Vladimir Vysotsky: The Voice the State Could Not Print
He died on 25 July 1980, in the middle of the Moscow Olympics, when the Soviet state had every reason to keep the news quiet and very nearly the means to do it. There was a minimal announcement. By the end of the day millions of people knew anyway, and tens of thousands lined the streets around the Taganka Theatre to watch his coffin pass. He had published exactly one poem in his own country in his lifetime and had never once appeared on Soviet television.
A War Childhood
Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky was born in Moscow on 25 January 1938. His father, Semyon Vladimirovich, was a Jewish Red Army reserve officer from Kiev; his mother, Nina Maksimovna, worked as a German translator and took her son to the theatre constantly. When his father went to the front in 1941, mother and son were evacuated to Orenburg Oblast, where they stayed until 1943. From 1947 to 1949 he lived with his father and stepmother at a Soviet military base in Eberswalde, in occupied Germany — a comparatively comfortable interlude that gave him a child's-eye view of an army from the inside.
He enrolled at the Moscow Institute of Civil Engineering in 1955 and left after a year. From 1956 he studied at the Moscow Art Theatre School instead.
Taganka
In 1964 he joined Yuri Lyubimov's Taganka Theatre, the most daring company in the Soviet Union, making his debut on 19 September in Brecht's *The Good Person of Szechwan*. His Hamlet, which opened on 29 November 1971, became the defining Russian performance of the role for a generation — a Hamlet with a guitar and a hangover, played by a man the audience already knew from tape.
The relationship with Lyubimov was volatile. The director fired and rehired him repeatedly because of his drinking, and complained that he brought a "stardom malaise" into productions. He kept casting him anyway, which tells you most of what you need to know.
The Tapes
The songs are the reason he matters. He wrote more than six hundred of them, almost all in minor keys, accompanying himself on the Russian seven-string guitar in a voice that has been described as whiskey poured over gravel. He sang in other people's voices — convicts, front-line soldiers, mountaineers, truck drivers, miners, drunks — in street jargon so precise that listeners routinely assumed he had personally done time or fought in the war. The early material drew on the criminal underworld; the war songs that followed carried the experience of ordinary soldiers with an accuracy the official culture never managed.
The state would not release him. Melodiya, the record monopoly, kept him off its catalogue; a smear campaign in 1968 branded the songs "immoral" and "anti-Soviet," and the composer Dmitry Kabalevsky objected publicly to his getting radio airplay. So the songs travelled by *magnitizdat* — homemade reel-to-reel and cassette copies passed hand to hand and recopied until the hiss swallowed the guitar. They reached everywhere. Cosmonauts took him into orbit.
The authorities' actual policy was neither ban nor endorsement but management: tolerate him, because suppressing him would cost more than it saved. He filled halls across the country while remaining, officially, almost a non-person.
Zheglov
Film gave him the one form of mass legitimacy he was allowed. *Vertical* (1967) made him a national figure and pushed his songs out of the intelligentsia and into the general population. In 1978 he played the detective Gleb Zheglov in *The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed*, a television serial that emptied Soviet streets while it aired and remains one of the most-watched things ever made in Russian.
Vlady
He married three times: Iza Zhukova in 1960, Lyudmila Abramova in 1965 — with whom he had his sons Arkady and Nikita — and, on 1 December 1970, the French actress Marina Vlady, who remained his wife until his death. The marriage opened a door to the West that almost no Soviet artist had, and it made the authorities permanently uneasy.
His body could not keep up with him. He drank heavily for most of his adult life and began taking amphetamines around 1977 to manage the hangovers. By April that year he was in the resuscitation unit of a Moscow clinic. On a concert tour of Central Asia in July 1979 he went into cardiac arrest, was clinically dead, and was brought back. He died a year later, at forty-two, almost certainly of a myocardial infarction after years of alcohol and drugs — though his parents prevented an autopsy, and the exact cause is still argued over.
Why Vladimir Is Called a Genius
The specific faculty is dramatic ventriloquism at scale. Vysotsky wrote more than six hundred songs almost none of which are in his own voice. Each is a monologue delivered by someone else — a sapper, a thief, a wolf being hunted, a fighter pilot, a man in a queue — and each is built with the dialect, the grievances and the logic of that person intact. He was trained as an actor, and he used the training on the page: the songs are not lyrics with characters in them, they are compressed one-man plays. That is why the criminal songs convinced criminals and the war songs convinced veterans. He had been neither.
Layered on that is a structural habit the critics keep pointing to: an extended metaphor built patiently verse by verse until it turns, in the last lines, into something unmistakably political. Under censorship this was not decoration but method. It let him say what could not be said, to an audience that had been trained by the same censorship to listen for it.
His standing is not seriously disputed inside Russian culture. He is the bard, the way Brassens is in France; the comparisons reached for abroad are Dylan, or a Russian compound of Lennon, Johnny Cash and Tom Waits.
The counter-case is honest and worth stating. Very little of this survives translation: the whole effect depends on Russian slang, Russian rhyme and a voice, so a non-Russian reader is largely taking the verdict on trust. He was not a formal poet and did not claim to be; one poem in print during his lifetime is a fact about the state, but it is also a fact about the form he chose. His acting career, real as it was, was repeatedly interrupted by his drinking. And his reputation is inseparable from the politics that suppressed him and from a death at forty-two — martyrdom is a powerful amplifier, and there is no way to run the experiment without it.
Legacy
His first collection of poems, *The Nerve*, appeared in autumn 1981 and sold out at once. In 1987 the state that had refused to publish him gave him the USSR State Prize posthumously, for Zheglov and for his work as a singer-songwriter — a citation that manages to acknowledge the songs without quite admitting what they had been about. Monuments went up in Moscow in 1995 and as far away as Podgorica in 2004; asteroid 2374 carries his name. He lies in the Vagankovo Cemetery, where people still leave flowers, and his songs remain standard repertoire in Russian bars and at Russian kitchen tables — which is, in the end, where they were always meant to be sung.
Achievements
- Worked as poet, writer and film actor
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