When a country has no God, the people need more than leaders. And there arises an ultrarespect for writers, composers, artists, because they are creators. This esteem spills over to actors; actors on TV and film are more earthly, and closest of them all was Volodya, who sang the whole nation’s calamity in the whole nation’s language.

—PAVEL LEONIDOV, Vladimir Vysotsky i drugie

VLADIMIR VYSOTSKY WAS the nearest equivalent there has ever been in the USSR to a media superstar in the West, but he was much more besides. And he became a superstar in the context of the Soviet system, through sheer power of talent and personality, with the media ranged against him rather than being manipulated to his advantage. He was a genuine legend long before his life ended in 1980, when he was only forty-two years old.

It was only after Vysotsky’s death that any significant amount of reliable information about his life became available, and that only in the West; inside Russia there is still legend and mystery.¹ Vysotsky was bom in Moscow in 1938. His father, who has outlived him, is Jewish, a career army officer who served with distinction in World War II, eventually retired with the rank of colonel, and took up a high executive position with the Moscow Central Post Office. Vysotsky’s parents separated when he was one year old, and his father remarried. The boy was brought up mainly by his mother, Nina Maksimovna, a translator from German by profession who ran the documentation office of a Moscow scientific research institute until she retired in 1980. Mother and son spent the war in evacuation near Orenburg, and Vysotsky went to live with his father from 1947 to 1949, when the latter was serving with the Soviet army of occupation in East Germany. Fundamentally, though, Vysotsky was a Moscow child, and the main element in his upbringing was Moscow street life, followed later by the bohemian world of the trainee actor. The restless, rootless, ruthless ethos of this social context is the dominant note in Vysotsky’s work—however much it may have become, as his personal situation changed, an antiestablishment metaphor. But contrary to all the rumors that flew about during his lifetime, he never served in the army and was never in prison.

Vladimir Vysotsky in the late 1970s.

In one of the very few interviews with Vysotsky ever published in the Soviet press, he stated that he had first attended a college of civil engineering when he began further education, but soon abandoned this course and went to train as an actor in the drama school of the Moscow Arts Theater.² He graduated in 1960, but he was not awarded a place in the troupe of the Arts Theater itself. Instead, he joined the Theater of Miniatures (Teatr miniatyur) and later the Pushkin Theater (Teatr imeni Pushkina), both central Moscow establishments. These too proved to be false starts. Vysotsky’s world fell into place when he went to see the very first production by the drama company that was being put together by the eminent director Yury Lyubimov. Vysotsky applied for an audition with Lyubimov and was accepted. That was in 1964. From then until the end of his life, Vysotsky was a member of this company, universally known as the “Taganka Theater” because of its location on Taganka Square. It was his base in the capital and in the public eye.

Vysotsky said that he stayed with Lyubimov and the Taganka because of their commitment to experimentation. He was much more than a rank-and-file member of the troupe, notwithstanding the strong collective ethos normal in Soviet theaters. He soon became the star attraction and the embodiment of the Taganka approach. This approach was brash, dynamic, and athletic, a conscious antipode to the stuffy academicism of the Moscow Arts Theater.

The reputation of the company in the early years was built to a large extent on their productions of the great Brecht plays, which during the Stalin years had been considered far too colorful and challenging for production in the USSR. After his first principal part, that of the Airman in The Good Woman of Setzuan, Vysotsky established himself in the title role of The Life of Galileo, which entered the Taganka repertoire in 1967 and remains there to this day.

In his account of the postwar “literature of moral resistance” in the USSR, Grigory Svirsky mentioned the rise of the Taganka Theater as part of the revitalization of Soviet cultural life in the post-Stalin period. Svirsky described the significance of Galileo:

the inquisitors [in the play], who had the same faces—fat from good living—that the Stalinist bureaucrats had, gave short shrift to dissident thought; and their methods made it look as if the inquisition, in its black medieval apparel, had taken its instructions from the Moscow City Committee of the Communist Party.³

For the first thirty seconds of this production, Vysotsky as Galileo had to do a handstand, a pose that struck his friend Pavel Leonidov as expressing the essence of Vysotsky’s personality and attitude toward life.⁴

One of the Taganka’s most characteristic early productions was Sergei Esenin’s verse drama Pugachev, which had previously been regarded as unplayable. It is a play about the nature of revolt. The embodiment of this spirit is the runaway convict Khlopusha, who was played by

Vysotsky, hoarse and brooding . . . the fact that it was none other fighting against his chains than freedom-loving, hard-drinking Vysotsky, gave the play an awesome, terrifying power of authenticity. . . .⁵

The last role Vysotsky created in the Taganka repertoire was that of Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment; he was reported to have played the great immoralist

in accordance with all the rules of high-society decorum, remaining the gentleman even when uttering cynical remarks and behaving abominably . . . then at one point he picked up a guitar, and was transformed before our eyes. He sang a mournful song, and in Svidrigailov’s gaze was reflected something he had cherished, but forgotten long ago, something fated not to happen. He finished the song, and with guitar still in hand, he spoke of his dream of leaving for America. It was a man’s dream of coming to terms with his past and starting a new life, of once more becoming pure in the eyes of God, people, and—first and foremost—himself.⁶

Vysotsky’s biggest, most responsible, and most memorable stage role was that of Hamlet. The opening scene of the Taganka production was described earlier.⁷ The play had its first performance in 1971. Reviews in the Soviet press were generally approving, and Vysotsky received a good deal of praise.⁸ He played the part in a style stripped of romanticism and even of lyricism, with a coarse, abrasive, deintellectualized edge. This portrayal, a Hamlet of the street or even of the gutter, has been said to have been Pasternak’s conception of the character in his work on the translation.⁹ But for many people it was a case of self-expression by Vysotsky. And Lyubimov once privately upheld this view:

People reproach me and say that Volodya is uncontrollable as a man and as an actor, that I don’t work with him, and that he’s no Hamlet or Galileo but always, in every play, Vysotsky. . . . That’s true; it’s because of his intensity, his charge, and his fire; he’s a personality on the same level. . . . He’s an uneven actor. He can be a Hamlet of genius and then a mediocre one. No, no, that’s not right, it doesn’t fit him. Either a genius or nothing. . . .¹⁰

Vysotsky was never considered to be one of the great legitimate Russian actors of his time, on a level with, for instance, Smoktunovsky. But despite his short, wiry physique and his coarse features, he was recognized early as a genuine star, with impressive presence and real charisma. He was by far the biggest box-office draw in the Soviet theater throughout the 1970s.

While his career was progressing with the Taganka company, Vysotsky was making a parallel impact in film, TV, and radio.¹¹ He appeared in many mediocre movies¹² and a small number of high-quality ones, playing more than twenty-five roles in his twenty-year career. One important part was the title role in The Fourth Man (Chetvertyi), a spy thriller made by the eminent director Aleksandr Stolper in 1972 from a scenario by Konstantin Simonov.¹³ His successes on TV included a notable Don Juan in Pushkin’s Little Tragedies. On the screen, Vysotsky’s personality projected the same magic as it did on the stage. One (perhaps legendary) testimony to this magic has been reported by Pavel Leonidov:

. . . in the film Two Comrades Served, Volodya played a White Guard lieutenant in such a way that the terrified Ministry of Film immediately issued an order never to film Vysotsky in negative hero roles, because when this White Guard lieutenant, on the point of leaving his motherland, shot himself, the audiences started weeping. Soviet people feeling sorry for a White Guardsman!¹⁴

The Vysotsky of stage and screen was the subject of intense curiosity as a personality, and there were several aspects of his private life that became the stuff of myth and legend. His turbulent character was reflected in his driving style, at one time in a big Mercedes; he had two spectacular crashes, after one of which he was clinically dead for three minutes.¹⁵ One of these crashes led Andrei Voznesensky to write him an “optimistic requiem.”¹⁶ And it was no secret that Vysotsky was a classic Russian-style drinker, who would go off periodically on gargantuan binges. There are many stories about his being forcibly hospitalized in order to be dried out. He was said to have received the ultimate Soviet treatment for alcoholism, the insertion into the buttocks of a “torpedo” capsule that releases toxic substances, causing the bearer excruciating pain, if alcohol enters the bloodstream. There were accounts of how Lyubimov, with a critical performance looming, would spend hours in a frantic search for Vysotsky and then use all the refinements of medical technology to get him into a fit state to take the stage. Pavel Leonidov has reported Lyubimov as saying that Vysotsky’s relations with the bottle reminded him of a fireman’s relations with his fire, but he adds:

I replied that I didn’t understand and didn’t agree, and that it was rather a matter of . . . the relations between a long drought and a tropical storm. . . .¹⁷

Leonidov detected the obvious deeper level to Vysotsky’s drinking: it was the attempt by a pathologically tense, hyperactive personality to win some intervals of relaxation. Drink was one of the factors, perhaps the main one, that led to Vysotsky’s premature death, and he was one of a considerable number of Soviet Russian creative artists who have sought this path to oblivion. The incidence of alcoholism among the “creative intelligentsia” of Soviet Russia, as indeed in the country at large, is a taboo subject,¹⁸ and the part of Vysotsky’s repertoire of songs that deals with it—a considerable part—is one of its most firmly underground elements.

The most outrageously un-Soviet and glamorous thing about Vysotsky’s life was his marriage to Marina Vlady, the French film actress who was already a European superstar when she came to film in Russia in 1969. (Vysotsky was already married and the father of two sons.) The Soviet media keep quiet about the conjugal lives of public personalities in the USSR, and the resulting rumors made the VysotskyVlady marriage, quite fabulous by Soviet standards, into a fairytale. For a Soviet citizen, especially one in the public eye, to marry a person from the capitalist world (even when the person concerned is a known Communist, like Vlady) is always an act fraught with immense bureaucratic and practical difficulties. It took a number of years before the Vysotskys established the pattern that was once relished in Paris Match. Under the headline “Marina Vlady says ‘I’m crazy about Vladimir because I only see him one day in two,’ ” the reporter accompanied some opulent pictures of the couple with the news that they had given the lie to the old saying “Out of sight, out of mind,” and that two or three times a year this most geographically separate of couples came together with delight either in Marina’s big house at Maisons-Lafitte or in Vladimir’s Moscow apartment.¹⁹ This connection eventually enabled Vysotsky, in the last few years of his life, to spend a fair amount of time away from Moscow and the Soviet environment. The Taganka company was for many years not allowed to travel outside the Communist bloc, despite pressing invitations from many parts of the world, and it gave Vysotsky some relief to have a private life line. He felt that he was an actor of international standard, and he was extremely irked by the lack of opportunity to play outside the Communist bloc, especially as Hamlet.²⁰

His activity in theater and film, and his extravagant lifestyle, bestowed great glamour on Vysotsky, and even if he had done nothing else, he would have been a remarkable phenomenon in the world of Soviet culture. But while acting remained his bread and butter, it soon became a backdrop against which Vysotsky pursued his real vocation: guitar poetry. The two areas of activity were not completely detached from each other, of course. He was required to sing in his stage and film roles; the guitar-accompanied song is part of the Soviet working actor’s equipment. And Vysotsky was ever more frequently commissioned to produce songs for plays and films in the same way as other established Soviet songwriters, despite his “underground” reputation. He is the author of some of the best songs on the conventional subjects of mountaineering, geological exploration, and sport.

The circumstances of exactly how and when Vysotsky became a guitar poet have been explained in several different ways. Pavel Leonidov says that Vysotsky began when he was a student in the Arts Theater school, before even Okudzhava had started as a guitar poet.²¹ Ruvim Rublev says that he first heard Vysotsky sing around 1955, and at the time he was not performing any original material at all. When he was young, says Rublev, Vysotsky

had happened to come by several notebooks full of genuine labor-camp and prison songs, and after he’d made a thorough study of them he started singing them for his friends, beginning actors like himself. He used to perform them at student get-togethers, and that’s when they first got onto tape.²²

Vysotsky himself once made a completely unambiguous statement about his early days:

I began writing my songs because I heard Okudzhava’s. Indeed, I consider him my godfather. He gave me a nudge; by that time I’d already written a lot of poetry, and suddenly I saw that if I took an instrument and wrote a rhythmical basis for my verse, I could strengthen even more the effect it had on the audience. So I did some things to piano accompaniment and some to the accordion, and then everything somehow crystallized and simplified down to the guitar.²³

Andrei Voznesensky describes his earliest encounter with Vysotsky in the following way:

I met him for the first time in 1965, when the Taganka put on my AntiWorlds. He was just another of the Taganka people, wearing his eternally teen-age leather jacket, and in his arsenal there were only five or six songs. But there were already hints of the enormous hidden energy in him. That was long before the entire country was tossing and turning, enmeshing him, like Laocoon, in magnetic tape.²⁴

Voznesensky’s image is not overly fanciful. Vysotsky’s fame as a creator and singer of songs was firmly established by the end of the sixties, and his reputation continued to rise throughout the seventies. As we have seen, Okudzhava faded out around 1972; Galich was forced into emigration in 1974. But Vysotsky held on, the fount of creativity seemingly inexhaustible, and the private tape recorder ensuring that his work stayed before the public.

It was inevitable that as Vysotsky’s reputation as a singer and writer of unofficial songs grew greater, there would be trouble from the authorities. The attacks on him took different forms at different times. He was always subject to appropriate reprisals in the same way as any Soviet public personality, that is, denial of the opportunity to travel, denial of recording and distribution facilities, and being barred from playing certain parts. This interference is part and parcel of the professional life of all Soviet creative artists.

An early example of a public attack on Vysotsky is an article headed “What Vysotsky Is Singing About,” published in 1968 by two authors, one of whom is identified as “a teacher in the consultation office of the State Institute of Culture.”²⁵ They allege that Vysotsky used a double repertoire: a public one composed for official plays and films and a private one that he used for individual performances. In the latter, they said, he spoke “on behalf of alcoholics, soldiers in the penal battalions, criminals, people who are depraved and inadequate.” He slandered Soviet reality, they said, in not speaking about World War II in heroic terms. They accused Vysotsky of “reveling in our shortcomings and making fun of what the Soviet people is right to feel proud of” (the evidence being a song actually written by Yury Vizbor²⁶). Also, they alleged, Vysotsky mangled the Russian language, undermining the efforts of the education system to promote proper language etiquette. And he wrapped it all up in an attractive package which had the deadly lure of forbidden fruit and (they concluded) must be denounced and extirpated as the insidious poison it really was. The authentic voice of Soviet official humbuggery may be discerned in these charges. But it must always be remembered that they are potentially backed up by action of a most unpleasant kind from “the organs,” with whose knowledge and permission they are published and often even generated for future use as ammunition. These charges are typical of what was officially said about Vysotsky as a poet-singer throughout his career.

More threatening than these allegations, though, were the ones that actually accused him of illegal conduct. Beginning in about 1968, Vysotsky regularly gave concerts of his songs, which were always massively attended. They were usually put on as technically private performances, in the sense that tickets were sold not to the public but only to the employees of the particular institution that was sponsoring the concert. This kind of activity also falls within the control system, and officials kept a tight watch on what Vysotsky was actually doing. For example, in 1968 a visit he paid to Novokuznetsk provoked a scandal. A “reader,” one M. Shlifer, complained in a letter to the newspaper Soviet Culture (Sovetskaya kul’tura) that Vysotsky’s concerts were very interesting, but that he had been giving five concerts a day, each lasting an hour and forty or even fifty minutes, and with a thousand people attending each one (and tickets still being hard to come by). The newspaper promptly investigated this allegation. It was discovered that Vysotsky in fact had given sixteen concerts in four days. This activity contravened a regulation of the Ministry of Culture; the extra concerts, the newspaper revealed, had been given “by private arrangement” with the director of the local theater. Not only that, but Vysotsky’s name did not figure on “the list of vocalists who have the right to give solo programs.”²⁷

What exactly happened as a result of this and similar accusations is unknown and will likely remain so. Vysotsky was probably given a reprimand at the appropriate level of the Taganka’s administration and possibly even at the Ministry of Culture, and perhaps eased off for a while as a result. But he was never absent for long. Vysotsky was never persecuted and muzzled like Galich and never desisted as a result of severe warnings, like Okudzhava.

While Vysotsky was not permitted to publish or record in Russia on anything like the scale his popularity would have appeared to warrant, and the repertoire that was allowed onto records was only a narrow segment of his total output, the fact remains that he did make a number of recordings for the state monopoly company, Melodiya.²⁸ These performances are provided with orchestral accompaniments of quite comic crudity and do not begin to compare with the raw intensity of Vysotsky’s magnitizdat performances. But they were made, and they were released, something that would have been unthinkable for even doctored versions of Galich’s songs. In this respect, as in the case of Vysotsky the actor, there was persistent give-and-take between him and the state apparatus. How long it would have continued had Vysotsky lived is unknowable, of course; but the evidence suggests that in the late 1970s things were moving toward a crisis. He was getting more and more publicity abroad, and his conduct was becoming more and more indiscreet.

The nearest Vysotsky came to a showdown with the Soviet authorities was in connection with the Metropol affair in 1979. A group of writers, led by the novelist Vasily Aksenov, all authors of work that had been submitted to the Soviet press and refused publication either altogether or without substantial changes, decided that they would make a stand and demand the publication of this work in the form they wanted it. They put together an almanac, of which they made eight copies, and called it Metropol (Metropolis), a triple pun: the word in the sense of “capital city”; in the sense of “underground (railway)”; and as the name of the famous hotel in the middle of Moscow, a sign that the participants were looking for somewhere to lay their heads. Twenty-three authors altogether were involved. They intended to launch their almanac at what would in the West be a straightforward publisher’s party. But the café they hired for the purpose was suddenly closed, and they began to be summoned one by one to the authorities. The almanac was sent to the United States for publication when it became clear that the Union of Writers and the “organs” were not going to be pressured into making concessions. The fate of the authors concerned has been various: exile, submission, repentance, disavowal. But if the affair may be regarded as a test case, which is certainly what the ringleaders wanted, it showed, with no room for doubt, that the system was not going to bend in response to internal pressure.²⁹

Vysotsky published nineteen songs in the almanac, and another was used as an epigraph to it. The songs in Metropol actually have a uniquely authoritative status. They were selected and prepared for publication by the author himself, and they therefore represent a conscious statement by him about his work. None of the other publications has this authority. All the magnitizdat recordings are unedited, and most of them are probably unauthorized (although that admittedly gives them a different kind of positive value). The official Soviet recordings and publications have gone through the fine-grinding mill of the control system. In view of Vysotsky’s death about a year after the Metropol affair, it is tempting to see the selection published there as his own statement about his creative career to date. The songs even appear to be, insofar as indirect evidence makes it possible to say, in chronological order of composition.

The nineteen Metropol songs actually do give a reasonable representation of Vysotsky’s work. They certainly show his limitations and weaknesses, as well as his strengths. They begin with four of the “criminal songs” which formed the staple of his repertoire when he was beginning in the late sixties. In the first, a man serving a prison sentence writes to his faraway mates and asks them to get in touch. The famous “The One Who Was with Her Before” is an archetypal vengeance song whose central persona is a criminal who has been carved up in a gang fight after trying to get even with the man who has taken his place with his girlfriend. Then comes the uproarious “Ginger Moll” (“Ryzhaya shalava”):

Why’ve you gone and plucked your eyebrows, bitch?

And why’ve you put your blue beret on, rotten stinker?

And where d’you think you’re off to in such a hurry, bag?

You can’t hide it from me that you’ve got two tickets for our club!

You know for a fact that I’m crazy about you,

I’d be glad to spend all my time thieving for you;

But just lately it looks to me

As if you’ve been two-timing me a bit too often.

If it’s Kolya that’s involved, or even Slava,

Well, I won’t object to my mates;

But if it’s that Vitya from Pervaya Pereyaslavskaya Street,

I’ll tear you limb from limb, so help me I will.

You red-headed bag, I’ll tell you straight,

If you go on wearing that beret of yours,

I won’t touch you, I’ll just forget all about you,

Cover my memory in cement so nobody can dig it out.

And then when summer comes and you try to come back,

I’ll grab myself such a fantastic chick

That you’ll curl up with jealousy, you bitch,

You’ll ask me to forgive you, but I won’t give a damn.

[M, 191 ;PRB, III, 28–29]³⁰

Vysotsky used to perform this song at a breakneck tempo, making it into a tour de force of elocution, and spoofing the sexist violence of the song’s surface meaning. The fourth of the criminal songs is one of the few in Vysotsky’s work that has a clear autobiographical subtext: “On Bolshoi Karetnyi Row” (“Na Βοl’shom Karetnom”), a lament for a misspent youth in a Moscow environment that has been left behind and then has changed out of all recognition.³¹

This little group of criminal songs is followed by a banal love song, “If I Were Rich as the Ocean King” (“Esli ia bogat, kak tsar’ morskoi”), an effort best forgotten. Then comes one of Vysotsky’s keynote songs, “In No-Man’s-Land” (“Na neitral’noi polose”). It tells the story of a Soviet frontier soldier who goes into no-man’s-land to pick some flowers for his wedding, not knowing that one of his Turkish opponents has exactly the same plan. The two men fall to the ground, overcome by the scent of the flowers. The song asks why they should not be allowed to do so. It has a moralistic, self-righteous tone that is dangerously close to the sanctimonious; its impact, such as it was, derived from the contrast with official frontier songs,³² where the brave Soviet heroes stand firm against the sinister provocations of the unsleeping aggressors. It is the nearest thing, in Vysotsky’s repertoire and maybe in the whole of Russian guitar poetry, to the pacifist anthems of the late sixties in the West.

The next song in Metropol is “Parody of a Bad Detective Story” (“Parodiya na plokhoi detektiv”), one of Vysotsky’s best comic songs. An “un-Soviet person,” calling himself “John Lancaster Peck,” spends his time in Moscow secretly taking detrimental pictures of “everything we treasure and love,/ that the collective is proud of”:

The club on Nagornaya Street

Became a public toilet.

Our dear old Central Market

Looked like a dirty warehouse.

Distorted by the microfilm

GUM was a little peasant hut,

And I’d rather not mention

What the Moscow Arts Theater was.

[PRB, I, 11–12]

“Peck” enrolls a seemingly dissolute Soviet citizen as his assistant and sets him up for some preliminary tasks, promising a reward of “money, a house in Chicago, lots of women and cars.” However,

The enemy didn’t realize, the fool,

That the person he was entrusting all this to

Was a Chekist, an intelligence major,

And a splendid family man!

[PRB, I, 12]

So “Peck” is brought to account. The story does indeed parody the clichés of the official Soviet spy mystery as practiced by the bestselling author Yulian Semenov. Its special appeal is created by the little touches that take it over the top (the “splendid family man,” and the Arts Theater reference, especially in the mouth of a Taganka actor). Altogether, the piece is an innocent romp, sent up by Vysotsky in performance and made into something quite hilarious.

The story of John Lancaster Peck is followed by the only representative in the Metropol collection of the considerable number of early Vysotsky songs on the subject of sport. It is not one of the best. A boxer is being battered senseless; but his opponent, Butkeev, works so hard that he exhausts himself, and the battered pugilist wins. The most interesting thing about this song is its refrain:

And Butkeev thought as he pummeled my jaw:

“It’s good to live, and life is good!”

[PRB, I, 6]

This apparently innocuous quotation aroused the ire of the critics of 1968 that have just been cited; the quotation happens to be from the holy writ of Mayakovsky, and this line of his, which has become an official Soviet slogan, must not be taken in vain.

Then come two outrageous parodies of Russian folklore, “The Wild Boar” (“O dikom vepre”) and “Evil Spirits” (“Pro nechist’ ”), the latter a masterpiece of deromanticization and desentimentalization. The song takes some of the schoolbook characters and incidents from the traditional Russian folk tales and makes them sordid and prosaic. As a piece of pure verbal inventiveness it is one of the high points of Vysotsky’s work; he revels in supernumerary rhymes and in juxtaposing conventional folk phraseology against vulgar urban slang. The stylistic and thematic virtuosity of the song is completely untranslatable. A large part of its impact derives from the contrast with the reverent official attitude toward the nation’s folklore.

A third folklore skit in Metropol is the most explicit of them all. The title, “The Sea-Cove’s Gone for Good” (“Lukomor’ya bol’she net”), refers to the most famous example in Russian poetry of the use of folklore, the introduction to Pushkin’s Ruslan and Lyudmila (“By a sea-cove is a green oak,/A golden chain around it,/And night and day a learned cat/Walks round and round on the chain,/When he walks to the left he starts up a song,/When he walks to the right he tells a tale.”) In Vysotsky’s song:

The sea-cove’s gone for good,

No trace of the oak trees.

Oak’s good for making parquet floors,

Isn’t it?

[Μ, 201]

The cat is still there, though:

The cat really does walk here,

Walks to the right and sings,

Walks to the left and cracks

An anecdote!

But that learned son of a bitch

Flogged his gold chain to the foreign currency agency,

And went to get relief

From the store!

[M, 202–203]

The virginal temptress of Russian folklore is transformed:

And the mermaid—there’s a thing!—

Didn’t keep her honor long,

And one fine day as best she could

Had a baby.

The thirty-three muzhiks

Don’t acknowledge the little boy—

Let him be for the moment

A son of the regiment.

[M, 203]

The last line is a reference to a famous Soviet play, A Son of the Regiment by Veniamin Kaverin. “The Sea-Cove” is almost childish in the level of its humor, but once again, it has to be seen against the background of Soviet solemnity in the study of Russian folklore. In Vysotsky’s performance it is a virtuoso piece, with deliberately outrageous rhymes, and sung at a breakneck tempo.

For some reason, the two last-mentioned folkloric songs are separated in the Metropol selection by a lyric that is among the gloomiest Vysotsky ever wrote. It has a two-line refrain:

The Earth is covered in ice!

The whole year round, in ice!

The rest of the song rings some changes on the theme of the first verse:

The Earth is covered in ice!

As if there were no spring or summer,

The planet’s clothed in something slippery,

People fall down and hit the ice.

[M, 201]

The song has often been read metaphorically, of course, as a statement about the atmosphere of Russian society during the Brezhnev years. And it has also been taken as a direct confession by Vysotsky about his own sense of insecurity.

The last of the folk parodies is followed by a three-verse text whose stark refrain needs no comment:

The people keep on complaining,

Justice is what they want:

“We were first in line,

But they’re already eating behind us!”

[M, 205]

All the songs that have been mentioned so far date from the earliest phase of Vysotsky’s career; they are attested on the magnitizdat tapes from the late 1960s. The criminal songs and the sport songs, of which Vysotsky composed a large number, were especially characteristic of this early period. As Vysotsky moved through the seventies, the proportion of songs in which he spoke explicitly from his own point of view seemed to grow. The next song in the Metropol group is an example. It is a lament for Vysotsky’s old friend, the writer and actor Vasily Shukshin (1929–1974), whose alcohol-accelerated death foreshadowed Vysotsky’s own. The song’s impact is retrospectively made very poignant by this fact; there are lines like:

“He can’t have understood omens,”

Say the idle people in vain,

“Death catches those of us first

Who intend to die.”

And even more ominously:

Death picks out the very best

And pulls them in one by one.

[M, 206–207]

The parallels between Shukshin and Vysotsky are many. The older man had nothing like the same level of national appeal as the singer, but they were similar personalities and reacted in a similarly desperate way to the pressures of Soviet life. In particular, Egor, the hero of Shukshin’s most famous story, Kalina krasnaya (translated as Snowball Berry Red), is exactly the same tough loner as the heroes of Vysotsky’s criminal songs. A poem by Esenin that Egor quotes in Kalina krasnaya, in which Esenin identifies himself with a hunted wolf, is the direct ancestor of the first of two impassioned anthems by Vysotsky that come next in Metropol. It is “The Wolf Hunt”:

I’m straining my utmost, every sinew,

But yet again, today like yesterday,

They’ve surrounded me, surrounded me,

And they’re merrily herding me in to do my tricks.

The shotguns are busy from behind the spruce trees,

The hunters are hiding in their shadow,

And the wolves go head over heels in the snow,

Turned into living targets.

The refrain:

The wolf hunt is on, the hunt is on!

For gray prowlers, old ones, and cubs;

The beaters shout, the dogs howl themselves sick,

There’s blood on the snow and the red spots of flags.

. . .

Our legs and jaws are swift.

Why, pack leader, answer us,

Do we run toward the shots as if doped,

And never try to go beyond the prohibitions?

The wolf cannot and must not do otherwise . . .

And now my time’s coming to its end!

The man I’m destined for

Has smiled and lifted his gun . . .

The wolf hunt is on, the hunt is on! etc.

But I’ve transgressed my obedience and gone

Beyond the flags—the thirst for life was stronger!

And behind me I heard with joy

The amazed cries of the people.

I’m straining my utmost, every sinew,

But today’s not the same as yesterday!

They’ve surrounded me, surrounded me,

But the hunters have been left empty-handed!

[PRB, I, 29–30]

Vysotsky wrote a sequel to “The Wolf Hunt” which is not included in Metropol; its title is “Hunting with Helicopters, or Where Are You, Wolves?”. The wolf that got away in the earlier song is here at bay:

What can I do alone? I can do nothing.

My eyes have given out, my sense of smell is dull.

Where are you, wolves, forest beasts of yore?

Where are you, yellow-eyed tribe of mine?

I’m alive. But now I’m surrounded

By animals who never knew wolf-calls,

They’re hounds, our distant relatives,

We used to think of them as our prey.

I smile at the enemy with my wolfish grin,

Baring the rotten stumps,

And on the blood-tattooed snow

Melts the sign: “We’re not wolves any more!”

[Pesni i stikhi, 1, 310]

This is one of the most despairing of Vysotsky’s later songs. “The Wolf Hunt” was followed in Metropol by a text that Vysotsky used to howl out in a voice more like a wolf’s than he used in the song about wolves; its refrain goes:

Stoke me the bath-house smokeless [po-belomu],

I’ve had enough of this wide world [belyi svet]

I’ll steam myself out of my mind,

And the hot steam will untie my tongue.

[PRB, III, 54–55]

The hero turns out to be an ex-convict who has labored in Siberia but who retained his faith in Stalin and did not begrudge the killing work he was performing for the country and its cause, only to realize, eventually, that the cause was not worth the effort:

The thoughts have started knocking under my skull,

It turns out I was condemned by Them for nothing!

So with my birch twig I’ll whip out

The inheritance of those gloomy times.

This song produced an almost frightening effect on Russian audiences; it seemed to take them by the throats and confront them with the tormenting question that they sometimes formulate for themselves as “What did we struggle for?” and to demand a despairing answer. And the personal charge that Vysotsky put into it was unmistakable. Like almost all his lyric anthems, it is expressed from the point of view of a person who has been goaded to the point of no return and feels he must do something desperate to resolve his fate.

It is aptly followed by a song in which sport is no more than the nominal subject; the hero is a racing driver, and he is the embodiment of risk, gambling with life as a pathological obsession. Characteristic of the song’s tone are lines like these:

My finish line is the horizon, the tape’s the earth’s end,

I have to be first at the horizon.

The driver has to complete the course to win a wager. His enemies have set traps for him:

I know they’ll throw wrenches in my spokes,

I can guess the way they’ll cheat me,

I know where they’ll smirk and cross my path.

And where there’s a cable stretched across the road.

. . .

My finish line, the horizon, is still as far away,

I haven’t broken the tape, but I’ve got past the cable,

It didn’t break my neck, but from the bushes

They’re firing at my wheels.

After all, it wasn’t money that made me race,

“Don’t miss this chance,” they said,

“Why not see if there’s a limit at earth’s end,

And if horizons can be pushed back?”

While I’m clocking up the miles,

I won’t let anyone put a bullet in my back,

But the brakes are failing—coda!

On I go right past the horizon.

[M, 211]

This impassioned personal outcry—melodramatic and perhaps selfpitying as it may be—is characteristic of the later Vysotsky.

Two songs remain of the Metropol collection. The first is a throwaway about a Soviet brain surgeon:

Everyone whose life wasn’t bright

He turned into normal people,

But this enormous bright star

Unfortunately was a Jew.

[M, 212]

The text as it stands in Metropol, with two verses and two refrain stanzas, looks incomplete, as if it were the beginning of a long narrative song about what happened to this person as a result of his Jewishness. The last song of the Metropol batch is one of the supreme masterpieces of Vysotsky’s last years, here called simply “A Dialogue” (“Dialog”), but usually called in performance “Dialogue in Front of the TV”:

“Ooh, Vanya, just look at them clowns,

Their mouths look as if they need bandaging,

They’re so made up, aren’t they, Vanya,

And they’ve got voices like alkies.

And that one looks like my brother,

A drunkard just like him, I’m right, aren’t I,

No, go on, have a look, go on, have a look,

I’m right, Vanya!”

“Listen, Zina, hands off brother,

I don’t care what he’s like, he’s still family.

And you’re all made up yourself,

Just watch what you say to me!

Why don’t you quit fretting

And get yourself down to the shop?

No? Well, I’ll go myself,

Move yourself, Zina.”

“Ooh, Vanya, just look at them dwarfs,

That’s jersey they’ve got on, not cheviot.

Down at our garment factory

We’d have a job making that up.

But honest, Vanya, I’m telling you,

All your friends are such layabouts,

First thing in the morning they start drinking

That rotgut.”

“My friends might not wear smart raincoats,

But they don’t make their families go short.

They drink that filth to save money,

And if they do start in the morning, they pay their way.

And who are you to talk, Zina,

Once you had a boyfriend from the tire factory

And he used to drink gasoline.

Remember that, Zina?”

“Ooh, Vanya, just look, little parrots,

A-a-a-gh, it’s going to make me scream, honest.

And who’s that wearing that short vest?

Can I have one like that, Vanya?

Vanya, I bet you could get me one

Down at the street comer, couldn’t you?

What d’you mean, give over, it’s all you ever say,

It’s not nice, Vanya.”

“You’d be better if you kept your trap shut,

This area’s got no priority any more.

And who’s been writing complaints about me to work,

What d’you mean, they haven’t, I’ve read them myself.

And besides, that vest, if you put it on,

Zina, it’d be a disgrace.

It’d take yards to make one for you,

And where’s the money, Zina?”

“Ooh, Vanya, that acrobat’ll be the death of me,

Just look at him twirling round, cheeky devil,

The man in charge of our club, Mr. Satikov,

Jumped about like that at work not long ago.

And Vanya, what you’ll do is get back home,

Have a bite, and collapse on the bed,

Or you’ll go on bawling if you’re not drunk,

What’re you doing, Vanya?”

“You’re starting to get rude, Zina,

You’re just trying to offend me.

I get so wound up during the day,

Then I get home and what do I see but you.

No wonder, is it, Zina,

I always feel like going to the shop,

That’s where my mates are, Zina,

After all, I never drink on my own.”

“Oh, look, there’s a gymnast on now,

She can do a bit even though she’s getting on . . .

Down at our milk bar, the “Swallow,”

There’s a waitress who can do that.”

“The only thing your friends ever do, Zina,

Is sit there knitting woolly winter hats,

People like that are so boring

They’d drive you out of your mind.”

“You what, Vanya? How about Lilka Fedoseeva,

The cashier from Gorky Park?

You were after her when we had our housewarming,

I bet you think she’s all right.

What’s the point of arguing, Vanya,

Let’s just go to Erevan for a holiday.

What d’you mean, give over, it’s all you ever say,

It’s not nice, Vanya.”

This piece of seeming trivia needs to be understood, in the first place, against the background of the conventions of Socialist Realism, especially as manifested in song. It is clear that Vysotsky has succeeded in carrying off something that has led most Russian authors who have attempted it into portentousness, inverted snobbery, and guilt—abandoning their intelligentsia stance and actually speaking from the persona of the ordinary people of Russia. The song seems to invite contempt and condemnation for a man and wife whose mental horizons are so limited. But that is not the case. The song in fact portrays them objectively, as if to say “They may not be beautiful, but that is how they are.” And it does not highhandedly and patronizingly summon them to be the vanguard of history, recall to them their revolutionary heritage, or anything that is remotely ideological. But the song does more. It implies that the people have not been ennobled by their history, and that the massive effort that has gone into indoctrinating them has been a complete failure. Astonishingly, the song was included in the posthumous Soviet collection of Vysotsky’s work, probably the only item from Metropol that has been published in the USSR.

The other remarkable thing about this song is that it is a masterpiece of naturalistic dialogue which succeeds at the same time in being a virtuoso piece of phonetic organization. The rhyme structure of the original is ABABCCCC; the four lines at the end of each stanza, each with their single rhyme, have to use the names of the husband and wife (Van’ or Ivan, and Zin); but there is only one line in the whole song where there is any suspicion that the content has been distorted by the exigencies of the rhyme. In translation, Vysotsky’s language may seem extremely prosaic. The original Russian sparkles with exuberant word play of the kind demanded by the rhyme scheme of “Dialogue in Front of the TV,” and the author’s performance underlines his relish as he overfulfils all norms.

While the Metropol songs give a balanced impression of Vysotsky’s work as a whole (excluding the two extremes of publishable and completely nonpublishable), some of his very best songs are not included among them.

The criminal songs formed the central core of Vysotsky’s “private” repertoire when he was in his first fame as a guitar poet. They are of several kinds. Some of them are extremely sophisticated pastiches of the underworld song, the genre that was discussed earlier as one element in the tradition of urban folk song in Russia. The subject matter is not necessarily actual criminal life, but may be simply from the low life of the city. An example is “The Lady Nark” (“Navodchitsa”), which must be one of the most outlandish love songs ever written in Russian. Vysotsky used to perform this song in a deadpan, lugubrious monotone. Once again, seen in the context of the officially approved approach to sexual relationships, the attitudes and characters of this song are outrageous.

Today I’m going to have fun

Arranging my Saturday;

And if Nina doesn’t play up,

I’ll arrange my whole life!

“Hang on, you dope, don’t you know she’s a nark?

What for?” “Don’t care, I just fancy her.”

“Hang on, you dope, there’s some of us getting together,

Let’s go down the pub and drown your desire.”

“Don’t try getting at me today,

You can stuff your booze today;

Today Nina’s making her decision,

Today my life’s being settled.”

“She’s been around, that Nina has,

She’s lived with the whole of Ordynka Street!

Anybody can sleep with her if they want to.”

“Makes no difference to me, I just fancy her a lot.

She said she loves me.” “Come off it, that’s past and gone,

I’ll lay a hundred rubles to one she’s putting you on.”

“It’s a bad sign if it’s her doing the asking.”

“Means nothing to me, I just fancy her a lot.”

“But her voice is hoarse, and she’s filthy,

She’s got one black eye and her legs don’t match,

She’s always dressed like a charwoman.”

“Be damned to that, I fancy her.

I know everybody says she’s not good-looking,

But I like them better if they’re like that,

What do I care if she’s a nark?

It just makes me fancy her even more.”

[PRB, III, 31–32]

One of the most subtle of all Vysotsky’s criminal songs, one which goes far beyond the regular limits of the genre, is “The Anti-Semites” (“Antisemity”):

Why should I be just a common criminal?

Wouldn’t it be better to join the Anti-Semites?

On their side they’ve got no laws, that’s true,

But they have got the support and enthusiasm of millions.

Well, I decided, somebody has to get beaten up,

But I thought I’d better find out who these Semites are;

What if they turn out to be decent people,

What if I stand to make something out of them?

But my friend and teacher, the alkie at the grocer’s,

Told me that these Semites are only ordinary Jews;

That’s a stroke of luck, isn’t it, lads?

Now I’ve calmed down, what is there to be scared of?

I held out for a long time, I always had

A respectful attitude toward Albert Einstein;

I hope folk will forgive me if I ask

What should be done about Abraham Lincoln?

Among them is Kapler, who suffered at Stalin’s hands,

And Charlie Chaplin, I’ve always liked him,

My mate Rabinovich, the victims of Fascism,

And even the founding father of Marxism.

That same mate told me once after we’d done a little job

That they drink the blood of Christian babies,

And the lads told me once down at the pub

That once, long ago, they crucified God.

They have to have blood, they once got worked up

And tortured an elephant at the zoo;

I know for sure that they stole from the people

All the grain from last year’s harvest.

Along the railway line from Kursk to Kazan

They’ve built themselves second homes, and they live there like gods;

I’m ready for anything, for punchups and violence,

I beat up the Yids so’s to save Mother Russia.

[PRB, III, 10–11]

The reactions that this song produces in a Russian audience are complicated. It spells out some of the most notorious elements in gut Russian anti-Semitism but appears to defuse them by passing them off as the views of a simple-minded clod of the criminal classes. An extremely delicate balance is achieved between the wholehearted realistic representation of lumpen attitudes and the temptation to recognize and agree with these attitudes in their more sophisticated forms. The last line of the song paraphrases the slogan of official anti-Semitism in the prerevolutionary period, a slogan still very much alive in the Russian folk memory.

There is another group of Vysotsky songs that exudes a guileless lunacy which is very rare indeed in Russian humor. It is true that behind them it is possible to identify all sorts of digs at Soviet attitudes, but nevertheless they have an immediate and very pure appeal. Perhaps the best of this group is the following:

The Yogi

What are the claims to fame of Indian culture?

Well, there’s Shiva, who’s got lots of arms and fangs;

There’s an actor that we’ve heard of, Raj Kapur,

And that strange caste, the yogis, and the tale.

People say that at one time yogis could do it

Even if they’d not taken a damn thing in their mouth for a year,

But these days they’re breaking records,

Eating everything and drinking all year round.

I know that yogis have a lot of secrets,

I’d like to have a tête-to-tête with one.

Even poison has no effect on yogis,

Against poisons they have immunity.

An hour under water, and he doesn’t breathe once,

Doesn’t take offense at one word, or two.

And if he feels he’s an old man, suddenly

He’ll say “Stop!” and rightaway he’s a corpse.

And us? —Well, we’re no worse than many,

We too can go without a night’s sleep.

There’s a lot of yogis wandering around here,

Though I admit they’re very hard to spot.

Yogis can do many many tricks.

Lately there was one who suddenly lay down.

Two whole days went flashing by (Shame!)

He just went on lying there, fast asleep.

I once asked a yogi who’d had a bit to drink

(He was eating razor blades and nails like sausage)—

“Listen, friend, reveal yourself to me, honest to God

I’ll take the secret with me to my grave.”

The answer to my question was simple,

But he and I had a terrible argument.

I could just reveal what his answer was,

But the yogi told me to keep the secret, that’s all.

[PRB, 1, 13]

The Metropol selection, by definition given the purposes for which the collection was put together, contains none of the songs by Vysotsky that were published or recorded in the USSR. But at least one of these ranks with his very best work, even in the adulterated version released on record. It is called “A.M. P.T.” (“Utrennyaya gimnastika”):

Breathe in deeply, stretch those arms out,

Take it easy (-three-and-four-and-)

Bright and breezy, grace of movement, sculptured pose,

It’s what strengthens you all over,

Gets you sober in the morning,

(If you’re still alive)—yes! It’s gym-

-nastics!

If you’re home in your apartment,

On the floor! (-and-three-and-four-and-)

Carry out the movements in the proper way;

Do away with outside things,

Keep your mind on what’s to come,

Breathe in deeply until you’re in

-capable!

Lately there’s a worldwide growth of

Cholera germs (-and-three-and-four-and-)

More and still more people keep on falling ill;

If you’re fragile—in your coffin!

If you want to keep your health up,

Folks, the thing you really need is rub-

-bing down!

If you’re getting tired already

(Sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up)

No need to fear the Arctic or the Antarctic;

Chief Academician Joffe

Proved that brandy and that coffee

Will do instead of physioprophy-

-laxis!

Right, cut out that conversation,

Knees-bend, knees-bend’til you’re dropping,

And no need for gloominess or furrowed brows;

If you’re feeling very bad,

Rub down with what comes to hand,

Have recourse to hydropro-

-cedures!

Bad news causes us no bother,

Running on the spot’s our answer,

Even a beginner is a winner;

It’s just great—a field of runners

With no winners and no laggers,

Running on the spot is the pan-

-pacifier!

[PRB, IV, 76–77]

The butt of the joke is the morning keep-fit broadcast which goes out over the main Soviet radio network. Its ballet-class piano and Butlinredcoat instructor arouse derisive mockery in most Russians, but Vysotsky’s comment is in a class of its own. This song, sung by the author to the accompaniment of an elephantine thirties-style dance orchestra, has been released on one of Vysotsky’s Soviet records. Clearly, there is nothing here that goes very deep; there is even a dollop of uplift at the end.

One of the very few songs of Vysotsky’s that stands as an indisputable masterpiece is “The Song of Serezhka Fomin” (“Pesenka pro Serezhku Fomina”). Not a single word in it could be omitted or changed without doing damage:

I grew up same as other backstreet kids,

We used to drink vodka and sing songs at night;

But we never had much time for Serezhka Fomin

Because he was always serious.

Once we were round at Serezhka Fomin’s place,

That’s where we usually got together,

And that war had broken out

We learned from Molotov’s famous speech.

At the recruiting center they said: “Old man!

Your place of work means you get exemption”;

I turned it down, but Serezhka Fomin

Was got off by his old man, a professor.

I’m spilling my blood for you, my country,

But all the same my heart is full of distress.

I’m spilling my blood for Serezhka Fomin,

And he just sits there without a care in the world.

But at last the war finished.

It was like getting a ton weight off our shoulders.

I bump into Serezhka Fomin—

And he’s a Hero of the Soviet Union.

[PRB, IV, 24]

This song is a classic ballad. It is understated, stylistically perfect, constructed with judicious parallelism, tautly economical but with just the right amount of repetition to make the effect inevitable (in performance the last couplet of each verse is repeated), and it tells a story that unfolds in an inexorable way to the final punch line and then needs no further comment. In the magnitizdat recordings it is invariably followed by a troubled silence from the audience. The song is a negation of the official war song, because it points to privilege and social injustice, when the events of 1941–45 are officially proclaimed to have welded Soviet society together in their just common cause. The hero, the “I” of the song, is exactly that ordinary man doing his duty who is a cliché hero of Soviet war mythology, as we have seen. But Vysotsky’s hero is contemptuous rather than indulging himself in resentment and bitterness—another reason why the song’s dry economy is so effective. This song is entirely Soviet in its data, a-Soviet in the mental horizon of the hero, and anti-Soviet in its implications. It is saved from being actionably anti-Soviet by retaining a positive view of the Russian people, or at least by not denigrating their “achievements.” But it is not alone in this respect among Vysotsky’s songs, as we have seen even in the Metropol group, which errs on the side of caution. But why was the author of items like these allowed to remain not only free but in the public eye?

One clear—if superficial—reason why Vysotsky was permitted to survive is that quite a number of his songs actually promote the official line of the time they were composed, especially some songs he wrote making fun of the Chinese during their cultural revolution. These songs portray the Chinese as nasty, destructive little boys going through an adolescent revolutionary tantrum. Here is an example, this time with a sporting subject:

The professionals get loads of salary,

They don’t care if they spit their teeth out on the ice;

They’re paid superdough, thousands and thousands,

Even if they lose and even if they draw.

These players are crafty, they go for the body,

Thump opponents in the teeth and don’t give a damn;

But they wind up getting their own legs done in,

And get a walking stick instead of a hockey stick.

To the professionals, those desperate fellows,

The game’s a lottery, a matter of luck.

They play their marker like a bull plays the matador,

Though you’d have thought it should be the other way around.

There lies the marker as if he was dead,

So what? That’s his lookout, let him lie;

Don’t mess it up, Bull, God wants the puck in the net,

God’s up there in the stands and he won’t let you off.

. . .

The professionals get paid through all sorts of channels

Big amounts, little amounts, into the bank;

But our Russian lads stay on the same money

And they’ve still gone ahead five times already.

So let them get on with their big-league intriguing,

And let them call hockey “the Canadian game”;

It’s our turn now, we’re looking forward to next time;

But as for our footballers . . . let’s hope they improve.

[PRB, II, 7]

This song was written during the epic Moscow series of 1972 that led to a Soviet defeat at the hands of the visiting Canadians. The entire country held its breath during the series, and national pride was painfully at stake. The tone of Vysotsky’s song is exactly in tune with the Soviet official myth about the unscrupulous professionalism of the Canadians and the clean sporting amateurism of the Russians.

This particular song is explicit in this respect, but the vast majority of Vysotsky’s songs about international politics, World War II, and the various professions are on the same level. The reason these songs are unsuitable for transmission is their form, not their content. Vysotsky succeeds in expressing popular attitudes that correspond in principle with official ones (usually involving that endemic Russian chauvinism which is so offensive to foreigners)—but he does so in a style which is incompatible with the linguistic decorum of the media.

For this and other reasons, Vysotsky managed to carry on despite the kind of public attacks that have intimidated or led to the arrest or silencing by other means of most other Soviet authors who have been subjected to them. There was a sort of unholy conspiracy between him and the Soviet official world. The Party and state apparatus by implication acknowledged him as the most authentic voice of their historical time and their country, someone who was perhaps unruly, disrespectful, and even downright subversive at times, but nevertheless someone who spoke to them in their own language and about their own life. It is in this important respect that Vysotsky was the unofficial bard of the official world instead of being (like Galich) a force alien to it, something it felt threatened by and needed to destroy.³³

Vysotsky, of course, was perfectly well aware of this situation. He even wrote a song about it:

The time for introductions and preludes is gone,

Everything’s fine—straight up, no fooling.

I get invitations from big people

To come and sing them “The Wolf Hunt.”

. . .

He’s listened right through to the last note;

Furious because the last words are missing,

He picks up the phone and says “Get me

The author of ‘The Hunt’ in my office tomorrow.”

I didn’t take any Dutch courage,

And, forcing back the stammers,

Standing in the doorway, I bawled out “The Hunt”

From beginning to end.

. . .

And he heard me out benevolently

And even clapped at the end.

Taking a bottle from his bookshelf

And making it ring against the glass,

He burst out: “But that’s about me,

About all of us, what’ve wolves got to do with it?”

That’s it, now something’s bound to happen,

For three years I’ve had five calls a day;

I get invitations from big people

To come and sing them “The Wolf Hunt.”

[PRB, IV, I]

The feeling that he was being played with and used by the official world must have been one of the main factors that contributed to Vysotsky’s permanent anxiety and tension, his feeling of always being at the end of his tether. This strain is the keynote of all Vysotsky’s “personal” songs. In this respect he is the polar opposite of Okudzhava; and he is very different too from Galich, in whose work there is occasionally real anger, but always with a softening note of self-doubt. Vysotsky is extroverted, bombastic, maximalist, violently intense.

The most succinct expression of this attitude is the song that was used as an epigraph to the Metropol collection, one which Vysotsky often saved up as the final encore at his concerts. (“Fed up to the throat” is the equivalent of English “fed up to the back teeth.”)

I’m fed up to the throat, up to the chin.

Even songs are starting to make me tired.

If only I could sink to the bottom, like a submarine,

So nothing could get my bearings!

My friend gave me a glass of vodka,

And told me things would get better.

My friend introduced me to Vera when I was drunk,

“Vera will help, and the vodka will save you.”

But neither Vera nor the vodka helped.

The vodka gave me a hangover, and what was there to take from Vera?

I’d like to sink to the bottom, like a submarine,

And not send any messages!

I’m fed up to the throat, up to the gullet,

Oh! I’m sick of singing and playing.

I’d like to sink to the bottom

So nothing could get my bearings!

[PRB, I, 6]

Naturally, this hysterical intensity is subject to diminishing returns. A dozen songs by Vysotsky are as much as anyone can take at any one time without being overwhelmed. Undeniably, Vysotsky is limited. The number of contemplative lyrics in his work is very small. He is not often subtle; in fact, most of the time he is gloriously, exultantly vulgar. But there is always delight in his humor, such a bright, pure spot on the dismal map of Russian literature in the Brezhnev age.

And Vysotsky’s prodigious inventiveness works against him, too. Over a period of fifteen years, perhaps a little longer, he wrote something like five hundred texts, something like three per month, in addition to all his other activities. Inevitably, by no means all of them stand the test of time, to say the very least. There are no songs by Vysotsky that have the bland grayness of official song, but many of them are trivial, many are facile, and many of them are virtually interchangeable. In this respect, too, Vysotsky stands at the opposite extreme from Okudzhava, the author of a small number of highly individualized, carefully wrought pieces. Vysotsky was a prodigal inventor of words, just as he was a prodigal personality.

Nobody could continue for long at Vysotsky’s intensity without blowing up. The drinking bouts provided temporary oblivion from time to time, but the old driving devil quickly returned. And the inevitable happened: Vysotsky died, of heart failure, on 25 July 1980, in Moscow.

The initial paralyzed disbelief was followed by displays of public feeling that had not been seen in Russia, some said with ghoulish irony, since the death of Stalin in 1953.³⁴ For the Russians, the event even eclipsed the Olympic Games, which were being held in Moscow at the time. Vysotsky died on a Friday morning. As soon as the news began to spread, a crowd started to form near the Taganka Theater and continued to stand there until, on Monday, people without special invitations were allowed into the theater to pay their last respects to his body, which had been taken there on Saturday. Behind closed doors, in the theater, there was a funeral service with the choir of the Bolshoi Theater, recordings of Vysotsky’s voice, and various addresses, all “choreographed” by Lyubimov. The funeral on 29 July was an even bigger demonstration of popular feeling. Vysotsky was adjudged insufficiently eminent to rate a place in the cemetery of the Novodovichii Monastery, where leaders in all walks of life are interred (except for the very highest, who rate the Kremlin Wall). He was assigned to the more homely Vagankovo Cemetery, whose biggest claim to fame is the grave of Sergei Esenin. For Vysotsky’s interment, there was a massive police presence; access to the graveside was strictly controlled; people were required to present their flowers to the police, to be placed by them on the grave later. The grave has already become a place of pilgrimage, with anonymous visitors keeping the flowers renewed.

It will never be known whether or not Vysotsky would have gone on to experience increasingly sharp confrontation with the official world, perhaps eventually being forced to decide whether to remain in the USSR or become an involuntary émigré. At all events, with his death (as is often the case with underground or semiofficial Soviet writers), publication of his work in the USSR became easier. Two poems were published in the annual almanac Poetry Day (Den’ poezii) in 1981,³⁵ and a batch more, with a preface by Andrei Voznesensky that has been cited several times here, in a well-regarded journal early in 1982.³⁶ To the amazement of the reading public, a whole volume of lyrics was published later the same year.³⁷ And that was not only after the Metropol scandal; more and more work by Vysotsky had been being published outside the USSR in the previous two years,³⁸ and his work had been increasingly discussed there as an anti-Soviet phenomenon.³⁹ He had even given concerts abroad, including one phenomenally highcharged occasion in New York before a largely Russian émigré audience. Fortunately, a recording was made of it, and it had been released before Vysotsky’s death.⁴⁰

The most moving tribute to Vysotsky has been that of his fellow guitar poet Bulat Okudzhava:

I thought I would make up a song about Volodya Vysotsky . . .

Yet another who will not come back from the campaign.

He sinned, people say, doused his candle before it was time,

He lived as best he could, and nature knows none who sin not.

Separation’s not for long, just a second, and then

We too will set off along his hot trail.

May his hoarse baritone circle over Moscow,

And with him we’ll laugh and with him we’ll weep.

I wanted to make up a song about Volodya Vysotsky,

But my hand trembled, and the tune didn’t fit the line.

A white Moscow stork has flown up into the white sky,

A black Moscow stork has come down to the black earth.⁴¹

The folkloric image at the end, with its plainly religious significance, is quintessential Okudzhava, and the understated, mournful tone of the whole piece is a deliberate contrast to the subject’s melodramatic, declamatory manner.

The tributes to Vysotsky by his fellow Russian intellectuals contain warm personal sentiments,⁴² but there is a curious hesitancy in some of them about his stature in the context of Russian culture. And that seems to have been a source of anxiety for Vysotsky himself, another element that added to the strains he was continually subjected to by the official world. He was the most widely popular of the guitar poets and, indeed, probably one of the most popular personalities ever in the USSR as a whole, ranking with soccer and ice hockey stars in a dimension beyond anything that is usually reached by people from the arts. But this glory and fame did not satisfy Vysotsky himself. The problem is implicit in the words of Vladimir Maksimov, the exiled novelist and editor, in an interview soon after Vysotsky’s death:

About Vysotsky . . . sad that it was so early . . . terrible. I always respected him as an actor and loved his songs, but he does not seem to me to be a literary phenomenon. He is rather a sociocultural phenomenon, perhaps. . . . A witness to the age, a representative of the age . . . he had a very accurate feeling for it. But literature? I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t think so. . . .⁴³

Okudzhava once expressed a similar kind of reservation about Vysotsky’s stature and accomplishments when asked to comment on his death and that of Shukshin:

Shukshin was a very talented maitre. Nothing more! Vysotsky is a much more significant revelation, although in his verse he did not achieve the same perfection (I mean artistic perfection) as Vasily Shukshin did in prose. But Volodya was approaching a higher mastery, he was moving, in the sphere of form as well, toward ever higher art.⁴⁴

Against this statement we may set Andrei Voznesensky’s words about one of Vysotsky’s most passionate personal anthems, “Persnickety Ponies” (“Koni priveredlivye”):

. . . that is a great song and great poetry, where the voice tosses the guitar away, wipes the cynical grin of everyday life from its lips . . . and gives itself up to the very highest spirit of poetry, the elemental force and truth of suffering—in it we hear not a chansonnier, but the destiny of a poet.⁴⁵

Voznesensky was even more explicit in his poem of tribute:

Don’t call him a bard.

He was a poet by nature.⁴⁶

But even Voznesensky is guarded; the implication is that Vysotsky was a poet by nature, but that what he actually produced was not poetry or literature. The last stanza of his poem seems to make the distinction explicit:

Scribes will remain scribes

in their corrupt, chalky papers.

Singers will remain singers

in the million-strong sigh of the people.⁴⁷

However, there is ambiguity here, too: scribe (pisets) is a derogatory term for a mediocre writer, while singer (pevets) has for centuries been a high literary word for poet (English bard, perhaps), and Voznesensky’s use means that as well as, literally, “singer.”

To ask whether or not Vysotsky was “a real poet” is actually in the last analysis irrelevant. But it is a question that tortured Vysotsky himself, and it comes from deep inside the Russian cultural tradition. So does the most striking of all the posthumous tributes paid to him, this one in an anonymous editorial:

He became Russia’s favorite son because he didn’t needle her, didn’t tell her how to live, didn’t give lectures on morals, but gave a real scale of values which are valid for use in the appalling circumstances she finds herself in now. Every person according to his age and almost according to his profession received from Vysotsky support and a point of reference from which he could assess what’s good and what’s bad.⁴⁸

In other words, Russian literature (official or unofficial) that is not didactic in intent still needs to offer lessons for life in order to attain the highest popularity. But there can be no doubt whatsoever that of Vysotsky’s massive repertoire, it is the songs furthest away from high literature that are the greatest—songs like “Serezhka Fomin,” “The Anti-Semites,” “Dialogue in Front of the TV,” “The Lady Nark,” and “The Yogi.” All of them are “objective” in the sense of using a persona that is distinct from the author’s own; all of them are humorous, covering the whole spectrum from nonsense (“The Yogi”) to the black irony of “Serezhka Fomin.” And they deal with everyday life. They portray this life as brutish, untouched by official ideology, and centered on laughter, violence, alcohol, and sex. They are informed by a clear-eyed understanding of, and compassion for, ordinary people that are absolutely beyond the reach of officially approved literature and art. That is social realism of a very high artistic order, and it exposes the crippling sham of the dogma of Socialist Realism.

But what kind of moral guidance can possibly be found in Vysotsky’s songs? That the personal lyrics express the gloom and alarm of people at the current state of the country is indubitable; this famous folk-style ballad is a true anthem for the Brezhnev years:

Why is the house quiet and plunged in gloom,

Standing at the windswept edge of town,

All its windows looking out on gloom,

And its doors on the high road?

Ah, I’m so tired, but I’ve unharnessed the horses,

Hey, anyone there alive, come out and help!

Nobody there, just a shadow in the doorway,

And the carrion crow’s circling lower . . .

[PRB, II, 12–13]

But it is not so much as a barometer of the national mood that Vysotsky was important. What matters more is the system of ethics that underlies the criminal songs and the songs of everyday life. They proclaim the irrelevance of official ideology and present an alternative—unedifying but nevertheless preferable. This alternative is based on the individual rather than the collective, and it is a system in which justice is personal and swift, retribution is a principle of the highest value, and there is no intermediacy between the wrongdoer and the victim. This code provides a stark alternative to Soviet goals, and it is not difficult to see its attraction in a society where the individual feels himself utterly at the mercy of a soulless machine. And Vysotsky himself embodied this sense of escape from the grinding might of the state.

Whether Vysotsky was a phenomenon whose significance will not outlast his epoch—the late sixties and the seventies—cannot be predicted. He certainly spoke for a generation, and his songs may grow old with this generation. But it is quite certain that, in contrast to the official “People’s Artists” of the Soviet state in his time, Vysotsky was the genuine thing: an artist of the people and for the people, whose life and work became folklore during their creator’s own lifetime.

Aleksandr Galich in the early 1907s.