Vysotsky’s gravel songs became the USSR’s unofficial diary
Vladimir Vysotsky (1938–1980), Moscow-born singer-songwriter, poet, and actor, stamped Soviet culture with hoarse ballads of war, prisons, and everyday nerve. A wartime childhood, divorced parents, and a 1953 first guitar fed a Taganka Theatre career that official radio could not contain.
Father Semyon, Jewish, went to the front in March 1941; mother Nina sheltered Vladimir. After the 1946 divorce he lived with his father and Armenian stepmother in Germany occupation zones (1947–49). Bogomolov drama courses and birthday guitar in 1953 locked the twin tracks of stage and song.
His mother took him to the theatre every Saturday from early childhood until his early teens. In 1955 he enrolled at Moscow's civil engineering university but quit after a year, and in June 1956 began studying acting under Boris Vershilov at the drama school attached to the Moscow Art Theatre, where he met his future wife Iza Zhukova. His first stage role, in 1958, was Porfiry Petrovich in Crime and Punishment, and his first film part came in 1959. Years at the Pushkin Drama Theatre brought disciplinary reprimands and drinking, and a 1962 stint at the Theatre of Miniatures ended with his dismissal for a supposed total lack of humour.
His first real song, Tatuirovka, in 1961, opened a cycle of stylised underworld ballads laced with social wit. In June 1963, while filming, he borrowed Gorky Film Studio equipment to tape an hour of his own songs, and copies spread so fast that many listeners took them for anonymous folk songs. In 1964 Yuri Lyubimov auditioned him for the Taganka Theatre, and a meeting meant to last five minutes stretched on as Lyubimov kept listening. That October he recorded 48 songs in sequence as his first complete-works compilation.
At Taganka he played Galileo in May 1966, his first lead and the first time his name appeared in Soviet papers, and later Khlopusha in Pugachev, though Lyubimov briefly fired him over his drinking. The 1967 climbing film Vertical, with songs written on Mount Elbrus, was his breakthrough, and Marina Vlady recalled hearing his voice from every open window on a summer night.
Source: Vladimir Vysotsky
