

Vladimir Vysotsky

Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-1980) was Russian actor, lyricist, and folksinger whose social and political satire spoke of the ironies and hardships of a strictly regulated Soviet society. He was a phenomenon which at first seemed normal, for his lyrics were pure and true and recognizably original, but only in a matter of a few years his name grew to mythic proportions in Russia's culture.While risking official displeasure, he became an immensely popular figure who was revered by the Russian people even after his death.

Vladimir Vysotsky was born in 1938 in Moscow. His father was a soldier in the World War ll, and his mother was a translator of German. His friends were his schoolmates and the punks who ran around the city streets stealing cigarettes. They enjoyed sneaking into movies, getting into fights, and other adventurous things that normal kids in the cities did. In 1959 he began working in the theater by the name of A. S. Pushkin as an actor for small roles, and then in 1960 started performing in Soviet films. But in 1964 he joined the Taganka Theater of Drama and Comedy, directed by Yuri Lyubimov, where Vysotsky reigned supreme as Hamlet, and many other roles.

From the early 60s he started performing his songs among the company of friends. These songs, guitar-poems, where regular poems to the beat of a guitar in the background. His first songs were "street songs". They were what are called in Russia "blatnye pesni", which means songs about the streets, the drunks, drug addicts, pimps, thieves, prostitutes, killers, spies, etc. These were what he called a "street romance".


"Brothers Graves"

They don't put up crosses at the graves of brothers,
And widows don't come here to weep.
Somebody brings them a bouquet of flowers
And lights an Eternal flame.

Here the earth would stick out of the ground,
And now - granite flagstones.
Here there is no personal fate -
All fates are mixed into one.

Within the flame - you see explosions of tanks,
Russian homes burning.
A burning Smolensk and a burning Reichstag,
The burning heart of a soldier.

Stronger people go there.
They don't put up crosses at the graves of the brothers . . .
But does this make things easier?

Movie Poster From 1964 he was a member of the Moscow Theatre of Drama and Comedy on the Taganka. He was also featured in 26 motion pictures.

The most famous movie "The place of meeting can't be changed" was about the life of the Moscow Criminal Investigations Department and about “thieves-in-law”, luxurious restaurants and flea markets – about the life after the Victory.

is great popularity as an actor was perhaps even exceeded by his popularity as a poet and songwriter. He wrote his first song in 1960 and would ultimately have a significant influence on an entire genre of music.

The main thing about Vysotsky was his style - his voice was deep and gruff. His singing was intense that moved high into a pitch that seemed all-powerful and grand. His words were also direct and vivid - not soft and mellow like many bards', but words of metal and fire.


"I sang everywhere. I performed in people's homes, at night, with vodka or without, I sang in airfield - at the same time as combat aircrafts were landing - among black-dressed beatle-like technicians, we just went away so that the words would be heard. I perfomed in buses, in gigantic stadiums, and in the smallest places. In other countires - and the French didn't understand: why is he so nervous and why is he yelling so much? Even after I translated the songs for them, they were still in a quandry, because for them singing is a genre that shouldn't touch on any problematic topics."

If Vysotsky's songs were just protests, they would only be good at the dissident rallies. Yet from his songs people draw strength to live, to work, to love; the bard's poems touch millions of hearts all over the world.

Marina Vlady.In 1975 he married the famous French actress of Russian descent Marina Vlady (born Marina De Poliakoff-Baidaroff), and this had a tremendous affect on the rest of his career. Being married to a foreign woman, especially a major international celebrity, he had the opportunity to leave the Soviet Union many times, he even had the opportunity to emigrate. From 1975 to the year of his death, 1980, he had performed all over Europe and America - with major concerts in Paris, London, Berlin, New York, L.A., and Chicago.

Their love was legendary. Marina saved him many times. Without her he would have died even earlier. He wrote songs about her.

Vysotsky and Vlady.After his tragic death from an overdose in 1980 Marina Vlady published the memoir of her life with Vysotsky, entitled "Volodya: Or A Flight Cut Short." In it she remembers a truly sensitive scene when they were both in Berlin.

Walking along the clean streets Vysotsky was fascinated by the cleanliness, the wonderful cars parked along the streets - Porsches, Mercedes', etc. - he noticed the stores filled with all the kinds of foods, stores filled with wonderful clothes and products - Marina noticed that Vysotsky felt ill and so they went back to the hotel room.
When they came in Vysotsky fell down on the bed in tears, shaking. "What's wrong! What's wrong!" Marina asked. "It's not fair! It's not fair!" He yelled, "They lost! And we won! They did such horrors to us, and we are starving like animals in our own country! It's not fair!" Such was the affect of the West on the most famous man in the Soviet Union.

Vysotsky and Vlady.B
ack in the USSR his concerts attracted thousands of people, stadiums, concert halls, open fields, factories, hospitals - he was earning the kind of cash that only Brezhnev earned. His popularity became phenomenal, he could not go a single day without at least 40 people begging him for his autograph. At the same time he was hassled by the KGB, jealous friends, and people who wanted something from him.

He became the ultimate superstar of Soviet history - in the eyes of the public from the late 1960s to the end of his life in 1980 he was greater then Stalin. He symbolized the soul of the nation - angry, repressed, tortured, tired, and wild. His gaze was stern and fixed, his gruff voice was the reflection of years of drinking and smoking, and screaming and crying and singing. His voice was a symbol of repression and angst, sinking deep into the poles of insanity and destroying the borders of normality and conformity - out of this madness appeared a dashing music of resistance and life, awareness and victory. A voice that sent soldiers to tears, and the heartbeat of the Soviet Union seemed to choke itself through his voice. This was his greatest accomplishment - what he did for the culture of the Soviet Union.

Vysotsky would probably be the definitive example of counter-culture in the Soviet Union - in each possible way. His interests were wide and varied, he collected large amounts of records from the West: jazz, rock, blues. In his three-bedroom apartment in Moscow there was a large library, filled with books on literature and the war.

Vysotsky knew he was going to die soon - everyone knew he was going to die soon, or at least those who watched him die. It wasn't the drugs - it was the repression. It was the knowledge that his poetry was not published - and there was no conceivable way that it could be published in his lifetime - and that is perhaps the poets greatest sadness - that his art can only go around illegally underground.

He died on July 25 1980 in his sleep, during the Olympics in Moscow.

It has always been remembered as the hottest day in the year, stadiums were packed with the Olympics taking place. Then suddenly people began to notice that policemen would take off their caps after speaking into their radios. "What's the problem?" everybody would ask. "Vysotsky's dead!" It was a strange site - thousands of Russians left the stadiums, their workplaces, their homes, and schools and went in a massive procession to the Taganka theater where Vysotsky performed Hamlet - gathering on the roofs of buildings, staring out of windows, people began crying and singing Vysotsky's songs.

Vysotsky's funeral was a funeral of an era.
The time of Okudzhava and Vysotsky was over - one of the greats had left.

Among the thousands of people who showed up to mourn the death of a living god, Bulat Okudzhava delivered a small speech:
"He is a true poet, and his bright and wide name is the greatest weapon against lies, horror, and what is called 'mass culture.'..."

Fellow actor from the Taganka, Yuri Trifonov, also gave a small speech: "He brought a strength, a love for life, and a deep meaning to the music of our 60s and 70s. He sang so much sadness about our time and about us, he blessed us - those who with love collected his recordings, who sang with him his songs, who heard them by accident from windows wide open - he blessed us with poetry, sadness and masculinity, the kind that is needed in life. He was the poet of legendary temperament, and he left . . ."

Among the others that wrote great essays and speeches on Vysotsky was Yuri Vizbor. "Vladimir Vysotsky was a loner. A bigger loner than many would believe . . . . . all his life he battled with officials and bureaucrats, to whom Vysotsky's work was never really considered as work. With those who saw what they wanted to see in Vysotsky - the vulgar, the drunk, the hysteric, the seeker of cheap popularity, the god of drunks and punks. . . . . there were no limits to his songs - thank God that there are tape recorders for sale in stores. He screamed his poetry, and this tape recorder scream hung over the whole nation - 'from Moscow to the very outskirts.' For his strength, for his truth - all was forgiven. His songs were the nations songs, and he himself was an artist of the nation."

Gorodnitsky wrote a song, tribute to Vysotsky:
At Vagankov dried leafs are burning.
The sun reflects in domes - it burns the eyes.
Come over here and quietly start praying -
Even if this is your first time.

Vysotsky and Oksana, his last love.He died at 42 of a heart attack, brought on, it was said, by his well-known carousing, hard-drinking life-style.

Vysotsky's departure was a shock to the nation. But it made people more aware of the importance of the musicians and their contribution to Russian culture.

Until his death, Vladimir Vysotsky, "A voice of a silent nation" was a prophet without honor in his own country.

Although he wrote more than a thousand highly popular songs, he died without an official record release to his name. The reason for this studied neglect lay in the political tenor of his material. Vysotsky, who began performing in the 1960s, was quite critical of the Communist regime, and his lyrics took position on the Soviet status quo. His songs derived from the blatny pesny (literally, delinquent songs) tradition, with its celebration of sex, drink, and street fights. Informally distributed cassettes ensured Vysotsky a wide and enthusiastic following.

After his death, in 1980, Gorbachev granted his music an amnesty and a 20-album retrospective was released. In the late 1980s the Soviet government began allowing the publication of his poetry and song lyrics.

Philip Kirkorov, May 1998, show in Las Vegas.
Philip Kirkorov, May 1998, show in Las Vegas.

Alexander Vertinsky.Alexander Vertinsky

In the distant, pre-revolutionary Russia of 1917, in Moscow's more intimate theatres, with only 300 seats, there appeared a tall, lean youth, dressed in the costume of Pierrot. A white mask of the face set off the dramatic blackened brow and scarlet mouth. Up flew his unusually expressive hands with elongated fingers, and he began to sing...

His miniature novellas-in-song were known as ariettes. Either because their themes hit the mark, or simply owing to the young man's rapport with the public, these songs began to circulate, their lyrics transmitted by word of mouth. The novice performer was christened the "Russian Pierrot", gained renown, became an object of imitation, admiration, simultaneously vilified in the press and lionized by the audiences; his career was destined to be brilliant. The young celebrity was Alexander Vertinsky (1889-1957), a poet, singer, actor and composer.

Not quite aware of that, Vertinsky was creating a new variety show form, in which poet, composer, singer and actor united in one person. Today we know that Vertinsky brought a new subject to the stage, similar to the one presented on screen, almost at the same time but in a different way, by the great Charlie Chaplin.

"We were hungry, we wore broken shoes and slept sitting at the tables of night pubs, but we never gave up! We forced our way into literature, into life! The time was hot, horrible, dark, but we were moving grippingly toward the light." - These were the words in which Alexander Vertinsky recalled his young days.

The tidal waves of the October 1917 revolution swept away the finest offspring of Russian culture. Poet Ivan Bunin, bass Feodor Shalyapin, silent screen idol Ivan Moszhukhin, ballerina Anna Pavlova, Alexander Vertinsky - the artistic elite fostered during Russia's "Silver Age" and forced to leave their native land - were doomed to long years of spiritual exile. Unable to accept the revolution, Vertinsky chose emigration, leaving Russia and eventually setting in Europe. This marks the beginning of Russian Pierrot's thorny road. His upraised thin hands now implore not for private joys, but the salvation of a nation. His new muse is the nostalgia of regret. His little dities grew into concise epics inhabited by circis clowns and cocain addicts, cabaret dancers and movies stars, capricious, richly caped femmes fatales and lowly vagrants, bohemians and gigolos, page boys and peers. They all fall in love, suffer, dream of happiness, pine with regret, huri themselves headlong after life's fleeting pieasures and bemoan its bitter disappointments.

He now appeared to the public in coattails, crisp white shirtfront and patent leather shoes. Vertinsky's artistry approached virtuosity, he was called "Shalyapin of the vaudeville stage" and "the Russian bard". His name encapsulates a genre all his own. He is the embodiment of an entire era in Russian history! His voice casts a spell, his songs invoke mysterious, faraway lands. Once experienced, he is permanently etched in memory. He is the toast of Paris, London, New York. His audiences include Russian eminres, Frenchmen and Englishmen. Among his fans he counts choreographer Michel Fokin, impressario Sergey Diaghelev, Feodor Shalyapin... For a second time, Vertinsky is riding on a wave of popularity.

Paradoxically, at the height of his success, Vertinsky is assiduously petitioning the Soviet goverment:"... let me come back, please! My heart yearns for Russia, my home, which has been such hardships, atrocities, famine and privations".

Only in late 1943 he was granted a permission to return. The war raged on, the nation just barely beginning to recover from the grueling years of pointless slaughter. He returned home with a new repertoire, with a note of tragedy added to his predominantly nostalgic songs. His songs reflected the mood of many outstanding Russian people Vertinsky had met in emigration, people scattered around the world by the revolution. Here, in his devastated native land, Vertinsky gave many charity performances to benefit famine victims, wounded soldiers, orphaned children. He was heard throughout the whole country: in Siberia, the Soviet Far East and Central Asia, touring inordinately while he sang himself hoarse, as if believing that his songs would thaw people's hearts. To him this nation was not "Soviet Union"; quite the opposite, it was still "his old Russia", his birthplace and source of comfort. This is where he sang away his remaining years. Fame, which came to him twice before, made a third and final appearance. Russian art, to whose fold he returned a fully formed master, embraced him like any true parent, unquestioningly, despite his years of wandering.

He toured the country with concerts and everywhere he enjoyed success and the recognition of the public. But the mass media kept complete silence, not producing a single review or comment. The authorities wanted him to understand that back home he remained a stranger because he refused to fit his art into the canons of Soviet art. Vertinsky seems to have started the sad list of artists admired by the public and rejected by the officials. The list was closed by Vladimir Vysotsky, a poet and singer of his verses from another generation.

The name of Alexander Vertinsky is legendary. His songs never did acquire the infection of revolutionary rhetoric - he remained a liberated child of his great culture. The fact that he survived Stalin's purges imparted a mythical reputation to his later years in the USSR. Perhaps the explanation was that even a despot's heart has a secret compartment to which the poet holds the key. Vertinsky's poetry, music and singing from the summit of Imperial Russia's period of artistic decline; he is the final ray, gleaning in the twilight of Russian Silver Age.

"Yes, my art was the reflection of my epoch,"
Vertinsky wrote in his memoirs. "I was its microphone. By some inner feeling I could guess the most important, something at the back of most people's minds: their private thoughts, wishes, and beliefs. Often I did it well in advance."

Alexander Vertinsky died in 1957, but the magic of his art continues to live in people's hearts.

Alla Pugacheva.Alla Pugacheva

lla Pugacheva (born in 1949 in Moscow) is the embodiment of success in the true Russian style. That is, success against all odds. And in that sense, Alla Pugacheva is the true Russian national legend in the full meaning of the word.

She is a Number One Superstar in Russia during last twenty years. Her voice is magic and her life is a good story for a book.

Alla Pugacheva.Her biography is years of studying (the Ippolitov-Ivanov school of Music, the Lunacharsky School of Theatrical Arts), years of searching (her first recordings on the radio, made when she was only 16, her first trips with the promotions crew of the radio station "Youth" in Siberia and Far East, working with the bands "New Electron", "Moscovites", "Happy Fellows", and Oleg Lundstrem's ensemble).

Her first spark of success came upon receiving of the third place prize at the All Union competition of pop artists in 1974 with songs like "Posidim Pookaem" and "Ermolova from Clear Ponds"

The first Star (and not the heroine of Socialist work) with all the resulting God-like qualities of that status in then the Soviet Union. She achieved everything with hard work and struggle with all her flaws, which gradually ceased to be so to her millions of fans.

It was the victory at Varnes in 1975 with the song "Arlekino" that gave us the great singer and actress, which we so love. The victory at Sopot on the International Contest with the song "Kings Can Do Everything" in 1978 once again proved her status quo.
In the twenty years that followed that event Alla Pugacheva has reached everything one could wish for in Russia and the former Soviet Union.

She is the last Peoples Honor Singer of the Soviet Union, the laureate of many domestic and foreign awards, as well as Russia's number one newsmaker, and the participant of many prestigious musical festivals all over the world (which she has toured many times).

She has done so much since that it is amazing she could have so much energy. Her album sales amount to about 300 million copies, and the movies in which she played, have had enormous success in the box office. Her concert programs, such as "The Monologues of a Singer" (1981) and "I Came and I'm Talking"(1984) are to this day yet to be outdone. Her "Christmas Reunions" (1988-1992) have, for five years in a row, gathered 15 thousand viewers.

Her name has been given to an ocean liner in Finland, a brand of French perfume, a magazine (whose editor in chief is Alla herslef) and a line of shoes (also designed by Allla).

Her daugter, Kristina Orbakaite, is now a popular cinema and theatre actress and a singer. Her lastest husband, Philipp Kirkorov, is also a popular singer.

Few popular songs (require shockwave player)


soviet screen, Interview with A. Vertinsky, Vertinsky's poems, his poems in English, about Vladimir Visotsky, Vysotsky's poems, list of articles about Vysotsky,(in Russian), Vladimir Vysotsky official site, article about Vysotsky, Vysotsky's songs (Eng/Rus), Russian rock group Aquarium official site, about Philip Kirkorov, Christina Orbakaite official site (in English), about Vysotsky (in German)

