beyond Russia. Jacek Kaczmarski, the Polish songwriter, based songs on Vysotsky's work and dedicated an epitaph to his memory. A museum in Koszalin, Poland, founded in 1994 by Marlena Zimna, has assembled over 19,500 exhibits from different countries, including one of Vysotsky's own guitars, given to a Moroccan journalist at a concert in Casablanca in April 1976. The asteroid 2374 Vladvysotskij, discovered by Lyudmila Zhuravleva, carries his name.