Mikhail Baryshnikov
Mikhail Baryshnikov in 2007
Born	Mikhail Nikolaevitch Baryshnikov (1948-01-27) January 27, 1948 (age 64) Riga, Latvia
Years active	1968 – present
Partner	Lisa Rinehart

Mikhail Nikolaevich Baryshnikov (Russian: Михаи́л Никола́евич Бары́шников, Latvian: Mihails Barišņikovs) (born January 27, 1948)^[1], nicknamed "Misha", is a Russian American dancer, choreographer, and actor, often cited alongside Vaslav Nijinsky and Rudolf Nureyev as one of the greatest ballet dancers in history. After a promising start in the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, he defected to Canada in 1974 for more opportunities in western dance. After freelancing with many companies, he joined the New York City Ballet as a principal dancer to learn George Balanchine's style of movement. He then danced with the American Ballet Theatre, where he later became artistic director.

Baryshnikov has spearheaded many of his own artistic projects and has been associated in particular with promoting modern dance, premiering dozens of new works, including many of his own. His success as a dramatic actor on stage, cinema and television has helped him become probably the most widely recognized contemporary ballet dancer. In 1977, he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and a Golden Globe nomination for his work as "Yuri Kopeikine" in the film The Turning Point.

Biography[link]

Born to Russian parents in Riga,^[2] now in independent Latvia, Baryshnikov began his ballet studies there in 1960. In 1964, he entered the Vaganova School, in what was then Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). His parents were Alexandra (a dressmaker; maiden name, Kisselov) and Nicholai Baryshnikov (an engineer). Baryshnikov soon won the top prize in the junior division of the Varna International Ballet Competition. He joined the Kirov Ballet and Mariinsky Theater in 1967, dancing the “Peasant” pas de deux in Giselle. Recognizing Baryshnikov's talent, in particular the strength of his stage presence and purity of his classical technique, several Soviet choreographers, including Oleg Vinogradov, Konstantin Sergeyev, Igor Tchernichov, and Leonid Jakobson, choreographed ballets for him. Baryshnikov made signature roles of Jakobson's 1969 virtuosic Vestris along with an intensely emotional Albrecht in Giselle.^[3] While still in the Soviet Union, he was called by New York Times critic Clive Barnes "the most perfect dancer I have ever seen."

On June 29, 1974, while on tour in Canada with the Bolshoi Ballet, Baryshnikov defected, requesting political asylum in Toronto, and joined the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.^[4][5] He also announced to the dance world he would not go back to the U.S.S.R. He later stated that Christina Berlin, an American friend of his, helped engineer his defection during his 1970 tour of London. His first televised performance after coming out of temporary seclusion in Canada was with the National Ballet of Canada in La Sylphide. He then went on to the United States.^[6]

From 1974 to 1978, he was principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre (ABT), where he partnered with Gelsey Kirkland. He also worked with the New York City Ballet, with George Balanchine and as a regular guest artist with the Royal Ballet. He also toured with ballet and modern dance companies around the world for fifteen months. Several roles were created for him, including roles Opus 19: The Dreamer (1979), by Jerome Robbins, Rhapsody (1980), by Frederick Ashton, and Other Dances with Natalia Makarova by Jerome Robbins. He returned to ABT in 1980 as dancer and artistic director, a position he held for a decade. On July 3, 1986, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. From 1990 to 2002, Baryshnikov was artistic director of the White Oak Dance Project, a touring company he co-founded with Mark Morris. In 2003, he won the Prix Benois de la Danse for lifetime achievement. In 2005 he launched the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York.

Artistic career[link]

Dance[link]

Baryshnikov's talent was obvious from his youth, but the Soviet system in which he grew up was ill-suited for developing it. Shorter than most dancers, he could not tower over a ballerina en pointe and was therefore relegated to secondary parts. More frustrating to him, the Soviet dance world hewed closely to 19th-century traditions and deliberately shunned the creative choreographers of the West, whose work Baryshnikov glimpsed in occasional tours and films. His main goal in leaving the Soviet Union was to work with these innovators; in the first two years after his defection, he danced for no fewer than 13 different choreographers, including Jerome Robbins, Glen Tetley, Alvin Ailey, and Twyla Tharp. "It doesn't matter if every ballet is a success or not," he told New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff in 1976, "The new experience gives me a lot." He cited his fascination with the ways Ailey mixed classical and modern technique and his initial discomfort when Tharp insisted he incorporate eccentric personal gestures in the dance.

In 1978, he abandoned his freelance career to spend 18 months as a principal of the New York City Ballet, run by the legendary George Balanchine. "Mr. B," as he was known, rarely welcomed guest artists and had refused to work with both Nureyev and Makarova; Baryshnikov's decision to devote his full attentions to the New York company stunned the dance world. Balanchine never created a new work for Baryshnikov, though he did coach the young dancer in his distinctive style, and Baryshnikov triumphed in such signature roles as Apollo, Prodigal Son, and Rubies. Robbins did, however, create Opus 19: The Dreamer for Baryshnikov and NYCB favorite Patricia McBride.^[7][8] In 1980, he became Artistic Director of American Ballet Theatre and his role changed from performer to director.

Nevertheless, his fascination with the new has stood him in good stead. As he observed, "It doesn't matter how high you lift your leg. The technique is about transparency, simplicity and making an earnest attempt.”^[9] The White Oak Project was formed to create original work for older dancers. In a run ending just short of his 60th birthday in 2007, he appeared in a production of four short plays by Samuel Beckett staged by avant-garde director JoAnne Akalaitis.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999.^[10] In 2000, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.^[11] He has received three Honorary Degrees: on May 11, 2006, from New York University; on September 28, 2007, from Shenandoah Conservatory of Shenandoah University; and on May 23, 2008, from Montclair State University.

For the duration of the 2006 Summer, he went on tour with Hell's Kitchen Dance, which was sponsored by the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Featuring works by Baryshnikov Arts Center residents Azsure Barton and Benjamin Millepied, the company toured the United States and Spain.

In late August 2007 Baryshnikov performed Mats Ek's Place (original Swedish title, Ställe) with Ana Laguna at Dansens Hus in Stockholm. He has been quoted as saying "dancing is living".^{[citation needed]}

Film and television[link]

Baryshnikov made his American television dancing debut in 1976, on the PBS program In Performance Live from Wolf Trap. During the Christmas season of 1977, CBS brought his highly acclaimed American Ballet Theatre production of Tchaikovsky's classic ballet The Nutcracker to television, and it has remained to this day the most popular and most often shown television production of the work, at least in the U.S. In addition to Baryshnikov in the title role, Gelsey Kirkland, Alexander Minz, and many members of the American Ballet Theatre also starred. The production was videotaped in Canada. After being shown a few times by CBS, it moved to PBS, where it was shown annually every Christmas season for many years, and still is by some PBS stations. It was first released on DVD by MGM/UA.^[12] The remastered DVD of the performance, issued by Kultur Video in 2004,^[13] is a bestseller during the Christmas season. The DVD has now been released in the UK by Digital Classics.^[14]

Although Tchaikovsky's ballet has been presented on TV many times in many different versions, the Baryshnikov version is one of only two to be nominated for an Emmy Award. The other one was Mark Morris' "The Hard Nut", Morris's intentionally exaggerated and satirical version of the ballet.

Baryshnikov also performed in two Emmy-winning television specials, one on ABC and one on CBS, in which he danced to music from Broadway and Hollywood, respectively. During the 1970s and 1980s, he appeared many times with American Ballet Theatre on Live from Lincoln Center and Great Performances. Over the years, he has also appeared on several telecasts of the Kennedy Center Honors.

Baryshnikov performed in his first film role soon after arriving in New York. He portrayed the character Yuri Kopeikine, a famous Russian womanizing ballet dancer, in the 1977 film, The Turning Point, for which he received an Oscar nomination. He co-starred with Gregory Hines and Isabella Rossellini in the 1985 film, White Nights, choreographed by Twyla Tharp; and he was featured in the 1987 film, Dancers. On television, in the last season of Sex and the City, he played a Russian artist, Aleksandr Petrovsky, who woos Carrie Bradshaw relentlessly and takes her to Paris. He co-starred in Company Business (1991) with Gene Hackman.

On November 2, 2006, Baryshnikov and chef Alice Waters were featured on an episode of the Sundance Channel's original series Iconoclasts. The two have a long friendship. They discussed their lifestyles, sources of inspiration, and social projects that make them unique. During the program, Alice Waters visited Baryshnikov's Arts Center in New York City. The Hell's Kitchen Dance tour brought him to Berkeley to visit Alice Waters' restaurant Chez Panisse.

On July 17, 2007, the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer featured a profile of Baryshnikov and his Arts Center.

Stage[link]

On April 11–21, 2012, Baryshnikov will star in a new play directed by Dmitry Krymov, titled In Paris. The play will be presented in the Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center, at the Broad Stage. His costar will be Anna Sinyakina.

Family[link]

Baryshnikov has a daughter, Aleksandra Baryshnikova (born 1981), from his relationship with actress Jessica Lange. When Baryshnikov and Lange met, he spoke very little English. They communicated in French instead.^{[citation needed]}

Baryshnikov is in a long-term relationship with former ballerina Lisa Rinehart. They have had three children together: Peter (born July 7, 1989), Anna (born May 22, 1992), and Sofia (born May 24, 1994). In an interview with Larry King, Baryshnikov said that he did not believe in marriage because the commitment that people make to each other did not have anything to do with a legal marriage. He stated that he was not religious, so standing in front of an altar would not mean anything to him.^[15]

Despite the above, in an article in The Wall Street Journal for February 25, 2012 (page D3), based on an interview conducted on his 64th birthday, Baryshnikov refers several times to his "wife".

Baryshnikov currently owns a home at the Punta Cana Resort and Club in the Dominican Republic.

See also[link]

• List of Russian ballet dancers
• List of Eastern Bloc defectors

References[link]

External links[link]

• Mikhail Baryshnikov at the Internet Movie Database
• Mikhail Baryshnikov at AllRovi
• Mikhail Baryshnikov Biography (1948-)
• Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th Street, NYC
• Baryshnikov Dance Foundation
• Kennedy Center Honors biography as of 2000
• Information community LJ devoted to Mikhail Baryshnikov
• Mikhail Baryshnikov entry in the Concise Encyclopædia Britannica
• Mikhail Baryshnikov entry in the Columbia Encyclopedia
• Sunday NY Times article by Anna Kisselgoff, October 28, 1979
• Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna to Perform in Israel (June 2010)
• Archival footage of Mikhail Baryshnikov performing Chacony in 2002 at Jacob's Pillow

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Don Quixote
Title page of first edition (1605)
Author(s)	Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Original title	El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote De la Mancha
Country	Spain
Language	Spanish
Genre(s)	Picaresco, satire, parody, farce
Publisher	Juan de la Cuesta
Publication date	1605 (Part One) 1615 (Part Two)
Published in English	1612 (Part One) 1620 (Part Two)
Media type	Print
Dewey Decimal	863
LC Classification	PQ6323

Don Quixote ( /ˌdɒn kiːˈhoʊtiː/; Spanish: [ˈdoŋ kiˈxote] ( listen)), fully titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (Spanish: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha), is a novel written by Miguel de Cervantes. The novel follows the adventures of Alonso Quijano, who reads too many chivalric novels, and sets out to revive chivalry under the name of Don Quixote. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who frequently deals with Don Quixote's rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood with a unique Earthy wit. He is met by the world as it is, initiating themes like Intertextuality, Realism, Metatheatre and Literary Representation.

Published in two volumes a decade apart, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published. In one such list, Don Quixote was cited as the "best literary work ever written".

Plot[link]

Part 1[link]

The First Sally

Alonso Quijano, the protagonist of the novel, is a retired directioner nearing fifty years of age, living in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and housekeeper. While mostly a rational man of sound reason, his reading of books of chivalry in excess has had a profound effect on him, leading to the distortion of his perception and the wavering of his mental faculties. In essence, he believes every word of these books of chivalry to be true though, for the most part, the content of these books is clearly fiction. Otherwise, his wits, in regards to everything other than chivalry, are intact. He decides to go out as a knight-errant in search of adventure. He dons an old suit of armour, renames himself "Don Quixote de la Mancha," and names his skinny horse "Rocinante". He designates a neighboring farm girl as his lady love, renaming her Dulcinea del Toboso, while she knows nothing about this.

He sets out in the early morning and ends up at an inn, which he believes to be a castle. He asks the innkeeper, whom he thinks to be the lord of the castle, to dub him a knight. He spends the night holding vigil over his armor, where he becomes involved in a fight with muleteers who try to remove his armor from the horse trough so that they can water their mules. The innkeeper then dubs him a knight to be rid of him, and sends him on his way. Don Quixote next "frees" a young boy who is tied to a tree and beaten by his master by making his master swear on the chivalric code treat the boy fairly. The boy's beating is continued as soon as Quixote leaves. Don Quixote has a run-in with traders from Toledo, who "insult" the imaginary Dulcinea, one of whom severely beats Don Quixote and leaves him on the side of the road. Don Quixote is found and returned to his home by a neighboring peasant.

The Second Sally

While Don Quixote is unconscious in his bed, his niece, the housekeeper, the parish curate, and the local barber secretly burn most of the books of chivalry, and seal up his library pretending that a magician has carried it off. After a short period of feigning health, Don Quixote approaches his neighbor, Sancho Panza, and asks him to be his squire, promising him governorship of an island. The uneducated Sancho agrees, and the pair sneak off in the early dawn. It is here that their series of famous adventures begin, starting with Don Quixote's attack on windmills that he believes to be ferocious giants. The two next encounter a group of friars accompanying a lady in a carriage. They are heavily cloaked, as is the lady, to protect themselves from the hot climate and dust on the road. Don Quixote takes the friars to be enchanters who hold the lady captive. He knocks a friar from his horse, and is immediately challenged by an armed Basque travelling with the company. As he has no shield, the Basque uses a pillow to protect himself, which saves him when Don Quixote strikes him. The combat ends with the lady leaving her carriage and demanding those travel with her to "surrender".

The Pastoral Wanderings

Sancho and Don Quixote go on, and fall in with a group of goatherds. Don Quixote tells Sancho and the goatherds about the "Golden Age" of man, reminiscent of both Ovid and the later Rousseau in which property does not exist, and men live in peace. The goatherds invite the Knight and Sancho to the funeral of Grisóstomo, once a student who left his studies to become a shepherd after reading Pastoral novels, seeking the shepherdess Marcela. At the funeral Marcela appears, delivering a long speech vindicating herself from the bitter verses written about her by Grisóstomo, claiming her own autonomy and freedom from expectations put on her by Pastoral clichés. She disappears into the woods, and Don Quixote and Sancho follow. Ultimately giving up, the two stop and dismount by a pond to rest. Some Galicians arrive to water their ponies, and Rocinante attempts to mate with them. The Galicians hit Rocinante with clubs to dissuade him, which Don Quixote takes as a threat and runs to defend Rocinante. The Galicians beat Don Quixote and Sancho leaving them in great pain.

The Adventures with Cardenio and Dorotea

After leaving the prisoners, The Knight and Sancho wander into the Sierra Morena, and there encounter the dejected Cardenio. Cardenio relates the first part of his story, in which he falls deeply in love with his childhood friend Luscinda, and is hired as the companion to the Duke's son, leading to his friendship with the Duke's younger son, Don Fernando. Cardenio confides in Don Fernando his love for Luscinda and the delays in their engagement, caused by Cardenio's desire to keep with tradition. After reading Cardenio's poems praising Luscinda, Don Fernando falls in love with her. Don Quixote interrupts when Cardenio suggests that his beloved may have become unfaithful after the formulaic stories of spurned lovers in Chivalric novels.

Don Quixote de la Mancha and Sancho Panza, 1863, by Gustave Doré

In the course of their travels, the protagonists meet innkeepers, prostitutes, goatherds, soldiers, priests, escaped convicts, and scorned lovers. These encounters are magnified by Don Quixote’s imagination into chivalrous quests. Don Quixote’s tendency to intervene violently in matters which do not concern him, and his habit of not paying his debts, result in many privations, injuries, and humiliations (with Sancho often getting the worst of it). Finally, Don Quixote is persuaded to return to his home village. The author hints that there was a third quest, but says that records of it have been lost.

Part 2[link]

The Third Sally

Although the two parts are now normally published as a single work, Don Quixote, Part Two was a sequel published ten years after the original novel. While Part One was mostly farcical, the second half is more serious and philosophical about the theme of deception.

As Part Two begins, it is assumed that the literate classes of Spain have all read the first part of the history of Don Quixote and his squire. When they encounter the duo in person, a Duke and Duchess, and others, deceive Don Quixote for entertainment, setting forth a string of imagined adventures resulting in a series of practical jokes that put Don Quixote's sense of chivalry and his devotion to Dulcinea through many tests.

Even Sancho deceives him at one point. Pressured into finding Dulcinea, Sancho brings back three dirty and ragged peasant girls, and tells Don Quixote that they are Dulcinea and her ladies-in-waiting. When Don Quixote only sees the peasant girls, Sancho pretends that their derelict appearance results from an enchantment. Sancho later gets his comeuppance for this when, as part of one of the duke and duchess's pranks, the two are led to believe that the only method to release Dulcinea from her spell is for Sancho to give himself a surplus of three thousand lashes. Sancho naturally resists this course of action, leading to friction with his master. Under the duke's patronage, Sancho eventually gets a governorship, though it be false, and proves to be a wise and practical ruler; though this, too, ends in humiliation.

Near the end, Don Quixote reluctantly sways towards sanity: an inn is just an inn, not a castle.

The lengthy untold "history" of Don Quixote's adventures in knight-errantry comes to a close after his battle with the Knight of the White Moon, in which we the readers find him conquered. Bound by the rules of chivalry, Don Quixote submits to prearranged terms that the vanquished is to obey the will of the conqueror, which in this case, is that Don Quixote is to lay down his arms and cease his acts of chivalry for the period of one year (a duration in which he may be cured of his madness). Defeated and dejected, he and Sancho start their journey home.

Part Two of Don Quixote is often regarded as the birth of modern literature, as it explores the concept of a character understanding that he is being written about. This is a theme much explored in writings of the 20th Century.

Upon returning to his village, Don Quixote announces his plan to retire to the countryside and live the pastoral existence of shepherd, although his housekeeper, who has a more realistic view of the hard life of a shepherd, urges him to stay home and tend to his own affairs. Soon after, he retires to his bed with a deathly illness, possibly brought on by melancholy over his defeats and humiliations. One day, he awakes from a dream having fully recovered his sanity. Sancho tries to restore his faith, but Alonso Quixano, for that is his true name, can only renounce his previous existence and apologize for the harm he has caused. He dictates his will, which includes a provision that his niece will be disinherited if she marries a man who reads books of chivalry. After Alonso Quixano dies, the author emphasizes that there are no more adventures to relate, and that any further books about Don Quixote would be spurious.

Themes[link]

Don Quixote by Honoré Daumier (1868)

The novel's structure is in episodic form. It is written in the picaresco style of the late sixteenth century, and features reference other picaresque novels including Lazarillo de Tormes and The Golden Ass. The full title is indicative of the tale's object, as ingenioso (Spanish) means "quick with inventiveness".^[1] marking the transition of modern literature from Dramatic to thematic unity. The novel takes place over a long period of time, including many adventures all united by common themes of the nature of reality, reading, and dialogue in general.

Although the novel is farcical on the surface, the novel, especially in its second half, is more serious and philosophical about the theme of deception. Quixote has served as an important thematic source not only in literature but in much of art and music, inspiring works by Pablo Picasso and Richard Strauss. The contrasts between the tall, thin, fancy-struck, and idealistic Quixote and the fat, squat, world-weary Panza is a motif echoed ever since the book’s publication, and Don Quixote's imaginings are the butt of outrageous and cruel practical jokes in the novel. Even faithful and simple Sancho is unintentionally forced to deceive him at certain points. The novel is considered a satire of orthodoxy, veracity, and even nationalism. In going beyond mere storytelling to exploring the individualism of his characters, Cervantes helped move beyond the narrow literary conventions of the chivalric romance literature that he spoofed, which consists of straightforward retelling of a series of acts that redound to the knightly virtues of the hero.

From shepherds to tavern-owners and inn-keepers, the characterization in Don Quixote was groundbreaking. The character of Don Quixote became so well known in its time that the word quixotic was quickly adopted by many languages. Characters such as Sancho Panza and Don Quixote’s steed, Rocinante, are emblems of Western literary culture. The phrase "tilting at windmills" to describe an act of attacking imaginary enemies derives from an iconic scene in the book.

It stands in a unique position between medieval chivalric romance and the modern novel. The former consist of disconnected stories featuring the same characters and settings with little exploration of the inner life of even the main character. The latter are usually focused on the psychological evolution of their characters. In Part I, Quixote imposes himself on his environment. By Part II, people know about him through "having read his adventures," and so, he needs to do less to maintain his image. By his deathbed, he has regained his sanity, and is once more "Alonso Quixano the Good".

When it was first published, Don Quixote was usually interpreted as a comic novel. After the French Revolution it was popular in part due to its central ethic that individuals can be right while society is quite wrong and seen as disenchanting—not comic at all. In the 19th century it was seen as a social commentary, but no one could easily tell "whose side Cervantes was on." Many critics came to view the work as a tragedy in which Don Quixote's innate idealism and nobility are viewed by the world as insane, and are defeated and rendered useless by common reality. By the 20th century the novel had come to occupy a canonical space as one of the foundations of modern literature.

Background[link]

Sources[link]

Sources for Don Quixote include the Castillian novel Amadis de Gaula, which had enjoyed great popularity throughout the 16th century. Another prominent source, which Cervantes evidently admires more, is Tirant lo Blanch which the priest describes in Chapter VI of Quixote as "the best book in the world." The scene of the book burning gives us an excellent list of Cervantes's likes and dislikes about literature.

Cervantes makes a number of references to the Italian poem Orlando furioso. In chapter 10 of the first part of the novel, Don Quixote says he must take the magical helmet of Mambrino, an episode from Canto I of Orlando, and itself a reference to Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando innamorato.^[2] The interpolated story in chapter 33 of Part four of the First Part is a retelling of a tale from Canto 43 of Orlando, regarding a man who tests the fidelity of his wife.^[3]

Another important source appears to have been Apuleius's The Golden Ass, one of the earliest known novels, a picaresque from late classical antiquity. The wineskins episode near the end of the interpolated tale "The Curious Impertinent" in chapter 35 of the first part of Don Quixote is a clear reference to Apuleius, and recent scholarship suggests that the moral philosophy and the basic trajectory of Apuleius's novel are fundamental to Cervantes's program.^[4] Similarly, many of both Sancho's adventures in Part II and proverbs throughout are taken from popular Spanish and Italian folklore.

[edit] Spurious Second Part by Avellaneda

It is not certain when Cervantes began writing Part Two of Don Quixote, but he had probably not gotten much further than Chapter LIX by late July 1614. About September, however, a spurious Part Two, entitled Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licenciado (doctorate) Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, of Tordesillas, was published in Tarragona by an unidentified Aragonese who was an admirer of Lope de Vega, rival of Cervantes.^[5] Avellaneda's identity has been the subject of many theories, but there is no consensus as to who he was. In its prologue, the author gratuitously insulted Cervantes, who not surprisingly took offense and responded; the last half of Chapter LIX and most of the following chapters of Cervantes' Segunda Parte lend some insight into the effects upon him; Cervantes manages to work in some subtle digs at Avellaneda's own work, and in his preface to Part II, comes very near to criticizing Avellaneda directly.

In his introduction to The Portable Cervantes, Samuel Putnam, a noted translator of Cervantes' novel, calls Avellaneda's version "one of the most disgraceful performances in history".^[6]

The second part of Cervantes' Don Quixote, finished as a direct result of the Avellaneda book, has come to be regarded by some literary critics ^[7] as superior to the first part, because of its greater depth of characterization, its discussions, mostly between Quixote and Sancho, on diverse subjects, and its philosophical insights.

Other stories[link]

Don Quixote, his horse Rocinante and his squire Sancho Panza after an unsuccessful attack on a windmill. By Gustave Doré

Don Quixote, Part One contains a number of stories which do not directly involve the two main characters, but which are narrated by some of the picaresque figures encountered by the Don and Sancho during their travels. The longest and best known of these is "El Curioso Impertinente" (the impertinently curious man), found in Part One, Book Four. This story, read to a group of travelers at an inn, tells of a Florentine nobleman, Anselmo, who becomes obsessed with testing his wife's fidelity, and talks his close friend Lothario into attempting to seduce her, with disastrous results for all. In Part Two, the author acknowledges the criticism of his digressions in Part One and promises to concentrate the narrative on the central characters (although at one point he laments that his narrative muse has been constrained in this manner). Nevertheless, "Part Two" contains several back narratives related by peripheral characters.

Several abridged editions have been published which delete some or all of the extra tales in order to concentrate on the central narrative.^[8]

Style[link]

Spelling and pronunciation[link]

Cervantes wrote his work in a form of Old Castilian or Ladino, a Sephardic Jewish language derived from Hebrew and Aramaic and that became the medieval form of the Spanish language. The language of Don Quixote, although still containing archaisms, is far more understandable to modern Spanish readers than is, for instance, the completely medieval Spanish of the Poema de mio Cid, a kind of Spanish that is as different from Cervantes's language as Middle English is from Modern English. The Old Castilian language was also used to show the higher class that came with being a knight errant.

In Old Castilian the letter x represented the sound written with sh in modern English, so the name was originally pronounced "ki-SHOT-eh "[kiˈʃote]. However as Old Castilian became modern Spanish, the pronunciation of the sh sound changed, and came to be pronounced with a voiceless velar fricative sound like the Scottish or German ch and today the Spanish pronunciation of "Quixote" is ki-HO-teh [kiˈxote]. The original pronunciation is reflected in languages such as Astur-Leonese, Galician, Catalan, French, Italian and Portuguese that pronounce it with a "sh" or "ch" sound.

Today English speakers generally attempt something close to the modern Spanish pronunciation when saying Quixote (Quijote), as [dɒŋ kiːˈhoʊteɪ], although the traditional English spelling pronunciation pronouncing the name with the value of the letter x in modern English is still sometimes used, resulting in /ˈkwɪksət/ or /ˈkwɪksoʊt/. The traditional English rendering is preserved in the pronunciation of the adjectival form quixotic, i.e., /kwɪkˈsoʊtɨk/ or /kwɪkˈsɒtɪk/, the foolishly impractical pursuit of ideals, typically marked with rash and lofty romantic ideals.^[9]

Setting[link]

Cervantes' story takes place on the plains of La Mancha, specifically the comarca of Campo de Montiel.

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.

—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Volume I, Chapter I

The location of the village to which Cervantes alludes in the opening sentence of Don Quixote has been the subject of debate since its publication over four centuries ago. Indeed, Cervantes deliberately omits the name of the village, giving an explanation in the final chapter:

Such was the end of the Ingenious Gentlemen of La Mancha, whose village Cide Hamete would not indicate precisely, in order to leave all the towns and villages of La Mancha to contend among themselves for the right to adopt him and claim him as a son, as the seven cities of Greece contended for Homer.

—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Volume II, Chapter 74

In 2004, a multidisciplinary team of academics from Complutense University, led by Francisco Parra Luna, Manuel Fernández Nieto and Santiago Petschen Verdaguer, deduced that the village was that of Villanueva de los Infantes.^[10] Their findings were published in a paper titled "'El Quijote' como un sistema de distancias/tiempos: hacia la localización del lugar de la Mancha", which was later published as a book: El enigma resuelto del Quijote. The result was replicated in two subsequent investigations: "La determinación del lugar de la Mancha como problema estadístico" and "The Kinematics of the Quixote and the Identity of the 'Place in La Mancha'".^[11][12]

Language[link]

Because of its widespread influence, Don Quixote also helped cement the modern Spanish language. The opening sentence of the book created a classic Spanish cliché with the phrase "de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme" ("whose name I do not wish to recall"): "En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no hace mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor." ("In a village of La Mancha, whose name I do not wish to recall, there lived, not very long ago, one of those gentlemen with a lance in the lance-rack, an ancient shield, a skinny old horse, and a fast greyhound.")

The novel's farcical elements make use of punning and similar verbal playfulness. Character-naming in Don Quixote makes ample figural use of contradiction, inversion, and irony, such as the names Rocinante^[13] (a reversal) and Dulcinea (an allusion to illusion), and the word quixote itself, possibly a pun on quijada (jaw) but certainly cuixot (Catalan: thighs), a reference to a horse's rump.^[14] As a military term, the word quijote refers to cuisses, part of a full suit of plate armour protecting the thighs. The Spanish suffix -ote denotes the augmentative—for example, grande means large, but grandote means extra large. Following this example, Quixote would suggest 'The Great Quijano', a play on words that makes much sense in light of the character's delusions of grandeur. La Mancha is a region of Spain, but mancha (Spanish word) means spot, mark, stain, region and word are not etymologically related (from Arab origin the former, from Latin macula the latter), so "de La Mancha" (lit. both Stained Quixote and Quixote from La Mancha) is a hilarious name for a spotless knight.

Publication[link]

Bronze statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, at the Plaza de España in Madrid

In July 1604, Cervantes sold the rights of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha (known as Don Quixote, Part I) to the publisher-bookseller Francisco de Robles for an unknown sum. License to publish was granted in September, the printing was finished in December, and the book came out on January 16, 1605.^[15][16] The novel was an immediate success. The majority of the 400 copies of the first edition were sent to the New World, with the publisher hoping to get a better price in the Americas.^[17] Although most of them disappeared in a shipwreck near La Havana, approximately 70 copies reached Lima, from where they were sent to Cuzco in the heart of the defunct Inca Empire.^[17]

No sooner was it in the hands of the public than preparations were made to issue derivative (pirated) editions. "Don Quixote" had been growing in favour, and its author's name was now known beyond the Pyrenees. By August 1605 there were two Madrid editions, two published in Lisbon, and one in Valencia. A second edition was produced with additional copyrights for Aragon and Portugal, which publisher Francisco de Robles secured.^[18] Sale of these publishing rights deprived Cervantes of further financial profit on Part One. In 1607, an edition was printed in Brussels. Robles, the Madrid publisher, found it necessary to meet demand with a third edition, a seventh publication in all, in 1608. Popularity of the book in Italy was such that a Milan bookseller issued an Italian edition in 1610. Yet another Brussels edition was called for in 1611.^[16] In total, the novel is believed to have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.^[19]

In 1613, Cervantes published the Novelas Ejemplares, dedicated to the Maecenas of the day, the Conde de Lemos. Eight and a half years after Part One had appeared, we get the first hint of a forthcoming Segunda Parte (Part Two). "You shall see shortly," Cervantes says, "the further exploits of Don Quixote and humours of Sancho Panza."^[20] Don Quixote, Part Two, published by the same press as its predecessor, appeared late in 1615, and quickly reprinted in Brussels and Valencia (1616) and Lisbon (1617). Part two capitalizes on the potential of the first while developing and diversifying the material without sacrificing familiarity. Many people agree that it is richer and more profound. Parts One and Two were published as one edition in Barcelona in 1617. Historically, Cervantes's work has been said to have “smiled Spain’s chivalry away”, suggesting that Don Quixote as a chivalric satire contributed to the demise of Spanish Chivalry.^[21]

English editions in translation[link]

Don Quixote goes mad from his reading of books of chivalry. Engraving by Gustave Doré.

There are many translations of the book, and it has been adapted many times in shortened versions. Many derivative editions were also being written at the time, as was the custom of envious or unscrupulous writers. Seven years after the Parte Primera appeared, Don Quixote had been translated into French, German, Italian, and English, with the first French translation of 'Part II' appearing in 1618, and the first English translation in 1620. One abridged adaptation is authored by Agustín Sánchez, which runs slightly over 150 pages, cutting away about 750 pages.^{[22][dead link]}

Thomas Shelton's English translation of the First Part appeared in 1612. Shelton is a somewhat elusive figure: some claim Shelton was actually a friend of Cervantes, although there is no credible evidence to support this claim. Although Shelton's version is cherished by some, according to John Ormsby and Samuel Putnam, it was far from satisfactory as a carrying over of Cervantes's text.^[18] Shelton's translation of the novel's Second Part appeared in 1620.

Near the end of the 17th century, John Phillips, a nephew of poet John Milton, published what is considered by Putnam the worst English translated version. The translation, as literary critics claim, was not based on Cervantes' text but mostly upon a French work by Filleau de Saint-Martin and upon notes which Thomas Shelton had written previously. Around 1700, a version by Pierre Antoine Motteux appeared. Ormsby considered this version "worse than worthless". What future translator Samuel Putnam called "the prevailing slapstick quality of this work, especially where Sancho Panza is involved, the obtrusion of the obscene where it is found in the original, and the slurring of difficulties through omissions or expanding upon the text" all made the Motteux version irresponsible. In 1742, the Charles Jervas translation appeared, posthumously. Through a printer's error, it came to be known, and is still known, as "the Jarvis translation". The most scholarly and accurate English translation of the novel up to that time, it has been criticized by some as being too stiff. Nevertheless, it became the most frequently reprinted translation of the novel until about 1885. Another 18th century translation into English was that of Tobias Smollett, himself a novelist. Like the Jarvis translation, it continues to be reprinted today.

Most modern translators take as their model the 1885 translation by John Ormsby. It is said that his translation was the most honest of all translations, without expansions upon the text or changing of the proverbs.

In 1922, Arvid Paulson and Clayton Edwards published a now-forgotten expurgated children's version printed under the title The Story of Don Quixote which has nevertheless recently been published on Project Gutenberg. It retains as much of the text as it could while leaving out the risque sections as well as those chapters that young readers might consider dull, and embellishes a great deal on Cervantes's original text (the title page actually gives credit to the two translators as if they were the authors, and leaves out any mention of Cervantes).^[23]

The most widely read English-language translations of the mid-20th century are by Samuel Putnam (1949), J. M. Cohen (1950; Penguin Classics), and Walter Starkie (1957). The last English translation of the novel in the 20th century was by Burton Raffel, published in 1996. The 21st century has already seen three new translations of the novel into English. The first is by John D. Rutherford and the second by Edith Grossman. Reviewing the novel in the New York Times, Carlos Fuentes called Grossman's translation a "major literary achievement"^[24] and another called it the "most transparent and least impeded among more than a dozen English translations going back to the 17th century."^[25] In 2005, the year of the novel's 400th anniversary, Tom Lathrop published a new English translation of the novel, based on a lifetime of specialized study of the novel and its history.^[26]

See also[link]

	Novels portal
	Spain portal

• Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda – author of a spurious sequel to Don Quixote, which in turn is referenced in the actual sequel
• List of best-selling books
• List of Don Quixote characters
• List of works influenced by Don Quixote – including a gallery of paintings and illustrations
• The 100 Best Books of All Time
• Tirant lo Blanc – one of the chivalric novels frequently referenced by Don Quixote
• Amadis de Gaula – one of the chivalric novels found in the library of Don Quixote
• António José da Silva – writer of Vida do Grande Dom Quixote de la Mancha e do Gordo Sancho Pança (1733)
• Belianis – one of the chivalric novels found in the library of Don Quixote
• coco - In the last chapter, the epitaph of Don Quijote identifies him as el coco

References and sources[link]

Further reading[link]

• Bloom, Harold (Ed.) (2000) Cervantes's Don Quixote (Modern Critical Interpretations). Chelsea House Publishers ISBN 0-7910-5922-7
• D' Haen, Theo (Ed.) (2009) International Don Quixote. Editions Rodopi B.V. ISBN 90-420-2583-2
• Echevarría, Roberto González (Ed.) (2005) Cervantes' Don Quixote: a casebook Oxford University Press USA ISBN 0-19-516938-7
• Duran, Manuel and Rogg, Fay R. (2006) "Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote". Yale University Press ISBN 978-0-300-11022-7
• Johnson, Carroll B (Ed.) (2006) Don Quijote Across Four Centuries: 1605–2005. Juan de la Cuesta-Hispanic Monographs ISBN 1-58871-088-2
• Graf, E. C. (2007) Cervantes and Modernity: Four Essays on Don Quijote. Bucknell University Press ISBN 0-8387-5655-7

External links[link]

Find more about Don Quixote on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
	Images and media from Commons
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource

• Don Quixote on In Our Time at the BBC. (listen now)
• Don Quixote, Volume 1 (volunteer-read audiobook) from LibriVox at Internet Archive.
• "One Master, Many Cervantes", by Ilan Stavans. A history of English translations. Humanities, September/October 2008. Volume 29, Number 5. Accessed 2010-08-04
• Works by Cervantes at Project Gutenberg
• The full text of Don Quijote in the original Spanish.
• Background information about Don Quijote and Cervantes

Vladimir Vysotsky
Vladimir Vysotsky, 1979.
Background information
Born	(1938-01-25)25 January 1938
Origin	Moscow, Soviet Union
Died	25 July 1980(1980-07-25) (aged 42)
Genres	Bard Russian chanson
Occupations	Singer, bard, songwriter, actor
Instruments	Seven-string guitar, vocals
Years active	1959–1980

Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky (Russian: Влади́мир Семёнович Высо́цкий [vɫɐˈdʲimʲɪr sʲɪˈmʲonəvɪt͡ɕ vɨˈsot͡skʲɪj]) (25 January 1938 – 25 July 1980) was a Soviet singer, songwriter, poet, and actor whose career had an immense and enduring effect on Russian 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 his work was largely ignored by the official Soviet cultural establishment, he achieved remarkable fame during his lifetime, and to this day exerts significant influence on many of Russia's popular musicians and actors who wish to emulate his iconic status.

Biography[link]

Vladimir Vysotsky was born in Moscow at the 3rd Meshchanskaya St. (61/2) maternity hospital.^[1] His father, Semyon Volfovich (Vladimirovich) (1915–1997), was a Jewish colonel in the army originally from Kiev. His mother, Nina Maksimovna, (née Seryogina, 1912–2003) was Russian, and worked as a German language translator.^[1] Vysotsky's family lived in a Moscow communal flat in harsh conditions, and had serious financial difficulties. When Vladimir was 10 months old, Nina had to return to her office in the Transcript bureau of the Ministry of Geodesy and Cartography of the USSR (engaged in making German maps available for the Soviet military) so as to help her husband earn their family's living.^[2][3]

Vladimir's extraordinary theatrical inclinations became obvious at a very early age, and were supported by his paternal grandmother Dora Bronshteyn, a theater fan. The boy used to recite poems, standing on a chair and "flinging hair backwards, like a real poet", often using in his public speeches 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 silly tossers! Give a child some respite!" His sense of humor was extraordinary, but often baffling for people around him. A three-year-old could jeer his father in a bathroom with unexpected poetic improvisation ("Now look what's here before us / Our goat’s to shave himself!")^[4] or appal unwanted guests with some street folk song, promptly steering them away. Vysotsky remembered those first three years of his life in the autobiographical Ballad of Childhood (Баллада о детстве, 1975), one of his best-known songs.^[5]

As WWII broke out, Semyon Vysotsky, a military reserve officer, joined the Soviet army and went to fight the Nazis. Nina and Vladimir were evacuated to the village of Vorontsovka, in Orenburg Oblast where the boy had to spend 6 days a week in a kindergarten and his mother worked for 12 hours a day in a chemical factory.^[2] In 1943, both went back to their Moscow apartment at 1st Meschanskaya St., 126. In September 1945, Vladimir joined the 1st class of the #273 Moscow Rostokino region School.^[1]

In December 1946, Vysotsky's parents divorced.^[6] In 1947 Vladimir went to live for two years with Semyon Vladimirovich and his Armenian^[7] wife, Yevge′nya Stepanovna Liholatova, whom the boy called "aunt Zhenya". "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.^[8] Vladimir spent 1947–1949 with his father (then an army Major) and "aunt Zhenya" at a military base in Eberswalde in the Soviet-occupied section of post-World War II Germany (later East Germany).^[9] Here living conditions, compared to those of Nina's communal Moscow flat, were infinitely better; the family occupied the whole floor of a two-storeyed house, and the boy had a room to himself for the first time in his life.^[10] In 1949 along with his stepmother Vladimir returned to Moscow. There he joined the 5th class of Moscow's School #128 and settled at Bolshoy Karetny, 15 (where they had to themselves two rooms of a 4-roomed flat), with "auntie Zhenya" (then just 28),^[1] a woman of great kindness and warmth whom he later remembered as his second mother.^[11] In 1953 Vladimir Vysotsky, now much interested in theater and cinema, joined the Drama courses led by Vladimir Bogomolov.^[12] "No one in my family has had anything to do with arts, no actors or directors were there among them. But my mother admired theater and from the earliest age... each and every Saturday I've been taken up with her to watch one play or the other. And all of this, it probably stayed with me," he later reminisced.^[13] The same year he's got his first ever guitar, a birthday present from Nina Maksimovna; a close friend (and future well known Soviet poet and bard), Igor Kohanovsky, taught him basic chords. In 1955 Vladimir re-settled into her mother's new home (at 1st Meshanskaya, 76). In June of the same year he graduated from school with five A's.^[1]

Professional career[link]

In 1955, Vladimir enrolled in the Moscow Institute of Civil Engineering (МИСИ), but dropped out after just one semester to pursue an acting career. In June 1956 he joined Boris Vershilov's class at the Moscow Art Theatre Studio-Institute. It was there that he met the 3rd course student Iza Zhukova (who four years later became his wife); soon the two lovers settled at the 1st Meschanskaya flat, in a common room, shielded off by a folding screen. It was also in the Studio that Vysotsky met Bulat Okudzhava for the first time, an already popular underground bard. He was even more impressed by his Russian literature teacher Andrey Sinyavsky who along with his wife often invited students to his home to stage improvised disputes and concerts. In 1958 Vysotsky's got his first MAT(Moscow Art Theatre) role: that of Porfiry Petrovich in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. In 1959 he was cast in his first cinema role, that of student Petya in Vasily Ordynsky's The Yearlings (Сверстницы). On June 20, 1960, Vysotsky graduated from the MAT theater institute and joined the A. S. Pushkin Moscow Drama Theater (led by Boris Ravenskikh at the time) where he spent (with intervals) almost three troubled years. These were marred by numerous administrative sanctions, due to "lack of discipline" and occasional drunken sprees which were a reaction, mainly, to the lack of serious roles and his inability to realise his artistic potential^[1][14] A short stint in 1962 with the Moscow Theater of Miniatures (administered at the time by Vladimir Polyakov) ended with him being fired, officially "for a total lack of sense of humour".^[15]

Vysotsky's second and third films, Dima Gorin’s Career and "713" Requests Permission to Land, were interesting only for the fact that in both he had to be beaten up (in the first case by Aleksandr Demyanenko). "That was the way cinema greeted me," he later often joked. In 1961 Vysotsky wrote his first-ever proper song, called "Tattoo" (Татуировка), which started a long and colourful cycle of artfully stylized criminal underworld romantic stories, full of undercurrents and witty social comments. In June 1963, while shooting Penalty Kick (directed by Veniamin Dorman and starring Mikhail Pugovkin), Vysotsky used the Gorky Film Studio to record an hour-long reel-to-reel cassette of his own songs; copies of it quickly spread and the author's name became known in Moscow and elsewhere (although many of these songs were often being referred to as either "traditional" or "anonymous"). Just several months later Riga-based chess grandmaster Mikhail Tal was heard praising the author of "Bolshoy Karetny" and Anna Akhmatova (in a conversation with Joseph Brodsky) was quoting Vysotsky's number "I was the soul of a bad company..." taking it apparently for some brilliant piece of anonymous street folklore. In October 1964 Vysotsky recorded in chronological order 48 of his own songs, his first self-made Complete works of... compilation, which boosted his popularity as a new Moscow folk underground star.^[16]

1964–1970[link]

In 1964, director Yuri Lyubimov invited Vysotsky to join the newly created Moscow Theatre of Drama and Comedy on the Taganka. "'I've written some songs of my own. Won’t you listen?' – he asked. I agreed to listen to just one of them, expecting our meeting to last for no more than five minutes. Instead I ended up listening to him for an entire 1.5 hours", Lyubimov remembered years later of this first audition.^[17] On September 19, 1964, Vysotsky debuted in Bertholt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan as Second God (two minor roles besides). A month later he came on stage as a dragoon captain (Bela's father) in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time.^[18] It was in Taganka that Vysotsky started to sing on stage; a new War theme having now became prominent in his musical repertoire. After having appeared in the experimental Poet and Theater (Поэт и Театр, February 1965) show, based on Andrey Voznesensky's work and then in Ten Days that Shook the World (after John Reed's book, April 1965), Vysotsky was commissioned by Lyubimov to write songs exclusively for Taganka's new II World War play. The Dead and the Living (Павшие и Живые, premiered in October 1965) included Vysotsky's Stars (Звёзды), The Soldiers of Heeresgruppe Mitte (Солдаты группы "Центр") and Penal Battalions (Штрафные батальоны), the striking examples of a completely new kind of a war song, never heard in his country before. As veteran screenwriter Nikolay Erdman put it (in conversation with Lyubimov), "Professionally, I can well understand how Mayakovsky or Seryozha <Yesenin> were doing it. How Volodya Vysotsky does it is totally beyond me".^[19][20] With his songs – in effect, miniature theatrical dramatizations (usually with a protagonist and full of dialogues), Vysotsky instantly achieved such level of credibility that real life former prisoners, war veterans, boxers, footballers etc. simply refused to believe that the author himself had never served his time in prisons and labour camps, or fought in the War, or been a boxing/football professional, etc. After the second of the two concerts at the Leningrad Molecular Physics institute (that was his actual debut as a solo musical performer) Vysotsky left a note for his fans in a journal which ended with words: "Now that you've heard all these songs, please, don't you make a mistake of mixing me with my characters, I am not like them at all. With love, Vysotsky, April 20, 1965, XX c." Excuses of this kind he had to make throughout his performing career.^[21] At least one of Vysotsky's song themes – that of alcoholic abuse – was worryingly autobiographical, though. By the time his breakthrough came in 1967, he'd suffered several physical breakdowns and once was sent (by Taganka's boss) to a rehabilitation clinic, a visit he on several occasions repeated since.^[22]

Brecht's Life of Galileo (premiered on May 17, 1966), transformed by Lyubimov into a powerful allegory of Soviet intelligentsia's set of moral and intellectual dilemmas, brought Vysotsky his first leading theater role (along with some fitness lessons: he had to perform numerous acrobatic tricks on stage). Press reaction was mixed, some reviewers disliked the actor's overt emotionalism, but it was for the first time ever that Vysotsky's name appeared in Soviet papers at all.^[23] Film directors now were treating him with respect. Victor Turov's war film I Was Born in Childhood where Vysotsky got his first ever 'serious' (neither comical nor villainous) role in cinema, featured two of his songs: a spontaneous piece called Cold Weather (Холода) and a dark, Unknown soldier theme-inspired classic Common Graves (На братских могилах), sung behind the screen by the legendary Mark Bernes.^[24][25]

Stanislav Govorukhin's Vertikal (1967), a mountain climbing drama, starring Vysotsky (as Volodya the radist) brought him all-round recognition and fame. Four of the numbers used in the film (including Song of a Friend (Песня о друге), released in 1968 by the Soviet recording industry monopolist Мелодия flexi disc to become an unofficial hit) were written literally on the spot, nearby Elbrus, inspired by professional alpinists' tales and one curious hotel bar conversation with a German guest who 25 years ago happened to climb these very mountains in a capacity of an Edelweiss division fighter.^[26] Another 1967 film, Kira Muratova's Short Liaisons featured Vysotsky as the geologist Maxim (paste-bearded again) with a now trademark off-the-cuff musical piece, a melancholy improvisation called Business... (Дела).^[27] All the while Vysotsky continued working hard at Taganka, with another important role under his belt (that of Mayakovsky – or, rather one the latter's character five different versions) in an experimantal piece called Have a Listen! (Послушайте!), and was more and more regularly giving semi-official concerts where audiences greeted him as a cult hero.^[28]

In the end of 1967 Vysotsky got another pivotal theater role, that of Khlopusha in Pugachov (a play based on a poem by Sergei Yesenin),^[29] often described as one of Taganka’s finest.^[24][30] "He’s given this play all things that he’s been excelling at and, on the other hand, it was Pugachyov that made him discover his own potential," – Soviet critic Natalya Krymova wrote years later.^[31] In a matter of weeks, though, infuriated by the actor’s increasing unreliability triggered by worsening drinking problems, Lyubimov fired him – only to let him back again several months later (and thus begin the humiliating sacked-then-pardoned routine which continued for years).^[32] In June 1968 a Vysotsky-slagging campaign was launched in the Soviet press.^[9] First Sovetskaya Rossiya commented on the "epidemic spread of immoral, smutty songs", allegedly promoting "criminal world values, alcoholism, vice and immorality" and condemned their author for "sawing seeds of evil". Then Komsomolskaya Pravda linked Vysotsky with black market dealers selling his tapes somewhere in Siberia.^[33] Composer D. Kabalevsky speaking from the Union of Composers Committee tribune criticised Soviet radio for giving an ideologically dubious, "low-life product" like Song of a Friend an unwarranted airplay.^[34][35] Playwright A. Stein who in his Last Parade play used several of Vysotsky’s songs, was chastised by a Ministry of Culture official for "providing a tribune for this anti-Soviet scum". The phraseology prompted commentators in the West to make parallels between Vysotsky and Zoschenko, another Soviet author who'd been officially labeled "scum" some 20 years ago.^[36]

Two of Vysotsky's 1968 films, Gennady Poloka’s Intervention (premiered in May 1987)^[37] where he was cast as Brodsky, a dodgy even if highly artistic character, and Ye. Karelov's Two Comrades Were Serving (a gun-toting White Army officer Brusentsov who in the course of the film shoots his friend, his horse, Oleg Yankovsky's good guy character and, finally himself)^[38] – were severely censored, first of them shelved for twenty years.^[39] Small wonder Vysotsky's 1968 songs were crushingly heavy and ultra depressive. At least four of them, though – Save Our Souls (Спасите наши души), Wolveshunting (Охота на волков), Nothing’s Right (Всё не так; better known by the opening line – "В сон мне желтые огни...") and Steam-bath in White (Банька по-белому) – were later hailed as his masterpieces. Meanwhile, at least one "proper" love song appeared in Vysotsky's repertoire for the first time, documenting the beginning of his passionate love affair with French actress Marina Vlady.^[40]

In 1969 Vysotsky starred in two films: The Taiga's Master (directed by V. Nazarov) where he played a villainous Siberian timber-floating brigadier,^[41] and somewhat more entertaining Dangerous Tour (George Bengalsky, a kinky revolutionary using his Odessa variety theater stage persona as a cover-up to spread banned literature behind the curtains) by film director G.Yungvald-Hinkevich.^[42] The latter was criticised in the press for having taken rather a farcical approach to the (historical fact-based) subject matter, but for a wider Soviet audience much more important was the second (after Vertical) opportunity to enjoy the charismatic (and still in many ways enigmatic) actor's presence on big screen full-time.^[43] In 1970 Vysotsky (assisted by the disgraced Soviet ex-leader's grand-daughter Yulia) visited Nikita Khrushchev at his dacha and had a lengthy conversation, revolving mostly round Stalin and Beria figures^[44] toured Ukrainian sites linked to Nestor Makhno's history,^[45] embarked on a massive (and, in those times' terms, dangerously "commercial") Central Asian concert tour,^[46] then took Marina Vlady to director (and now good friend) Victor Turov's place to help his French fiancée investigate her Belorussian roots. The pair finally wed on December 1, 1970 (causing furore among the Moscow cultural and political elite) and for a honeymoon went for Georgia where they met Paradzhanov and friends.^[47]

1971–1973[link]

1971 started promisingly: Lyubimov gave Vysotsky the long sought-after leading role in his groundbreaking Hamlet play.^[48] A drinking spree-related nervous breakdown, though, brought the actor to the infamous Moscow Kaschenko psychiatry clinic, severest of them all.^[49] By this time Vysotsky had been suffering from alcoholism. Many of his songs from the period deal – either directly or metaphorically – with alcoholism, insanity, mania, and obsessions. Partially recovered (much due to the encouraging presence of Marina, now well-settled into the real life role of a guardian angel, ever on the alert, ready to fly out to Moscow and lend a helping hand),^[17] Vysotsky embarked on a successful Ukrainian concert tour (there he wrote a cluster of songs and later referred to those days as his personal Boldino Autumn). But it was Taganka's Hamlet (premiered on November 29, 1971) that finally provided Vysotsky with his worthiest reason for celebration. A role – that of a lone intellectual rebel, rising to fight the cruel state machine – became an instant hit with the Soviet intelligentsia and in retrospect is seen as one of Soviet theater's all-time classic.^[50][51] This was huge psychological triumph too, over Lyubimov's skepticism, among other things.^[52]

Then came another blow: Vysotsky's got the role in (and wrote some songs for) The Sannikov Land, an adaptation of Vladimir Obruchev's science fiction,^[53] then got the boot – only for the reason of his face "being too scandalously recognizable", as a state official had put it. One of the songs written for the film, a doom-laden epic allegory of death-approaching called "Capricious Horses", gained life of its own and became one of the singer's signature tunes.^[54] Two of Vysotsky’s 1972 film roles were somewhat meditative: an anonymous American journalist in The Fourth One (after Konstantin Simonov's play, directed by A.Stolper)^[55] and the 'righteous guy' von Koren in The Bad Good Man (based on Anton Chekov's Duel, directed by I. Kheifitz and starring Oleg Dahl).^[56][57] The latter brought Vysotsky the Best male role prize at the V Taormina Film Fest. This philosophical slant rubbed off onto some of his new musical poems of the time (The Other's Track, Monument). More popular, though, proved to be his 1972 joke-songs: Mishka Shifman (making fun of the whole of leaving-for-Israel routine), Victim of TV (ridiculing the concept of "political consciousness" as such) and grotesquely funny The Honour of a Chess Crown about an ever-fearless "simple Soviet man" encountering the much feared American champion Bobby Fisher (who, incidentally, six months later demolished Boris Spassky) and thrashing him thoroughly, in every possible sense of the word.^[58]

In April 1973 for the first time ever (since his 1947 East Germany venture) Vysotsky went abroad. Imminent official permission difficulties were sorted out instantly after the French Communist party leader Georges Marchais's personal phone call to Leonid Brezhnev (who, according to Marina Vlady's memoirs, rather sympathized with the stellar couple).^[59] They stayed in Poland for a while with Daniel Olbrychski (since then a good friend), having talks with Andrzej Wajda and Krzysztof Zanussi, then in France visited the Cannes festival. Having found on return a potentially dangerous lawsuit brought against him (concerning 'illegal' concerts in Siberia the year before), Vysotsky wrote a defiant letter to Minister of Culture Pyotr Demichev where he stated his right to perform officially.^[60] As a result, he was given the official status of a philharmonic artist, 11,5 roubles (an equivalent to the price of 3 bottles of vodka) per concert now guaranteed. Still the 900 rubles' fine had to be paid according the court decision, which was a lot, considering his salary at the theater amounted to monthly 110 rubles.^[61]

1974–1977[link]

Unable to completely ignore his musical phenomenon, Melodiya did release a few of his songs on vinyl in the 1970s, which represented only a small portion of his creative work, which millions already owned on tape and knew by heart. In 1974 the 7” EP was released, featuring four of his war songs (He’s Never Returned From a Battle (Он не вернулся из боя), The New Times Song (Песня о новом времени), Common Graves (Братские могилы) and The Earth Song (Песня о Земле)).^[24][62] In September 1974 Vysotsky’s been officially merited for the first time ever – by the UzSSR government’s Honorary Diploma (along with four other actors of Taganka, which toured this Central Asia Soviet republic). Coupled with the USSR Union of Cinematographers’ membership that had been granted to him a year before, this modest Uzbek gift meant a lot. Now Vysotsky was an "anti-Soviet scum" no more: rather, an unlikely link between the official Soviet cinema and the "progressive-thinking artists of the West".^[63] More films followed, among them The Only Road (alternative title: Chained Drivers, Okovani šoferi, a Soviet-Yugoslav joint venture, directed by Vladimir Pavlovich, premiered on January 10, 1975 in Belgrade) ^[64] and The Flight of Mr. McKinley (1975, directed by Aleksandr Mitta);^[65] the latter proved to be a disappointment, only 2 of the 9 ballads specially written for it found their way into the film.^[66] This was the height of his popularity, when, as described in Vlady's book about her husband, walking down the street on a summer night, one could hear Vysotsky's recognizable voice coming literally from every open window.

In 1975 Vysotsky made his third trip to France where he rather riskily visited his former teacher (and now a celebrated dissident emigre) Andrey Sinyavsky. Artist Mikhail Shemyakin, his new Paris friend ('bottle-sharer, rather, in Marina's terms), recorded Vysotsky in his home studio.^[67] After a brief stay in England a Transatlantic trip followed which resulted in his first Mexico concerts in April. Back in Moscow, there were changes at Taganka: Lyubimov went to Milan's La Scala on a contract and Anatoly Efros has been brought in, a director of radically different approach. His project, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, caused a sensation. Critics praised Alla Demidova (as Ranevskaya) and Vladimir Vysotsky (as Lopakhin) powerful interplay; in retrospect this short-lived duet is regarded to be easily one of the most dazzling in the history of the Soviet theater.^[68] At least one person, though, hated it wholeheartedly, and that was Lyubimov himself who, on return, accused Efros of giving his actors 'stardom malaise'.^[69] 1976 Taganka’s visit to Bulgaria resulted in Vysotskys’s interview there being filmed and 15 songs recorded by Balkanton record label, leaving the boss again rather disgruntled. On return Lyubimov made a move which many thought outrageous: declaring himself "unable to work with this Mr. Vysotsky anymore" he's given the Hamlet role to Valery Zolotukhin, the latter's best friend. That was the time, reportedly, when Vysotsky, totally stressed out, started using amphetamines for the first time.^[70]

Having had another Belorussian voyage completed, Marina and Vladimir went for France, then (official permission neither given nor asked for) flew to Montreal, Canada, the host of that year's Summer Olympics, where Vysotsky met Blokhin and Buryak and gave one impromptu concert at the latter's birthday. In New York (where he met, among other people, Baryshnikov and Brodsky), in the course of a televised one-hour interview, he declared himself to be "not a dissident, just an artist", who's never had any intentions to leave his country where people loved him and his songs.^[71] At home this unauthorized venture into the Western world bore no repercussions: by this time Soviet authorities were divided by the "Vysotsky controversy" up to the highest level; while Suslov detested the bard, Brezhnev loved him to such an extent that once, while in hospital, was listening to his songs performed live into a telephone, in daughter Galina's home.^[72]

In September Vysotsky made a trip to Yugoslavia with Taganka (Hamlet there won the annual BITEF festival's first prize) and then to Hungary for a two-week concert tour. Back in Moscow in another ambitious Lyubimov’s venture, The Master & Margarita, he got the rather meager Ivan Bezdomny role (Voland what he’d been aiming at), recompensed by an important Svidrigailov slot in Yury Karyakin's take on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.^[73] Of Vysotsky's new songs of this period two stand out: bitterly autobiographical Two Witches, Named Destiny Each (Две судьбы) and a poignant Truth and Lie (Правда и ложь) allegory, devoted to (and stylized after) Bulat Okudzhava. In 1977 Vysotsky’s health deteriorated (problems were multiple: heart, kidneys, liver failures, jaw infection and nervous breakdown) to such an extent that in April he found himself in Moscow clinic's reanimation center in the state of total physical and mental collapse.^[74]

1977–1980[link]

1977 saw the release of three Vysotsky’s LPs in France (including the one that’s been recorded by RCA in Canada the previous year); arranged and accompanied by guitarist Kostya Kazansky, the singer for the first time ever enjoyed the relatively sophisticated musical background. In August he performed in Hollywood before members of New York, New York film cast and (according to Vladi) was greeted warmly by the likes of Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro.^[75] Some more concerts in Los Angeles were followed by the appearance at the French Communist paper L’Humanité annual event. In December Taganka left for France, its Hamlet (Vysotsky back in the lead) gaining fine reviews.^[76]

External videos
	The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed film fragment. Sharapov (Vladimir Konkin) is outraged with the way Zheglov (V.Vysotsky) planted a purse into a thief’s pocket to get evidence by blackmail. "A thief belongs in prison. Whichever way I get him there is beside the point," Zheglov retorts.

1978 started with the March–April series of concerts in Moscow and Ukraine. In May Vysotsky embarked upon a new major film project: the The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Место встречи изменить нельзя) about two cops fighting crime in late 1940s Stalinist Russia, directed by Stanislav Govorukhin. Based on the Arkady and Georgy Vainer brothers' criminal/detective drama, the film (premiered on November 11, 1978 on the Soviet Central TV) presented Vysotsky as Zheglov, a tough and charismatic MUR (Moscow Criminal Investigation Department) officer teaching his milder (and somewhat less credible) partner Sharapov (actor Vladimir Konkin) his crude art of crime-solving based on the simple idea formulated in a "Prison is the only place for a thief to be" slogan.^[77] Theater-wise, Vysotsky became engaged in Taganka’s Genre-seeking show (performing some of his own songs) and played Aleksander Blok in Anatoly Efros' The Lady Stranger (Незнакомка) radio play (premiered on air on July 10, 1979 and later released as a double LP).^[78]

In November 1978 Vysotsky took part in the underground censorship-defying literary project Metropolis, inspired and organized by Vasily Aksenov.^[79] In January 1979 Vysotsky was in America again with highly successful series of concerts. That was the point (as biographer V.Novikov argues) when a glimpse of new, clean life of a respectable international actor and performer all but made Vysotsky seriously reconsider his priorities.^[80] What followed though, was a return to the self-destructive theater and concert tours schedule, personal doctor Anatoly Fedotov now not only his companion, but part of Taganka's crew.^[81] "Who was this Anatoly? Just a man who in every possible situation would try to provide drugs. And he did provide. In such moments Volodya trusted him totally", Oksana Afanasyeva,^[82] Vysotsky's Moscow girlfriend (who was near him for most of the last year of his life and, on occasion, herself served as a drug courier) remembered.^[83] In July 1979, after a series of Center Asia concerts, Vysotsky collapsed, experienced clinical death and was resuscitated by Fedotov (who injected caffeine into the heart directly), colleague and close friend Vsevolod Abdulov helping with heart massage. In January 1980 Vysotsky asked Lyubimov for a year's leave. "Up to you, but on condition that Hamlet is yours," was the answer.^[84]

On January 22, 1980, Vysotsky entered the Moscow Ostankino TV Centre to record his one and only studio concert for the Soviet television. What proved to be an exhausting affair (concentration totally missing, he had to plod through several takes for each song) was premiered on the Soviet TV eight years later.^[85] Last six months of his life saw Vysotsky appearing on stage sporadically, fuelled by heavy dosages of drugs and alcohol. His performances were erratic and all but mechanical; for many he looked stoned and alienated.^[86] Occasionally Vysotsky paid visits to Sklifosofsky institute's urgent help unit, but would not hear of Marina Vlady's suggestions for him to take long-term rehabilitation course in a Western clinic. Vysotsky's last visit to France in June made it clear: his marriage was in serious trouble, regardless of one of his last poetic Marina-addressed confessions: "Alive I am, guarded only by God and you.^[87]

Death[link]

Vysotsky's grave

Although several theories of the ultimate cause of the singer's death persist to this day (including a few rather sinister ones), knowing what we know now about cardiovascular disease, it seems likely that by the time of his death Vysotsky had an advanced coronary condition brought about by years of tobacco, alcohol and drug abuse, as well as by the stress of persecution and of the grueling work schedule. Towards the end, most of Vysotsky's closest friends had become aware of the ominous signs and were convinced that his demise was only a matter of time. A clear evidence of this can be seen in a video ostensibly shot by the Japanese NHK channel only months before Vysotsky's death, where he appears visibly unwell, breathing heavily and slurring his speech.^[88] What follows in the rest of this section is based on accounts by Vysotsky's close friends and colleagues compiled in the book by V. Perevozchikov ^[89]

Vysotsky suffered from alcoholism for most of his life. Sometime around 1977, he started using amphetamines and other prescription narcotics in an attempt to counteract the debilitating hangovers and eventually to rid himself of alcohol addiction. While these attempts were partially successful, he soon found himself with a severe drug dependency that was fast spiraling out of control. He was reduced to begging some of his close friends in the medical profession for supplies of drugs, often using his acting skills to collapse in a medical office and imitate a seizure or some other condition requiring a painkiller injection. On July 25, 1979 (a year to the day before his death) he suffered a cardiac arrest and was clinically dead for several minutes during a concert tour of Uzbekistan, after injecting himself with a wrong kind of painkiller he had previously obtained from a dentist's office.

Fully aware of the dangers of his condition, Vysotsky made several attempts to cure himself of his addiction. He underwent an experimental (and ultimately discredited) blood purification procedure offered by a leading drug rehabilitation specialist in Moscow. He also went to an isolated retreat in France with his wife Marina in the spring of 1980 as a way of forcefully depriving himself of any access to drugs. After these attempts failed, Vysotsky returned to Moscow to find his life in an increasingly stressful state of disarray. He had been a defendant in two criminal trials, one for a car wreck he had caused some months earlier, and one for an alleged conspiracy to sell unauthorized concert tickets (he eventually received a suspended sentence and a probation in the first case, and the charges in the second were dismissed, although several of his co-defendants were found guilty). He also unsuccessfully fought the film studio authorities for the rights to direct a movie called The Green Phaeton. The relations with his wife Marina were deteriorating, and he was torn between his loyalty to her and his love for his mistress Oksana Afanasyeva. He had also developed a severe inflammation in one of his legs, making his concert performances extremely challenging.

In a final desperate attempt to overcome his drug addiction, partially prompted by his inability to obtain drugs through his usual channels (the authorities had imposed a strict monitoring of the medical institutions in order to prevent illicit drug distribution during the 1980 Olympics), he switched back to alcohol and went on a prolonged drinking binge (apparently consuming copious amounts of champagne due to a prevalent misconception at the time that it was better than vodka at countering the effects of drug withdrawal).

On July 3, 1980, Vysotsky gave a performance at a suburban Moscow concert hall. One of the stage managers recalls that he looked visibly unhealthy ("gray-faced", as she puts it) and complained of not feeling too good, while another says she was surprised by his request for champagne before the start of the show, as he had always been known for completely abstaining from drink before his concerts.^[90] On July 16 Vysotsky gave his last public concert in Kaliningrad. On July 18, Vysotsky played Hamlet for the last time at the Taganka Theatre. From around July 21, several of his close friends were on a round-the-clock watch at his apartment, carefully monitoring his alcohol intake and hoping against all odds that his drug dependency would soon be overcome and they would then be able to bring him back from the brink. The effects of drug withdrawal were clearly getting the better of him, as he got increasingly restless, moaned and screamed in pain, and at times fell into memory lapses, failing to recognize at first some of his visitors, including his son Arkadiy. At one point, Vysostsky's personal physician A. Fedotov (the same doctor who had brought him back from clinical death a year earlier in Uzbekistan) attempted to sedate him, inadvertently causing an asphyxiation from which he was barely saved. On July 24, Vysotsky told his mother that he thought he was going to die that day, and then made similar remarks to a few of the friends present at the apartment, who begged him to stop such talk and keep his spirits up. But soon thereafter, Oksana Afanasyeva saw him clench his chest several times, which led her to suspect that he was genuinely suffering from a cardiovascular condition. She informed Fedotov of this, but was told not to worry, as he was going to monitor Vysotsky's condition all night. In the evening, after drinking relatively small amounts of alcohol, the moaning and groaning Vysotsky was sedated by Fedotov, who then sat down on the couch next to him but fell asleep. Fedotov awoke in the early hours of July 25 to an unusual silence, and found Vysotsky dead in his bed with his eyes wide open, apparently of a myocardial infarction, as he later certified. This was contradicted by Fedotov's colleagues, Sklifosovsky Emergency Medical Institute physicians L. Sul'povar and S. Scherbakov (who demanded the actor's instant hospitalization on July 23, but were, allegedly, defied by Fedotov), who insisted that Fedotov's incompetent sedation combined with alcohol was what killed Vysotsky. An autopsy was prevented by Vysotsky's parents (who were eager to have their son's drug addiction remain secret), so the true cause of death remains unknown.^[91]

No official announcement of the actor's death was made, only a brief obituary appeared in the Moscow newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva, and a note informing of Vysotsky's death and cancellation of the Hamlet performance was put out at the entrance to the Taganka Theatre (the story goes that not a single ticket holder took advantage of the refund offer). Despite this, by the end of the day millions had learned of Vysotsky's death. On July 28, his body was laid out at the Taganka Theatre. After a mourning ceremony involving an unauthorized mass gathering of unprecedented scale, Vysotsky was buried at the Vagankovskoye Cemetery in Moscow.^[92] The attendance at the Olympic events dropped noticeably on that day, as scores of spectators left to attend the funeral. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to catch a glimpse of his coffin.^[93] Vysotsky was posthumously awarded the title of Meritorious Artist of the Soviet Union.

Controversy surrounding circumstances of death[link]

Some people felt that part of the blame for his death lay with the group of associates who surrounded him in the last years of his life.^[94] This inner circle were all people under the influence of his strong character, combined with a material interest in the large sums of money his concerts earned. This list included Valerii Yanklovich, manager of the Taganka Theatre and prime organiser of his non-sanctioned concerts; Anatolii Fedotov, his personal doctor; Vadim Tumanov, gold prospector (and personal friend) from Siberia; Oksana Afanas'eva (later Yarmol'nik), his mistress the last three years of his life; Ivan Bortnik, a fellow actor; and Leonid Sul'povar, head of division at the Sklifosovski hospital responsible for much of the supply of drugs.

Vysotsky's associates had all put in efforts to supply his drug habit,^[95] which kept him going in the last years of his life. Under their influence he was able to continue to perform all over the country, up to a week before his death. Due to illegal (i.e. non-state-sanctioned) sales of tickets and other underground methods, these concerts pulled in sums of money unimaginable in Soviet times, when almost everyone received nearly the same small salary.^[96] The payouts and gathering of money were a constant source of danger, and Yanklovich and others were needed to organise them.

Some money went to Vysotsky, the rest was distributed amongst this circle. At first this was a reasonable return on their efforts; however, as his addiction progressed and his body developed resistance, the frequency and amount of drugs needed to keep Vysotsky going became unmanageable.^[97] This culminated at the time of the Moscow Olympics which coincided with the last days of his life, when supplies of drugs were monitored more strictly than usual, and some of the doctors involved in supplying Vysotsky were already behind bars (normally the doctors had to account for every ampule, thus drugs were transferred to an empty container, while the patients received a substitute or placebo instead).^[98] In the last few days Vysotsky became uncontrollable, his shouting could be heard all over the apartment building on Malaya Gruzinskaya St. where he lived amongst VIP's. Several days before his death, in a state of stupor he went on a high speed drive around Moscow in an attempt to obtain drugs and alcohol – when many high-ranking people saw him.^[99][100] This increased the likelihood of him being forcibly admitted to hospital, and the consequent danger to the circle supplying his habit. As his state of health declined, and it became obvious that he may die, his associates gathered to decide what to do with him. They came up with no firm decision. They did not want him admitted officially, as his drug addiction would become public and they would fall under suspicion, although some of them admitted that any ordinary person in his condition would have been admitted immediately.^[101]

On Vysotsky's death his associates and relatives put in much effort to prevent a post mortem being carried out.^[102] This despite the fairly unusual circumstances: he died aged 42 under heavy sedation with an improvised cocktail of sedatives and stimulants, including the toxic chloral hydrate, provided by his personal doctor who had been supplying him with narcotics the previous three years. This doctor, being the only one present at his side when death occurred, had a few days earlier been seen to display elementary negligence in treating the sedated Vysotsky.^[103] On the night of his death, Arkadii Vysotsky (his son) who tried to visit his father in his apartment, was rudely refused entry by Yanklovich, even though there was a lack of people able to care for him. Subsequently the Soviet police commenced a manslaughter investigation which was dropped due to absence of evidence taken at the time of death.^[104]

Marriages[link]

Vysotsky's first wife was Iza Zhukova. They met in 1956, being both MAT theater instutite students, lived for some time at Vysotsky's mother's flat in Moscow, after her graduation (Iza was 2 years older) spent months in different cities (her – in Kiev, then Rostov) and finally married on April 25, 1960.

He met his second wife, Lyudmila Abramova, in 1961, while shooting the film "713" Requests Permission to Land. They married in 1965 and had two sons, Arkady (b. 1962) and Nikita (b. 1964).

While still married to Ludmila Abramova, Vysotsky's got romantically linked with Tatyana Ivanenko, a Taganka actress,^[105] then, in 1967 fell in love with Marina Vlady, a French actress of Russian descent, who was working at Mosfilm on a joint Soviet-French production at that time. Marina had been married before and had 3 children, while Vladimir had two. Fueled by Marina's exotic status as a Frenchwoman in the Soviet Union, and Vladimir's unmatched popularity in his country, their love was passionate and impulsive. They were married in 1969. For 10 years the two maintained a long-distance relationship as Marina compromised her career in France in order to spend more time in Moscow, and Vladimir's friends pulled strings in order for him to be allowed to travel abroad to stay with his wife. Marina eventually joined the Communist Party of France, which essentially gave her an unlimited-entry visa into the Soviet Union, and provided Vladimir with some immunity against prosecution by the government, which was becoming weary of his covertly anti-Soviet lyrics and his odds-defying popularity with the masses. The problems of his long-distance relationship with Vlady inspired several of Vysotsky's songs.

Legacy[link]

In the Autumn 1981 Vysotsky's first-ever collection of poetry was officially published in the USSR, called The Nerve (Нерв). Its first edition (25.000 copies) was sold out instantly. In 1982 the 2nd one followed (100.000), then the 3rd (1988, 200.000), followed in the 1990s by several more. The material for it was compiled, somewhat illogically, by Robert Rozhdestvensky, an officially-laurelled poet whose pretentious stylings were once parodied by actor Leonid Filatov in the verse whose first quatrain ended with: "...But to theaters I go – seldom / And Taganka I detest – from childhood".^[106] Also in 1981 Yuri Lyubimov staged at Taganka a new music and poetry production called Vladimir Vysotsky which was promptly banned and officially premiered on January 25, 1989.^[107]

In 1986 the official Vysotsky poetic heritage committee was formed (with Rozhdestvensky at the helm, theater critic Nina Krymova being both the instigator and the organizer). Despite some opposition from the conservatives (Yegor Ligachev was the latter's political leader, Stanislav Kunyaev of Nash Sovremennik represented its literary flank) Vysotsky was rewarded posthumously with the USSR State Prize. The official formula – "for creating the character of Zheglov and artistic achievements as a singer-songwriter" was much derided from both the left and the right. In 1988 the Selected Works of... (edited by N.Krymova) compilation was published, preceded by Sure, I'll Be Back... (Я, конечно, вернусь...) book of fellow actors' memoirs and Vysotsky’s verses, some published for the first time. In 1990 two volumes of extensive The Works of... were published, financed by the late poet's father Semyon V. Vysotsky. Even more ambitious publication series, self-proclaimed "the first ever academical edition" (the latter assertion being dismissed by sceptics) compiled and edited by Sergey Zhiltsov, were published in Tula (1994–1998, 5 volumes), Germany (1994, 7 volumes) and Moscow (1997, 4 volumes).^[108]

In 1989 the official Vladimir Vysotsky Museum opened in Moscow, with the magazine of its own called Vagant (edited by Sergey Zaitsev) devoted entirely to Vysotsky’s legacy. In 1996 it became an independent publication and was closed in 2002.^[109]

In years to come, Vysotsky's flower-adorned grave became a site of pilgrimage for several generations of his fans, the youngest of whom were born after his death. His tombstone also became the subject of controversy, as his widow had wished for a simple abstract slab, while his parents insisted on a realistic gilded statue. Although probably too serious to have inspired Vysotsky himself, the statue is believed by some to be full of metaphors and symbols reminiscent of the singer's life. One of the most obvious symbols is the angel-like wings that wrap the statue's body. The angel wings are supposed to symbolize Vysotsky's importance to all oppressed peoples; they are wrapped around his body to represent the fact that he was never allowed to fully spread his talent and flourish during his lifetime due to the oppressive regime. Another symbol is the two horse heads, which might refer to his landmark song "Koni Priveredliviye" (Capricious Horses).

On July 25, 1995, in Moscow the Vladimir Vysotsky monument was officially opened at Strastnoy Boulevard, by the Petrovsky Gates. Among those present were the bard's parents, two of his sons, first wife Iza, renown poets Yevtushenko and Voznesensky. "Vysotsky had always been telling the truth. Only once he was wrong when he sang in one of his songs: "They will never erect me a monument in a square like that by Petrovskye Vorota", Mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov said in his speech.^[110]

In 2011, biographical film Vysotsky. Thank You For Being Alive was released. The actor Sergey Bezrukov portrayed Vysotsky,^[111] with the latter's face attached to the actor's using performance capture CGI. The film tells about Vysotsky's illegal underground performances, problems with KGB and drugs, and subsequent clinical death in 1979.

Orbit of Vladimir Vysotskij asteroid

The asteroid 2374 Vladvysotskij, discovered by Lyudmila Zhuravleva, was named after Vysotsky.

Shortly after Vysotsky's death, many Russian bards started writing songs and poems about his life and death. The best known are Yuri Vizbor's "Letter to Vysotsky" (1982) and Bulat Okudzhava's "About Volodya Vysotsky" (1980). In Poland, Jacek Kaczmarski based some of his songs on those of Vysotsky and dedicated to his memory the song ”Epitafium dla Włodzimierza Wysockiego” (Epitaph for Vladimir Vysotsky).

Every year on Vysotsky's birthday, festivals are held throughout Russia and in many communities throughout the world, especially in Europe. Vysotsky's impact in Russia is often compared to that of Bob Dylan in America, or Brassens and Brel in France. In Germany, he has been compared to Wolf Biermann, who — although more overtly political — came from a similar ethnic background and played a similar outsider's role.^{[citation needed]}

Books on Vladimir Vysotsky[link]

After her husband's death, urged by her friend Simone Signoret, Marina Vlady wrote a book called The Aborted Flight about her years together with Vysotsky. The book paid tribute to Vladimir's talent and rich persona, yet was uncompromising in its depiction of his addictions and the problems that they caused in their marriage. Written in French (and published in France in 1987), it was translated into Russian in tandem by Vlady and a professional translator and came out in 1989 in the USSR. Totally credible from the specialists' point of view, the book caused controversy, among other things, by shocking revelations about the difficult father-and-son relationship (or rather, the lack of any), implying that Vysotsky-senior (while his son was alive) was deeply ashamed of him and his songs which he deemed 'anti-Soviet' and reported his own son to the KGB.^[112][113] Also in 1989 another important book of memoirs was published in the USSR, providing a bulk of priceless material for the host of future biographers, Alla Demidova's Vladimir Vysotsky, the One I Know and Love.^[114] Among other publications of note were Valery Zolotukhin's Vysotsky’s Secret (2000), a series of Valery Perevozchikov's books (His Dying Hour, The Unknown Vysotsky and others) containing detailed accounts and interviews dealing with the bard's life’s major controversies (the mystery surrounding his death, the truth behind Vysotsky Sr.'s alleged KGB reports, the true nature of Vladimir Vysotsky's relations with his mother Nina's second husband Georgy Bartosh etc.), Iza Zhukova's Short Happiness for a Lifetime and the late bard's sister-in-law Irena Vysotskaya's My Brother Vysotsky. The Beginnings (both 2005).^[115]

Music[link]

The multifaceted talent of Vladimir Vysotsky is often described by the term "bard" (бард) that Vysotsky has never been enthusiastic about. He thought of himself mainly as an actor and poet rather than a singer, and once remarked, "I do not belong to what people call bards or minstrels or whatever." With the advent of portable tape-recorders in the Soviet Union, Vysotsky's music became available to the masses in the form of home-made reel-to-reel audio tape recordings (later on cassette tapes).

Vysotsky accompanied himself on a Russian seven-string guitar, with a raspy voice singing ballads of love, peace, war, everyday Soviet life and of the human condition. He was largely perceived as the voice of honesty, at times sarcastically jabbing at the Soviet government, which made him a target for surveillance and threats. In France, he has been compared with Georges Brassens; in Russia, however, he was more frequently compared with Joe Dassin, partly because they were the same age and died in the same year, although their ideologies, biographies, and musical styles are very different. Vysotsky's lyrics and style greatly influenced Jacek Kaczmarski, a Polish songwriter and singer who touched on similar themes.

The songs—over 600 of them—were written about almost any imaginable theme. The earliest were outlaw songs. These songs were based either on the life of the common people in Moscow or on life in the crime people, sometimes in Gulags. Vysotsky slowly grew out of this phase and started singing more serious, though often satirical, songs. Many of these songs were about war. These war songs were not written to glorify war, but rather to expose the listener to the emotions of those in extreme, life threatening situations. Most Soviet veterans would say that Vysotsky's war songs described the truth of war far more accurately than more official "patriotic" songs.

A Russian stamp honoring Vladimir Vysotsky, 1999.

Nearly all of Vysotsky's songs are in the first person, although he is almost never the narrator. When singing his criminal songs, he would adopt the accent and intonation of a Moscow thief, and when singing war songs, he would sing from the point of view of a soldier. In many of his philosophical songs, he adopted the role of inanimate objects. This created some confusion about Vysotsky's background, especially during the early years when information could not be passed around very easily. Using his acting talent, the poet played his role so well that until told otherwise, many of his fans believed that he was, indeed, a criminal or war veteran. Vysotsky's father said that "War veterans thought the author of the songs to be one of them, as if he had participated in the war together with them." The same could be said about mountain climbers; on multiple occasions, Vysotsky was sent pictures of mountain climbers' graves with quotes from his lyrics etched on the tombstones.

Not being officially recognized as a poet and singer, Vysotsky performed wherever and whenever he could – in the theater (where he worked), at universities, in private apartments, village clubs, and in the open air. It was not unusual for him to give several concerts in one day. He used to sleep little, using the night hours to write. With few exceptions, he wasn't allowed to publish his recordings with "Melodiya", which held a monopoly on the Soviet music industry. His songs were passed on through amateur, fairly low quality recordings on vinyl discs and magnetic tape, resulting in his immense popularity. Cosmonauts even took his music on cassette into orbit.

Musical style[link]

Musically, virtually all of Vysotsky's songs were written in a minor key, and tended to employ from three to seven chords. Vysotsky composed his songs and played them exclusively on the Russian seven string guitar, often tuned a tone or a tone-and-a-half below the traditional Russian "Open G major" tuning. This guitar, with its specific Russian tuning, makes a slight yet notable difference in chord voicings than the standard tuned six string Spanish (classical) guitar, and it became a staple of his sound. Because Vysotsky tuned down a tone and a half, his strings had less tension, which also colored the sound.

His earliest songs were usually written in C minor (with the guitar tuned a tone down from DGBDGBD to CFACFAC), using the following chord shapes:

Songs written in this key include "Stars" (Zvyozdy), "My friend has left for Magadan" (Moy drug uyekhal v Magadan), and most of his "outlaw songs".

At around 1970, Vysotsky began writing and playing exclusively in A minor (guitar tuned to CFACFAC), which he continued doing until his death. The main chord shapes he based his songs on were:

Vysotsky used his fingers instead of a pick to pluck and strum, as was the tradition with Russian guitar playing. He used a variety of finger picking and strumming techniques. One of his favorite was to play an alternating bass with his thumb as he plucked or strummed with his other fingers.

Often, Vysotsky would neglect to check the tuning of his guitar, which is particularly noticeable on earlier recordings. According to some accounts, Vysotsky would get upset when friends would attempt to tune his guitar, leading some to believe that he preferred to play slightly out of tune as a stylistic choice. Much of this is also attributable to the fact that a guitar that is tuned down more than 1 whole step (Vysotsky would sometimes tune as much as 2 and a half steps down) is prone to intonation problems.

Singing style[link]

Vysotsky had a unique singing style. He had an unusual habit of elongating consonants instead of vowels in his songs. So when a syllable is sung for a prolonged period of time, he would elongate the consonant instead of the vowel in that syllable.

Filmography[link]

• 1959 — The Yearlings (Сверстницы) – Mosfilm; Director: V.Ordynskii
• 1961 — Dima Gorin's Career (Карьера Димы Горина) – M. Gorkii Studio Director: F. Dovlatyan & L. Mirskii
• 1962 — "713" Requests Permission to Land (713-й просит посадку) – Lenfilm; Director: G. Nikulin
• 1962 — Shore Leave (Увольнение на берег) – Mosfilm; Director: F. Mironer
• 1963 — Penalty Kick (Штрафной удар) – M. Gorkii Studio; Director: V. Dorman
• 1963 — The Alive and the Dead (Живые и мёртвые) – Mosfilm; Director: A.Stolper
• 1965 — On Tomorrow's Street (На завтрашней улице) – Mosfilm; Director: F. Filipov
• 1965 — Our House (Наш дом) – Mosfilm; Director: V. Pronin
• 1965 — The Cook (Стряпуха) – Mosfilm; Director: E. Keosyan
• 1966 — I Was Born in Childhood (Я родом из детства) – Belarusfilm; Director: V. Turov
• 1966 — Sasha-Sashen'ka (Саша-Сашенька) – Belarusfilm; Director: V. Chetverikov
• 1967 — Vertical (Вертикаль) – Odessa Film Studio; Director: Stanislav Govorukhin & B. Durov
• 1967 — Short Liaisons (Короткие встречи) – Odessa Film Studio; Director: K.Muratova
• 1967 — War Under the Rooftops (Война под крышами) – Belarusfilm; Director: V. Turov
• 1968 — Intervention (Интервенция) – Lenfilm; Director: G.Poloka
• 1968 — Taiga's Master (Хозяин тайги) – Mosfilm; Director: V. Nazarov
• 1968 — Two Comrades Were Serving (Служили два товарища) – Mosfilm; Director: E. Karyelov
• 1969 — Dangerous Tour (Опасные гастроли) – Odessa Film Studio; Director: G. Yungvald-Hilkevich
• 1969 — White Blast (Белый взрыв) – Odessa Film Studio; Director: S. Govorukhin
• 1972 — The Fourth (Четвёртый) – Mosfilm; Director: A. Stolper
• 1973 — The Bad Good Man (Плохой хороший человек) – Lenfilm; Director: I. Heifits
• 1974 — The Only Road (Единственная дорога) – Mosfilm & Titograd Studio; Director: V. Pavlovich
• 1975 — The Only One (Единственная) – Lenfilm; Director: I. Heifits
• 1975 — The Escape of Mr. McKinley (Бегство мистера Мак-Кинли) – Mosfilm; Director: M. Shveitser
• 1976 — A Tale of How Tzar Pyotr Married His 'Arap' (Сказ про то, как царь Пётр арапа женил) – Mosfilm; Director: Alexander Mitta
• 1977 — They're Together (Они вдвоём) – Mafilm; Director: M. Mészáros
• 1979 — The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (Место встречи изменить нельзя); directed by Stanislav Govorukhin
• 1979 — Little Tragedies (Маленькие трагедии); directed by Mikhail Shveytser

Bibliography[link]

• Wladimir Wyssozki. Aufbau Verlag 1989 (DDR) : Zerreißt mir nicht meine silbernen Saiten....
• Vysotsky, Vladimir (1990): Hamlet With a Guitar. Moscow, Progress Publishers. ISBN 5-01-001125-5
• Vysotsky, Vladimir (2003): Songs, Poems, Prose. Moscow, Eksmo. ISBN
• Vysotsky, Vladimir / Mer, Nathan (trans) (1991): Songs & Poems. ISBN 0-89697-399-9
• Vysotsky, Vladimir (1991): I Love, Therefore I Live. ISBN 0-569-09274-4
• Vlady, Marina (1987): Vladimir ou Le Vol Arrêté. Paris, Ed. Fayard. ISBN 2-213-02062-0 (Vladimir or the Aborted Flight)
• Влади М. Владимир, или Прерванный полет. М.: Прогресс, 1989.
• Vlady, Marina / Meinert, Joachim (transl) (1991): Eine Liebe zwischen zwei Welten. Mein Leben mit Wladimir Wyssozki. Weimar, Aufbau Verlag. ISBN

Books by Vladimir Vysotsky[link]

• Novel about Girls (roman o devochkah)
• Vacation in Vienna (Venskie kanikulyi)

Discography[link]

Lifetime[link]

• Алиса в стране чудес / Alice in Wonderland (1977) [2 vinyls]
  Musical play, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland,
  with Klara Rumyanova, Vladimir Vysotsky, Vsevolod Abdulov.
  Lyrics and music: Vladimir Vysotsky

Posthumous releases[link]

France[link]

• Le Monument (1995) [CD]
• Le Vol Arrêté (2000) [CD]

Germany[link]

• Wir drehen die Erde (1993) [CD]
• Lieder vom Krieg (1995) [CD]

Russia[link]

• Песни / Songs (1980) [LP] Melodiya
  • Collection of songs published shortly after his death. [Melodiya Stereo C60-14761.2]
• Sons Are Leaving For Battle (1987) [double LP] Melodiya
  • War songs. Archive recordings from between 1960–1980. [Melodiya MONO M60 47429 008/006]
• На концертах Владимира Высоцкого / At Vladimir Vysotsky's concerts
  • 01, 02, 03, ... 21 (1986–1990) [12" vinyl]
• Marina Vlady / Vladimir Vysotsky (1996) [CD] [Melodiya]

• MP3 Kollektsiya: Vladimir Vysotsky [SoLyd Records]
  Concert and Studio recordings
  • Disk 1
  • Disk 2
  • Disk 3
  • Disk 4 (period 1979–1980) (2002) [CD: MP3 192 kBit/s]

• Platinovaya Kollektsiya: Vladimir Vysotsky (2003) [2 CDs]

See also[link]

• Ethnic Russian music
• Aleksey Vysotsky

References[link]