Vladimir Vysotsky

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".

It wasn't long until Vysotsky's youthful interest in drugs and street punks vanished and he began working on more serious poetry. From 1964, his poems start to deal with the World War II. Real, intense, sophisticated, and deeply philosophical songs appear.

"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.

At the graves of the brothers there are no widows in tears,
Stronger people go there.
They don't put up crosses at the graves of the brothers . . .
But does this make things easier?

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.

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.

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.