Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky (25 January 1938 – 25 July 1980) was a Soviet singer, songwriter, poet and actor who had an immense and enduring effect on Soviet culture. He became widely known for his unique singing style and for his lyrics, which featured social and political commentary in often-humorous street jargon. He was also a prominent stage- and screen-actor. Though the official Soviet cultural establishment largely ignored his work, he was remarkably popular during his lifetime and has exerted significant influence on many of Russia's musicians and actors.
Vysotsky was born on 25 January 1938, at the 3rd Meshchanskaya Street (61/2) maternity hospital in Moscow. His father was Semyon Vladimirovich (Volfovich) Vysotsky, a Jewish man who came originally from Kiev. His mother, Nina Maksimovna Vysotsky (née Seryogina), was Russian, and worked as a German translator. The family lived in a communal flat at No. 126, 1st Meshchanskaya Street.
Vladimir's theatrical inclinations became obvious at an early age, and were supported by his mother, herself a great fan of theatre. Vysotsky later recalled: "I didn't have anyone in my family who was an actor or a director [...] nobody who was in the arts. But my mother really loved theatre, and every Saturday—from the very earliest age until I was about thirteen or fourteen—she would take me to the theatre. And that probably stuck." His paternal grandmother Dora Bronshteyn also supported his interests. The boy used to recite poems, standing on a chair and "flinging hair backwards, like a real poet," and often used expressions he could hardly have heard at home. Once, at the age of two, when he had tired of the family's guests' poetry requests, he, according to his mother, sat himself under the New Year tree with a frustrated air about him and sighed: "You freeloaders, let the child rest!" His sense of humor was extraordinary, but often baffling for people around him. At three years old he would jeer at his father while the latter was in the bathroom, breaking out unexpected poetic improvisation ("Take a look what's happening here! / Our goat's decided to shave!") or appall unwanted guests with street folk songs. Vysotsky remembered these earliest years of his life in the autobiographical song "Ballada detstva" ("Ballad of Childhood").
After the outbreak of World War II, Semyon Vysotsky, who had been a reserve officer, was called up for service in the Red Army. In March 1941 he was sent to the front. Nina and Vladimir were evacuated to the village of Vorontsovka in Orenburg Oblast, where the boy had to spend six days a week at kindergarten while his mother worked twelve hours a day in a chemical factory. In 1943, both returned to their flat in Moscow. In September 1945, Vladimir entered the first grade at the 273rd Moscow Rostokino District School.
In December 1946, Vysotsky's parents divorced. From 1947 to 1949, Vladimir lived with Semyon Vladimirovich (then an army Major) and his Armenian wife, Yevgenya Stepanovna Liholatova, whom the boy called "Aunt Zhenya," at a military base in Eberswalde in the Soviet occupation zone in Germany. "We decided that our son would stay with me. Vladimir came to stay with me in January 1947, and my second wife, Yevgenia, became Vladimir's second mother for many years to come. They had much in common and liked each other, which made me really happy," Semyon Vysotsky later remembered. Here the living conditions were much better than at Nina's communal flat in Moscow; the family occupied the whole floor of a two-story house, and for the first time in his life Vladimir had a room to himself. In 1949, Vladimir and his stepmother returned to Moscow. There he joined the fifth grade of the 128th School of Moscow and settled at 15 Bolshoy Karetny, where they had two rooms of a four-room communal flat to themselves. Vysotsky found "Auntie Zhenya," who was just 28 at the time, to be a woman of great kindness and warmth, and later remembered her as being a second mother to him.
In 1953 Vysotsky, by this point very interested in theater and cinema, enrolled in drama courses led by Vladimir Bogomolov. That same year he received his first-ever guitar, as a birthday present from his mother. His close friend Igor Kokhanovsky, who would go on to become a well-known Soviet pop lyricist, taught him basic chords. In 1955 Vladimir moved into his mother's new home at No. 76, 1st Meshchanskaya Street, and in June of that year he graduated from school with five A's.
1955-1963: Beginnings in theatre, cinema, and music
In 1955, Vladimir enrolled in the Moscow State University of Civil Engineering, but dropped out after just one year to pursue an acting career. In June 1956 he joined Boris Vershilov's class at the Moscow Art Theatre School. There he met the third-year student Iza Zhukova, who four years later would become his wife. The two soon settled in a common room at the Meschanskaya flat, where their space was sectioned off by a folding screen. It was also at the MAT School that Vysotsky met Bulat Okudzhava, who at this point was already a popular underground bard. He was even more impressed by his Russian literature teacher, Andrey Sinyavsky, who often invited students to his home to stage improvised disputes and concerts.
In 1958, Vysotsky got his first role at the Moscow Art Theatre: that of Porfiry Petrovich in Crime and Punishment.
In 1959 he was cast in his first cinema role, that of the student Petya in Female Age-Mates.
On 20 June 1960, Vysotsky graduated from the MAT School. He soon joined the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre, then led by Boris Ravenskikh, where he spent almost three troubled years (with intervals). His time at the theatre was marred by numerous administrative sanctions for "lack of discipline" and occasional drunken sprees, which were primarily a reaction to the lack of serious roles and his inability to realize his artistic potential.
In 1961 and 1962 Vysotsky appeared in the films Dima Gorin's Career and 713 Requests Permission to Land, respectively. Both roles required him to be beaten up on screen, in the first case by Aleksandr Demyanenko. "That was the way cinema greeted me," Vysotsky joked later.
In 1961 Vysotsky also wrote his first proper song, called "Tatuirovka" ("Tattoo"), starting a long and colorful cycle of artfully stylized criminal underworld romantic stories, full of undercurrents and witty social comments.
In 1962 he did a short stint at the Moscow Theater of Miniatures, then directed by Vladimir Polyakov, which ended with his being fired. The official reason given was "for total lack of a sense of humour."
In June 1963, while shooting Penalty Kick (dir. Veniamin Dorman) Vysotsky used the Gorky Film Studio to record an hour-long reel-to-reel tape of his own songs. Copies of it quickly spread, and Vysotsky's name became known in Moscow and elsewhere, though many of the songs were referred to as being either folk music or anonymous. Only several months later, chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal was heard praising the author of "Bolshoy Karetny," and Anna Akhmatova (in conversation with Joseph Brodsky) quoted from Vysotsky's "Ya byl dushoj durnogo obshhestva" ("I Was the Soul of a Bad Company"), apparently taking it for a brilliant piece of anonymous street folklore.
1964–1970: Taganka Theatre, rise to fame, and backlash
Taganka Theatre and early work
In 1964 Vysotsky auditioned at the Taganka Theatre. Yuri Lyubimov, the theatre's director, recalled the audition many years later: "A young man came to my theatre. When I asked him what role he wanted to read for, he answered, 'I've written some songs of my own. Won't you listen?' I agreed to listen to one song […] Our meeting should have lasted at most five minutes. But I ended up listening without interruption for an hour and a half." Vysotsky was invited to join, and on 19 September 1964 he debuted in Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan as the Second God. Later that year he appeared on stage as a dragoon captain (Bela's father) in an adaptation of A Hero of Our Time.