Moscow Coopts Vysotsky

...He would undoubtedly have enjoyed a statement by the director of Melodiya thanking the countless amateur collectors for preserving the tapes of his songs...

...patriotic and sports themes...

...It will be interesting to see whether all of his works are eventually made available, especially those that mocked anti-Semites, sympathized with common criminals in the Gulag and with inmates of psychiatric hospitals, and dared to expose other long forbidden subjects...

...Vysotsky gave a number of concerts in the West, and in 1979 appeared in the United States and Canada...

...Vysotsky lived a luxurious albeit frenetic existence...

...He wrote and set to music over 600 poems, some done in hilarious street slang, others in the form of Aesopian allegory...

...He may have been protected by admirers in high places, but his position was always shaky...

...Rachlin noted that someone had placed a message at the poet's bier reading, "What a pity that the wrong ones are dying...

...Vysotsky's friends and his widow, Marina Vlady, are pleased that he has finally received official recognition, but they resent his being coopted for political purposes...

...Often he and Marina stayed in her Paris apartment...

...For the concert itself he carefully chose some of his more innocuous songs, because his SRO audience included several vigilant Soviet UN officials...

...Vysotsky's burial place in Vagankovskoye Cemetery, not far from the center of Moscow, has become a shrine for ordinary Russians...

...Gene and Gloria Donen Sosin, a husband and wife team, write and lecture on contemporary Soviet culture...

...Vysotsky was admired by an entire generation of Soviet citizens-"from academician to alcoholic, " as one Russian put it-for his macho personality, gravelly voice and hard-drinking habits (after one binge he was miraculously revived from three minutes of clinical death...

...But even his belated recognition has its controversial aspects...

...Accompanying himself on the guitar, he performed these works at semiofficial gatherings and private meetings...

...Vysotsky's sudden death from a heart attack at age 42 was ignored by the Soviet media, except for one short paragraphin Vechernyaya Moskva, the Moscow evening newspaper...

...He had a comfortable apartment in Moscow, and was allowed to travel abroad frequently, an uncommon privilege even among artists...

...In one that has come to symbolize him, he implores the skittish horses pulling him headlong in flight: A little more slowly, my horses, I beg you, don't gallop along...

...BELATED RECOGNITION Moscow Coopts Vysotsky BY GENE ANDGLORIA DONEN SOSIN Vladimir Vysotsky, the unofficial national hero of the Soviet people during Leonid I. Brezhnev's reign, is at last being officially honored by Mikhail S. Gorbachev's regime...

...It was this song that Mikhail Baryshnikov, his close friend, chose to interpret in dance during a poignant scene in the film White Nights...

...Until the end of my life I will do everything I can to make sure his rich creative heritage is published, and the real truth about him is known...

...Amid the events marking the 70th anniversary of the Revolution last November, Vysotsky was awarded a USSR State Prize, the nation's highest cultural honor...

...The proceeds from the concert are slated to help establish a Vysotsky museum near the Taganka Theater, but this has not yet been approved by the authorities...

...A middle-aged man called him "the conscience of our generation...

...Only a few of his songs were produced by Melodiya, the State recording company, and none of his verses was published...

...Let me finish my life and my song...

...Soviet astronomers have even given the name " Vladvysotsky" to a newly discovered small planet...

...He did not fashion himself a dissident...

...His friend, the poet Andrei Voznesensky, was in charge of the program, which included some of Vysotsky's songs and reminiscences by fellow actors...

...While in New York he confided to an émigré writerfriend that the authorities in Moscow were "twisting my soul...

...Articles about him have appeared in the press (one noted that "talent should be nurtured and supported while the bearer is still alive...

...Vysotsky's canonization by a State that viewed him as a nuisance while he was alive is an irony that would have piqued the poet's satirical impulse...

...Her book, Vladimir, or the Interrupted Flight, recently issued in Paris, has been judged "too frank" by the Soviet press and will probably not appear in the USSR any time in the near future...

...During the 1960s and '70s Vysotsky was rarely permitted to appear in concerts, or on TV and radio...

...Several members of the friendly crowd played his works on tape recorders, and a few imitated him on their guitars...

...He struck responsive chords among old and young, workers and intellectuals, even Communist Party bigwigs...

...During a visit to a construction site hundreds of miles to the east, for example, the hardhats greeted him by blaring his songs on their portable recorders and shouting "Volodya...

...They were taped by his fans on their small cassette recorders and then disseminated clandestinely throughout the country...

...On January 25, the 50th anniversary of Vysotsky's birth, the cemetery overflowed with thousands of people who stood waiting patiently in the freezing cold to place flowers at his grave...

...Nevertheless, tens of thousands of mourners filled Taganka Square opposite the theater, the site of his funeral...

...He was particularly idolized, however, for his irreverent satirical songs about everyday Soviet life in the Brezhnev era...

...The poet's trenchant observations have obvious propaganda value for a campaign aimed at eradicating the stagnation and corruption left over from the Brezhnev era...

...What fidgety horses they gave me...

...Since Gorbachev's assumption of power in 1985, Vysotsky has been posthumously transformed into a State-sanctioned hero...

...When we made our own pilgrimage there one warm Sunday last October, we had to elbow our way through the people gathered around the flower-covered grave...

...Before his performance at Queens College in New York City, we had an opportunity to chat with him at a small reception...

...He once wrote: "Poets walk barefoot on a knife's edge, and cut their naked souls to ribbons...

...But his mirror of Soviet reality was too glaringly truthful to please the pre-glasnost Establishment...

...In coming to terms with Vysotsky's enduring popularity, the Gorbachev leadership is simultaneously exploiting it to promote perestroïka...

...Samuel Rachlin, a correspondent for Danish television at the time, captured the extraordinary event on film, including frank comments from the public cherishing Vysotsky for telling it "like it is...

...In an obvious reference to Brezhnev's time, Voznesensky spoke of the "period of lies" that was "made more bearable because it was also the period of Vysotsky...

...Perhaps his alcoholism, chain-smoking and attraction to drugs stemmed from the stress of leading a double life as an approved matinee idol and a semiunderground debunker of official pretensions...

...If they are, maybe not too many years from now when Soviet schoolchildren ask their teachers who Leonid I. Brezhnev was, the reply will be: "He was a minor political figure in the era of Vladimir Vysotsky, in which we all still live...

...On the eve of his 50th birthday an officially sponsored sellout concert was held in the Luzhniki Sports Stadium in Moscow...

...You're one of us...

...What especially disappointed him was never being accepted into the Union of Writers or the Union of Composers...

...Back home, the songs Vysotsky sang at private gatherings often expressed his desperation and sense of impending death...

...Although Vysotsky is relatively unknown in the West, from 1964 until his death in 1980 he was a film star and a leading actor in Moscow's avant-garde Taganka Theater, playing such roles as Hamlet and Bertolt Brecht's Galileo...

...I'll sing a few lines, give the horses a drinkLinger one moment more at the brink...

...This year he has been commemorated with still greater fanfare...

...He was married to Marina Vlady, abeautiful French film actress of Russian parentage...

...a number of songs dealt with subjects acceptable to the authorities (e.g...

...In a telephone interview with TASS in November, Marina said: "Vladimir was above all a human being with all his passions, problems, difficulties, and shortcomings...

...In addition, books, record albums, documentary films, and a number of long TV series celebrating him are now being produced...

...They stared reverently at the large bronze statue of the poet, a guitar strapped behind his back and two horses' heads flowing from his shoulders almost like wings (an allusion to the quoted song...

...The poet's fame spread far beyond Moscow...

...He drove his own Mercedes, smoked Marlboros incessantly and was into drugs as well as alcohol...