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I was trying to explain the phenomenon of Vladimir Vysotsky to someone the other day. Vysotsky is my favorite singer/songwriter ever. He is also, like, "the soul" of the undertow of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows him and loves him. He is, like, Bob Dylan only a thousand times larger. He died two years after I was born, and no albums of his were ever released during his lifetime. He had a deep raspy smoked-through voice and he sang with his guitar all over the country. He was sort of like Johnny Cash in the sense that he spoke for "the downtrodden" among others. He was very versatile. He had a "legitimate" niche in the sense that he was an actor, part of the "Taganka" troupe (a famous Moscow theater) and did some film roles. He played everyone from a police detective to Don Juan to Hamlet. He wrote songs for war films and for the plays in which he appeared. But his "own" songs, the ones he performed at factories and univerities and ad hoc concerts were narratives that were about the dark and insane side of Soviet reality. Needless to say, they were not recorded or distributed. People bootlegged his concerts and passed the unmarked cassettes around. After his death, the bootlegs were digitally remastered (sort of--crappy-ass Russian style) and released, a total of over 30 albums. His thing was, writing songs-as-ballads, first-person narratives with unconventional narrators, whose personas and voices and jargon he assumed. Some of them, he claimed were old prison songs that he was covering, but really he wrote them. He sang from the point of view of people who spend decades in Stalin's gulags and prison inmates, an employee of the month at the Steelworker's factory who, for good behavior, is being sent on a vacation abroad to Bulgaria, except in his Soviet-educated imaginary of the world outside the iron curtain, Bulgaria, Hungary, Checkhoslovakia and Turkey are all mixed together, and he is afraid to go, because he is afraid he will be seduced by a foreign she-spy but if he does not go, his wife, who wants a carpet from "the abroad" will kill him. He sang from the point of view of inanimate objects, like a microphone that rebels and does not want to broadcast lies anymore, and is, thus, silenced. He sang from the point of view of a wolf that is being hunted and knows that if he just jumps across the red flags that are put up on wolfhunts, he will survive, but he's been conditioned not to. He sang from the point of view of a horse that's made to run a race and sabotages it all the way through, but in the end decides to win, but only after throwing the jockey off. He sang songs from the point of view of mountain climbers, Arctic exploreres, and sea captains in the far East--all people who tried to put as much distance between themselves and the Soviet sphere of influence as possible. He sang about the routine of the daily life--one of his most popular "humorous" songs is a dialogue between a husband and a wife in front of the TV (he does both voices) where they are watching the circus and the wife keeps wanting clothes like the ones circus performers are wearing, and the husband accuses her and her friends of being too fat and doing nothing but knitting winter hats all day, and she accuses him of being drunk all the time, and he says "well, I have to, because I work all day, I come home and you are sitting there." But he also wrote about poets and drunkards and James Bond and Alice in Wonderland (he had a whole series of songs based on Lewis Carroll). I think it is from listening to him from a very early age that my fixation on song lyrics above all else came about; because his lyrics were "in code"--the subversive subtext had to be listened for, especially in his more "humorous" songs, like this one: it's called "A Letter From The Patients of Kanachikova Dacha to the Editors of 'Obvious/Incridible'" in which the inmates see a TV program about the Bermuda Triangle, are very disturbed and excited by it and decide to write a letter about it. (Kanachikova Dacha was a famous Soviet mental hospital populated equally by real cray people, people who were put there because they were political dissidents and people who were hiding out there from the army; 'Obvious/Incredible' was a famous Soviet TV program, along the lines of 'Ripley's Believe It Or Not') ( Read more... )

I have always thought that a true marker of someone really learning Russian would be the ability to understand all the puns, nuances and references in his songs. He is something I wish I could share with everybody close to me. He died when he was 42. As part of the repression campaign against him, there was no official mention of his death anywhere in the press, but on the day that he died, the theater that he was a part draped a black sheet across their central window; by nightfall thousands and thousands of people materialized in the square in front of the theater and stood there with candles all night, holding a vigil for him.