At all times, poetry has had a huge influence on public life. The work of poets contributed to spiritual emancipation, revealed human vices, and made us think about the life around us. One of these poets was Vladimir Vysotsky - the personification of the conscience of the people.
Vysotsky's work is a biography of our time. In a huge number of poems written in different periods, the poet touched on very important milestones in history. Three main themes occupied a significant place in Vysotsky’s civic poetry: the Great Patriotic War, the tragedy of the people during the period of Stalin’s personality cult, the stupidity and inertia of the Soviet bureaucracy.
Vysotsky’s poems about the Great Patriotic War sound with such piercing power, filled with such burning truth, that it seems as if the author himself had a hard time in the war. The poem “We Rotate the Earth” is amazing. The symbolic image of a soldier stops the movement of fascist hordes:
We turned the earth back from the border,
It happened first.
But our battalion commander spun her back,
Pushing off with your foot from the Urals.
It would seem that everything collapsed, disappeared, “the sun went backwards and almost set in the east.” But the “replacement companies on the march” stopped the rotation of the Earth and “spinned” the planet back until they reached Berlin. Of course, the exploits of our soldiers in this war were sung even before Vysotsky, but with what feeling he writes about it! The poet talks about the courage of Russian soldiers in the poem “They grabbed onto the heights...”:
They clung to the heights as if they were their own.
Mortar fire, heavy.
But again we climb, wheezing, on her
Behind the flash of a signal flare.
And shouts of “Hurray!” froze in your mouth
When we swallowed bullets
Seven times we occupied that height,
We left her seven times.
And this height, to which the fighters went on the attack, became for them the crossroads of all destinies and paths, the personification of the Motherland, which must be defended.
In Vysotsky’s works, war appears not as its ceremonial portrait, but as a harsh truth, ugly, cruel, but always true. In the poem “The One Who Shot...” the poet spoke about a soldier who refused to carry out an unjust sentence. In another work, Vysotsky addressed the fate of people from the penal battalion. These soldiers were little pitied at the front and even less looked after. With their bodies they covered the space in front of the enemy’s fortifications and paved the way for other units:
Penalties have one law, one end:
Stab, chop the fascist tramp.
And if you don't catch lead in your chest,
You'll get a medal for bravery.
Until recently, writing about “penalties” was prohibited. But Vysotsky wrote. He wrote about them, and about rifle companies storming nameless heights, and about pilots dying in unequal battles, about battles with alpine riflemen in the mountains, about paratroopers and submariners. War is not only about victories, but also about blood and death. Since there were dead, it means there were widows and orphans. The poet in his poems managed to convey the melancholy of wives, mothers, brides who saw off their men to war:
The willows are crying for you,
And without your smiles
The rowan trees turn pale and dry...
Vysotsky's poems about the Great Patriotic War are a tribute to memory and respect to those who died for our future. But they died not only at the front. During the cruel and dark years of Stalin's personality cult, millions of honest people were shot and sent to prisons and camps. This fate did not escape the participants in the war. The “Great Leader” stated that we have no prisoners, but only traitors. And many former soldiers became “enemies of the people.” Vysotsky openly sympathized with the victims of repression. His poems on this forbidden topic at that time were especially noticeable amid the almost universal silence. In the poem “The Fellow Traveler,” the poet wrote about how they became “enemies of the people.” Two people met on the train and started talking:
My tongue, like a lace, has come untied,
I scolded someone, mourned.
And then they gave me a little business
According to an article of the criminal code.
Calm down - everything will change,
They gave me a deadline and didn’t let me come to my senses.
In “Wolf Hunt” and its sequel, “Hunting from Helicopters,” the author talked about the psychology of people who became guilty without guilt. They understood the horror and unnaturalness of what was happening, but could not rebel:
You lay down on your stomach and removed your fangs,
Even the one, even the one who dived under the flags,
I smelled wolf pits with my paw pads;
The one whom even a bullet couldn’t catch up with, -
He also stood up in fear and lay down - and weakened.
Among Vysotsky’s poems telling about the time of the cult of personality, the poem “Bathhouse in White” occupies a special place. It gives me chills! The plot is simple, but the poet was so able to convey the feelings and thoughts of an innocently convicted person that we feel like participants in the events. Despite the fact that people suddenly became “enemies of the people,” they continued to believe in Stalin:
And then at the quarry, in the swamp,
Having swallowed tears and raw food,
We injected profiles closer to the heart,
So that he can hear hearts beating.
But then there was too much faith and the forest was knocked down. And so, obviously, after Stalin’s death, the former prisoner with a distorted fate increasingly thought that the leader’s profile on his chest was the mark of a criminal on an innocent person.
The poet’s poems about the cruel lessons of history are a poetic requiem to all those innocently convicted and serve as a warning against the danger of repeating “dark times.”
Vysotsky always responded to events taking place in the country. During the difficult years of stagnation, when everything new and progressive was suppressed, every honestly spoken word was persecuted, the poet could not come to terms with the surrounding reality, or withdraw into himself. In the poem “The Old House” he wrote with pain and bitterness:
Who will answer me - what kind of house is this?
Why in the darkness - like a plague barracks?
The light of the lamps went out, the air poured out...
Have you forgotten how to live?
The main character was looking for “the land where there is light,” but there is no hope for change for the better. The dream of some other life seems naive:
We have never heard of such houses,
We got used to living in the dark for a long time.
From time immemorial we are in evil and whispers
Under the icons in black soot.
The poet repeatedly addressed the question of how difficult it is to preserve oneself, to remain honest amid the surrounding atmosphere of lies and hypocrisy. In “The Microphone Song” Vysotsky said bitter but very true words:
Often we are replaced by others,
So that we do not interfere with lies.
The poet would also be the author of many satirical poems. Vysotsky ridiculed bureaucrats, officials, sycophants, and ordinary people. He was a merciless judge of himself, his own weaknesses and mistakes. This is what gave him the moral right to castigate bureaucrats and tribune phrase-mongers, respectable scoundrels and militant ordinary people with the power of satire. Thus, the poem “Save Our Souls” tells about the fate of sailors dying on a submarine. It reflects the state of our society during the period of Brezhnev’s “timelessness”:
Save our souls!
We are delirious from suffocation.
Save our souls!
Hurry to visit us!
Vysotsky loved his homeland with all his heart. He said: “Without Russia I am nothing!” He suffered for his people, was proud of them, experienced all their hardships, shouted in his poems so that he could be heard, in order to reach the hearts and minds of people. After all, the first collection of his poems, which, unfortunately, saw the light after the poet’s death, was called “Nerve.” The poet's truthful works were read voraciously and caused a wide public response. It was something of a feat. Now we are undergoing a process of renewal in our country, and how we miss Vysotsky! There is an opinion that he was good for his time. I think people like him are needed now just as people of high civic courage were then.
In 1985, astronomers at the Crimean Observatory named the newly discovered planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter - Vladivysotsky. In space, among a huge number of planets, a small luminous point wanders, and this ever-living celestial body is associated with the name of the famous poet, singer and actor - Vladimir Vysotsky. So who is he - an actor, a poet or a composer? He himself answered this question in one of his interviews: “I think that the combination of those genres and elements of art that I deal with and try to make a synthesis out of them - maybe this is some kind of new type of art. Maybe all this will be called in the future by one word, but now there is no such word.”
So what are the features of Vysotsky’s lyrics? What are the features of all his work? And his work is interesting and multifaceted. He wrote more than 600 songs and poems, played more than 20 roles on the theater stage, 30 roles in films and television films, and in radio plays. He most often called his genre on the stage an author's song. He wrote his first poem in 1961. Vysotsky began to write his songs only for his friends, so that he could sing in a small courtyard company. That's why the first songs were so street and even a little hooligan. Later he began to write about war and on more philosophical topics.
The poet was asked a lot why he, who had not gone through or seen the war, wrote about it, and wrote as if he himself took part in it. He answered: “...We are children of the war years - for us this will not be forgotten at all. One person aptly remarked that we “fight before the war” in our songs. We all have a bad conscience because we did not take part in this. I pay tribute to this time with my songs. It is an honorable task to write about people who fought”:
I will not leave this heavenly square.
Numbers are not important to me now, -
Today my friend protects my back
This means the chances are equal.
("The Pilot's Song")
These are not retrospective songs: they were written by a man who did not go through the war. These are association songs. If you think about them and listen carefully, you will see that they can be sung now: the characters and situations are simply taken from those times, but all this could happen here, today. And these songs were written for people, most of whom also did not participate in these events. But, according to M. Kulchitsky:
War is not fireworks at all,
It's just hard work
When black with sweat, up
Infantry slides through the plowing.
These songs are written on war material with an eye on the past, but it is not at all necessary that the conversation in them is purely about the war... He also wrote many songs about the war for cinema. Vysotsky himself acted in films, but admittedly his fate as a film actor did not work out. Cinematography did not use all its possibilities. Half of the roles played are episodic. He truly revealed himself only at concerts, where he always worked at full capacity. Every concert is like the last. While performing songs, he could be so thunderous, so stormy and raging that people sitting in the hall had to close their eyes and pull their heads into their shoulders, as if from a strong wind. And it seemed: another second, and the ceiling would collapse, and the speakers would explode, the strings would burst, unable to withstand the tension, and Vysotsky himself would fall, suffocate, die right on stage... It seemed: it was impossible to sing at such a nervous intensity, it was impossible to breathe! And he sang. He was breathing. But his next song could be stunningly quiet. And this made her sink into her soul even more. Vysotsky, who had just seemed like a pulsating bundle of nerves, suddenly became the embodiment of sublime calm, became a man who had comprehended all the secrets of existence. And every word sounded specially reverent. Vysotsky paid a lot of attention to the sports theme. He wanted to create a whole program where there would be a song about each sport. This, of course, is an enormous task, since there are a lot of sports. However, he worked hard and wrote something. For example, the song “Professionals,” which he wrote after the USSR-Canada hockey game, when Soviet hockey players became world champions for the fifth time. The game was difficult, and our fans feared that Canadian professionals, skilled in power techniques, would be able to win, but everything turned out differently:
...To professionals, desperate little ones,
A lottery game - whoever is lucky.
They play with a partner like a bull with a matador -
Although it seems to be the other way around.
He has a “Song about a short-distance skater who was forced to run a long distance (And he really didn’t want to)” or also a humorous song - “Song about a sentimental boxer.” And the famous “Morning Gymnastics”, such an anti-alcohol joke song, like a parody of some gymnastics exercises:
Inhale deeply, arms wider,
Don't rush - three, four! -
Cheerfulness, grace and plasticity!
General strengthening,
Sobering in the morning,
If you are still alive, do gymnastics.
“A Song about a Long Jumper” is dedicated to Vladimir’s friend, the famous long jumper G. Klimov. He has a misfortune: he constantly steps over the board from which he pushes off, and his records do not count:
What happened, why are they screaming?
Why did my coach call?
Just eight forty result,
True, he crossed the line.
“Song about a weightlifter” is dedicated to Vasily Alekseev, the strongest man in the world:
...But marked by the grace of a mustang,
I am constrained and not quick in my movements.
Barbell, overloaded barbell, -
My eternal rival and partner.
He also has a poem about chess:
...Move after me - what to do? It is necessary, Seva, -
At random, like at night in the taiga...
I remember - the queen is most important:
Walks back and forth and left and right, -
Well, the horses seem to be shaped like the letter “G”.
Many of Vysotsky’s songs are dedicated to climbers. “Mountaineering is not a sport, but even if it is a sport, competitions are inappropriate here - they will not lead to anything good,” Vysotsky said this phrase in one of his interviews. The poet wrote songs, as if immersed in the atmosphere of what he was writing about. The same thing happened on the set of the film “Vertical”. He and the film crew came to the mountains, and they simply captivated him with their beauty:
...Only mountains can be better than mountains,
Which I haven't been to yet.
He met a lot of smart, good people there, and people in the mountains behave completely differently than in an ordinary city environment. They open up in a completely different way. The fact is that the situation during the ascent is close to military, and therefore people behave as if in battle:
This is not a plain for you, here the climate is different, -
Avalanches are coming one after another!
You rarely see this anywhere else. Vysotsky himself said: “I was once invited to speak by climbers, I came to them, they had long wanted to listen to me, but then it suddenly turned out that some group had suffered an accident. All of them, as one, were blown away by the wind, they left at night, in bad weather, on a route to save people. Why do people go up? Probably to check, to see what kind of person you are, to understand better the people who are with you. Because in the mountains there are no police, no ambulances that could save or help you out":
In the mountains, neither stone, nor ice, nor rock is reliable, -
We only hope for strong hands,
On the hands of a friend and a driven hook, -
And we pray that the insurance doesn’t let us down.
He did not sing songs about the sea, about the storm, about sailors so often, but he had a lot of them. He was fascinated by the mutual assistance of the sea, and he reflected this in the songs “Man Overboard” and “Save Our Souls”:
There was a storm - the ropes tore the skin from my hands,
And the anchor chain screamed like hell,
The wind sang a rough song - and suddenly
A voice rang out: “Man overboard!..”
Among his friends were many sailors, and he often sang to them in the wardrooms. Vysotsky’s sea songs are a special category of soulful songs:
Only once again do the eyes turn back -
The earth holds tenaciously, everything is both wrong and wrong.
Why do the alignments take too long to converge?
Why does the beacon blink too often?!
Vladi Vysotsky met Marina in 1967, and only in 1980 they got married. But it was a difficult alliance. Vysotsky still has children from his first marriage, and so does Marina. The situation was further complicated by the fact that M. Vladi lived and worked in Paris. Only the phone connected them both. He called Paris at any time of the day or night, sang songs he had just written into the phone, and declared his love. It’s a pity that the connection could have been interrupted in the most intimate place; it got on both of their nerves. An incredibly complex tangle of feelings arose. This is stated in the song address to the telephone operator of the international station 07. In this monologue, all of Vladimir Vysotsky, with his dazzling passion, with an unbridled desire to love now, and not someday in the future:
For me this night is outlawed.
I write - at night there are more topics.
I grab the phone dial
I'm dialing the eternal 07. -
Girl, hello!
What is your name? Tom.
Seventy-second! I am waiting! Hold your breath!
It can’t be, repeat, I’m sure - at home!
Here! Already answered! Well, hello, it's me.
When they did manage to meet, they were simply happy:
I have never seen another hand like this
Which would caress me so much...
Great love inspired Vysotsky to create lyrical musical and poetic works that were unique in spirit and character, which enriched his songwriting with their melodies, content, and form:
A crystal house on the mountain for her.
He himself, like a dog, grew up in chains.
My silver springs,
My gold placers.
Love inspired Vysotsky, and he dedicated more and more poems to her:
What day of the week, what time?
You will come to me carefully...
When I carry you in my arms
Where it is impossible to find...
The poet did not like to advertise his personal life, and therefore he spoke little about it, but various newspaper scribblers and other “readers” of his work supplemented this deficiency with their conjectures. And he answered them:
...I don’t like it when they get into my soul,
Especially when they spit on her.
Crowds of fans, who saw him only as an idol and not as a creator, constantly pestered him with stupid questions about his personal life. To avoid any confusion, Vysotsky wrote a song that answered many questions from the curious:
I will cover all the questions in full,
I'll satisfy my curiosity.
Yes! I have a French wife
But she is of Russian origin.
No! I don't have any lovers now.
Will there be? I don't intend to yet.
I haven't drunk for about two years.
Will I drink again? I don't know, I'm not sure.
We will miss Vladimir Vysotsky for a long time - his talented appearances on the Taganka stage and his heroes that he created, his funny, sad, mischievous and irreconcilable songs, his confidential hoarse voice... In his poems and songs, the poet managed to convey the mindset and image of the Russian people. He expressed some kind of daring, despair, the confusion of the life of his people and at the same time its breadth. All this together, this poetic and at the same time mocking and wise attitude towards life made his songs very vital. In October 1985, a monument to Vysotsky was unveiled at his grave. The poet is cast in bronze to his full height, as if he is trying to break out of the fetters that bind him. There is a guitar on it. Behind are two beautiful horse heads that remind of his best song:
...A little slower, horses, a little slower!
You tight don't listen to the whip!
But somehow the horses I came across were picky,
And I didn’t have time to live, I didn’t have time to finish singing...
“Even during his lifetime, Vysotsky was truly legendary and urgently needed, like air, by the crowds of people who flocked to listen to him... Vysotsky sang every time to the whole country: he knew that every word, every intonation was caught on the fly and instantly reproduced on tape tapes. At the moment of performance, Vysotsky sent the song into the vast world. This simplest circumstance radically changed both the song itself and the nature of the singing. The song took on the power of an alarm bell and the crushing power of an explosion. Okudzhava worries to the core. Vysotsky shakes the soul... Both of them have accompanied the spiritual life of our society for decades and helped us understand ourselves,” noted K. Rudnitsky.
Vysotsky wrote his first song “Tattoo” in 1961. In the first half of the 60s, he began performing his songs, accompanying himself on the guitar, in friendly companies, and somewhat later - at public evenings and concerts. Thanks to tape recordings, Vysotsky’s circle of listeners rapidly expanded, and in a short time he gained nationwide popularity. According to I. Brodsky, “he was an incredibly talented person, incredibly gifted, an absolutely wonderful poet-creator. His rhymes are absolutely phenomenal. On the one hand, his tragedy, on the other hand, his luck is that he chose the career of a bard, chan sonnier...” Material from the site
Vysotsky’s work is a significant and unusual event in the history of Russian literature. It was brought to life by both socio-spiritual and intraliterary factors. Vysotsky enriched poetry with elements of lively colloquial speech, colorful characters, sharp plots and novelistic storytelling. The widest popularity of his texts was accompanied by an unspoken ban on their publication (out of eight hundred poems, five or six poems were published). This determined the deep drama of Vysotsky’s fate as a writer, who considered poetic texts the dominant feature of his songwriting, and also tried his hand at prose (the story “Life Without Sleep,” the unfinished “Novel about Girls,” film scripts).
Vysotsky Vladimir Semyonovich (1938, Moscow - 1980), Russian poet, artist. In Vysotsky’s works, social protest against injustice was clearly felt; he was deeply concerned about the restriction of creative freedom in a totalitarian society. For a long time, his poems and songs could not reach the audience through the cordons of bans and censorship corrections. This explains the fact that during Vysotsky’s lifetime his works were not published. It was only in 1981 that his first poetry collection, “Nerve,” was released. However, Vysotsky’s work was widely known from tape recordings from concerts
Vysotsky is known primarily as a poet-bard. However, his activities in the field of art are not limited to poetry. Vysotsky worked in the theater, acted in films, for many films (“I come from childhood” (1966), “Vertical” (1967), “Master of the Taiga” (1968), “Intervention” (1968, restored in 1987), “ Dangerous Tours" (1969), "Ivan da Marya" (1974), "Once Alone" (1974)) wrote songs.
In parallel with his work in theater and cinema, often in direct connection with it, V. Vysotsky brightly reveals his poetic talent, creates numerous poems and songs that have become widely known, meeting the spiritual needs of people and the needs of the time.
About the birth of a new one genre of "art song"", the originality of this artistic phenomenon in Vysotsky is evidenced by his own words, as well as the statements and characteristics of his contemporaries. In his speeches, Vysotsky repeatedly emphasized the difference between an author’s song and a pop song, and on the other hand, from an “amateur” song, believing that the former is always based on his own, original poetic creativity, inseparable from a purely individual, author’s, “live” performance that reveals the subtlest semantic and musical-rhythmic shades of poetry.
In 1980, at one of the concerts, he said: “... when I heard the songs of Bulat Okudzhava, I saw that my poems could be enhanced with music, melody, rhythm. So I also began to compose music for my poems.” As for the specifics of V. Vysotsky’s song creativity, then, according to the correct remark of R. Rozhdestvensky, he created “songs-roles”, organically getting used to the images of the characters - the heroes of his poems. Perhaps one of the most successful definitions of this specificity comes from the pen of the Taganka Theater actress Alla Demidova: “Every song of his is one-man show, where Vysotsky was both a playwright, a director, and a performer" And - we must certainly add: first of all - this is a poet m.
He was able to create bright, colorful artistic images, typical characters of his contemporaries, and rose to a deep psychological perception of human nature. The heroes of Vysotsky’s songs are people from various social strata. These include front-line soldiers, criminals, and ordinary people. The poet’s artistic images, through which the conversation was conducted with the listener, were so visible and expressive that he often received letters where people asked what regiment he served in and what prison he was in, although in real life the poet was never convicted, and during the war I was still a child.
Due to the fact that in the poet’s work ironic, humorous songs coexist with serious lyrical monologues, the genre palette of his works is quite wide. However, Vysotsky gravitates towards the ballad, a genre that successfully combines a lyrical beginning with a detailed epic plot. In the autobiographical “Ballad of Childhood” (1975), the poet recreates easily recognizable realities of the war and post-war era: the corridor system of Moscow communal apartments, air raid warning, the long-awaited victory and, finally, the metro construction as a symbol of social change. The society, wounded by numerous denunciations and repressions, needed not only material progressive changes, but also a change in the ideological climate. The victorious people no longer wanted and could not be prisoners in their own country. A single lyrical hero - a strong, strong-willed person with clear moral guidelines, for whom the world is divided into black and white, without halftones - is connected by a cycle of ballads written for the film "Robin Hood's Arrows" (1975). One feels that the author was close to this image of a noble robber, somewhat cruel, but also a generous hero. The main idea of the cycle is the affirmation of universal human values, unchanged at all times. The specific historical principle in ballads is combined with the universal:
After the poet’s death, publications of his works began to appear one after another in periodicals, and then individual books: “Nerve” (two editions: 1981 and 1982), “Fasicky Horses” (1987), “Favorites” (1988), “ Four quarters of the way" (1988), "Poetry and prose" (1989), "Works in 2 volumes." (from 1990 to 1994 there were seven editions) and a number of others. In 1993, “Collected Works in 5 volumes” began to be published.
Vysotsky did not like it when his early songs were talked about as about thieves, courtyards; he preferred to associate them with the tradition of urban romance. His choice at an early stage of this particular form and genre seems not at all accidental, but completely natural and meaningful. Here are his words: “I started with songs that many for some reason called courtyard songs, street songs. It was such a tribute to urban romance, which was completely forgotten at that time. And people probably had a craving for such a simple, normal conversation in a song, a craving for not simplified, but rather simple human intonation. They were simple-minded, these first songs, and there was one, but fiery passion in them: man’s eternal desire for truth, love for his friends, woman, close people.” Of course, in these songs there are elements of stylization, especially noticeable in the recreation of street flavor, and in other cases - the melodies of urban or gypsy romance. But the main thing in them is the appeal to a living, unemasculated word, taken from life, from colloquial speech. An essential quality of Vysotsky’s style, already at an early stage, was immersion in the folk (everyday and folklore) element of speech, its creative processing, and fluency in it.
It was this quality that gave him the opportunity already in the first half of the 60s, especially closer to the middle, to create such wonderful examples of his song creativity as “Silver Strings”, “On Bolshoy Karetny”, “Penal Battalions”, “Mass Graves” " Actually, the last two songs already seem to open the next big and important period in the poet’s creative evolution.
In the mid and second half of the 60s, the themes of Vysotsky’s poems and songs were noticeably expanded and the genres of Vysotsky’s poems and songs diversified. Following the songs of the military cycle, which included “Song about the Hospital”, “Everyone Gone to the Front”, “sports” appear (“Song about a sentimental boxer”, “Song about a short-distance skater who was forced to run a long distance”), “ cosmic" (“In the distant constellation Tau Ceti”), “climbing” (“Song about a friend”, “This is not a plain for you”, “Farewell to the mountains”), “farewell” (“About a wild boar”, “Fairy-tale song about evil spirits"), "sea" ("Ships stand still - and go on course...", "Sail. Song of Anxiety"), parody-satirical ("Song about the prophetic Oleg", "Lukomorye is no more. Anti-fairy tale"), lyrical (“Crystal House...”) and many, many others.
The end of the 60s turned out to be especially fruitful for Vysotsky. It was then that he wrote magnificent songs, created at the limit of emotion and expressiveness, “Save our souls”, “My Gypsy” (“Yellow lights in my dreams...”), “Bathhouse in White”, “Wolf Hunt”, “Song of the Earth”, “Sons Go to Battle”, “Man Overboard”. Regarding “Bathhouse...” and “Wolf Hunt”, in which, in the words of L. Abramova, one senses “going beyond limits” and, perhaps, breakthroughs into genius, it should be added that they were written in 1968, during the filming of the film “Master of the Taiga”, on the Yenisei, in the village of Vyezhy Log, and it was no coincidence that V. Zolotukhin called this period “Boldino autumn” by V. Vysotsky.
In the 70s, Vysotsky’s songwriting developed in breadth and depth. Enriched with ever new signs of living life, strokes and dashes of characters and situations drawn directly from it, without losing soulful lyricism, it acquires the quality of in-depth philosophy, reflection on the main questions of existence.
In very different poems written at the very beginning of the decade (“I am no more - I left the Race...”, “The Pacer’s Run”, “On Fatal Dates and Figures”), one’s own fate and creativity, the fate of the great predecessors and contemporary poets are comprehended. And in the late 70s (“Paradise Apples”, 1978) and in the first half of 1980, including in the very last poems - “And there is ice below and above - I toil between...”, “My sadness, my melancholy” ( author's phonogram July 14, 1980), - the poet turns to thinking about the tragic destinies of the people and once again about himself, with good reason coming to the conclusion: “I have something to sing, appearing before the Almighty, / I have something to justify myself to him "
But, undoubtedly, the brightest rise in the last decade of Vysotsky’s creative activity occurred in 1972 - 1975. It was then that he wrote the tragic ballad songs “Finicky Horses”, “Tightrope”, “We Rotate the Earth”, “The One Who Didn’t Shoot”, satirical sketches “Police Protocol”, “Victim of Television”, “Comrade Scientists”, genre pictures “Dialogue at the TV”, “Bridesmaids”, autobiographical “Ballad of Childhood”, lyrical and philosophical “Song of Time”, “Ballad of Love”, “Domes”, “Two Fates”, etc.
In addition to the military, or, perhaps more precisely, anti-war theme, the theme of the Motherland-Russia, taken in its present day and distant historical past, occupies an important place in the poet’s work. Russian, Russian motifs and images are pervasive in Vysotsky’s works, but there are some among them where they are expressed with particular clarity.
As for love lyrics, Vysotsky owns magnificent examples of it, created at different stages of his creative path and in a variety of forms. Suffice it to name “The Crystal House” (1967), “Song of Two Beautiful Cars” (1968), “Here the paws of the fir trees are shaking in the air...” (1970), “I Love you now...” (1973), etc. .
Responding in his songs to today's events, the poet saw and comprehended them on a large scale, historically and even cosmically: Earth and sky, natural elements, time, eternity, the universe - live in his poems, the present day is inseparable in them from history, the momentary - from the eternal . Hence the spatio-temporal openness, breadth and scale of his poetic world.
Vysotsky’s archive also preserves a number of works in various genres, in particular, the unfinished children’s comic poem “...about Vitka Korablev and bosom friend Vanya Dykhovichny” (1970–1971), the story “Life without sleep (Dolphins and Crazies)” ( 1968), the script “Somehow It All Turned Out...” (1969-1970) and also the unfinished “Novel about Girls,” which he worked on in the late 70s. All these experiences testify to the rich and not fully revealed creative potential of this multi-talented person.
Speaking about the main themes and motives of Vysotsky’s poems and songs, which has already been discussed in connection with the creative evolution of the poet, it is necessary to once again emphasize the problematic and thematic range of his works, the severity of their formulation of pressing social issues of the day and the problems of the century. In one of his last concert performances in 1980, Vysotsky said: “And the author’s song relies on only one thing - that you are worried, just like me, by some problems, human destinies, that are bothering you and me.” the same thoughts and in the same way some injustices, human grief tear your soul or scratch your nerves” (Living Life. P. 302).
Vysotsky's songs, especially of his mature period, are always distinguished by the depth and originality of their artistic solution to the “eternal” philosophical questions of existence. And here it is not without interest to present the judgment on this matter of three high-class professionals - a poet, a theater worker and a philosopher.
Thus, David Samoilov sees Vysotsky’s creative evolution in the direction of increasing significance and depth of the social and philosophical problems he artistically solves: “In serious conversations about the phenomena and events of life, he developed a position and drew themes for his songs. It was no longer “the people of the Moscow court” that fueled his inspiration, but serious views on the structure of the world.”
Mikhail Ulyanov emphasizes the same dynamics of internal growth: “...only he could put all of himself into a song at such a deadly limit - despite the sometimes unpretentious text, despite the sometimes street melody, Vysotsky’s song became a bitter, deep, philosophical reflection on life. .. In his songs, especially in the last ones, there was not only feeling and passion, but an ardent thought, a thought that comprehended the world, man, their very essence.”
Finally, the testimony of Valentin Tolstoy, who noted the fusion in the poet’s work of everyday life and being, lyricism and philosophy, is characteristic: “Vysotsky speaks of love and hate, of time and struggle, of birth and death, rising in his lyrical outpourings to a philosophical understanding of everyday close, recognizable topics and problems."
Speaking about Vysotsky’s song creativity as a unique artistic, philosophical and poetic system, about the ways of combining individual poems-songs into thematic groups, about the ways of cyclization, we should especially dwell on the poems of the war cycle and the originality of his solution to this topic. Speaking at the evening of February 21, 1980, the poet emphasized: “... I write about the war not in retrospect, but in association. If you listen to them, you will see that they can be sung today, that the people are from those times, the situations are from those times, and in general, the idea, the problem is ours, the present one. And I turn to those times simply because it is interesting to take people who are in the most extreme situation, at the moment of risk, who in the next second can look into the face of death...” (Living Life. P. 304).
The fact that Vysotsky wrote about people in the most extreme situations, looking death in the face, often becoming senseless victims of war, and at the same time especially emphasizing that this is “our, current problem,” says a lot. Obviously, even then, especially at the beginning of 1980, when troops had just been sent into Afghanistan, he acutely felt and foresaw that the war would remain our national tragedy for a long time. In one of the key poems of the war cycle, “He Didn’t Return from the Battle” (1969), the tragic death of one of the countless privates of the Great War is interpreted as an everyday fact that takes on a symbolic meaning. The bitterness of loss, the blood connection between the living and the dead are contrasted here by a picture so serene against the backdrop of the human tragedy of eternal and beautiful nature:
Today spring has escaped, as if from captivity.
By mistake I called out to him:
“Friend, stop smoking!” - and in response - silence...
He didn't return from the battle yesterday.
Our dead will not leave us in trouble,
Our fallen are like sentries...
The sky is reflected in the forest, as in water, -
And the trees are blue.
Nature, and above all the Earth itself, always appears alive and animated in Vysotsky’s poems. In “Song of the Earth” (1969), the title image is revealed as a synonym for the human soul. Hence the personification lines running through the refrain: “... who said that the Earth is dead?
No, she hid for a while...
Who believed that the Earth was burned?
No, she turned black with grief...
The exposed nerves of the Earth
They know unearthly suffering...
After all, the Earth is our soul,
You can’t trample your soul with boots.”
In Vysotsky's poetry, close-ups and general plans are closely interconnected. The cruel truth of the war, the brutal reality of what is depicted (“We use the fallen as cover... With our stomachs - through the mud, breathing in the stench of the swamps...”) are intended to confirm the high measure of the feat of each and every one in the poem “We Rotate the Earth” (1972). In the poems of the war cycle, the poet achieves special capacity and soulful lyricism in creating a poetic image. This is the symbol of the Eternal Flame, coming to life before our eyes and filling with a new object-tangible meaning in the poem “Mass Graves”, which was first heard in the movie “I Come From Childhood” (1966) and with which Vysotsky usually opened his performances and concerts - right up to the very last 1980
And in the Eternal Flame - you see a tank bursting into flames,
Burning Russian huts
Burning Smolensk and the burning Reichstag,
The burning heart of a soldier.
Need to download an essay? Click and save - "Speaking about the main themes and motives of Vysotsky's poems and songs. And the finished essay appeared in my bookmarks.