The Magical Chorus

loyal follower of the Stanislavsky Method, and at the age of forty-five he suddenly threw off all that baggage. How did it happen? Lyubimov never bothered to explain.

His productions at the Taganka combined into one motley but effective whole Meyerhold’s biomechanics, Vakhtangov’s expressionist miseen-scene, and Tairov’s songs and pantomime meshed with circus, shadow theater, moving sets, and snatches of avant-garde music. The complex theatrical score that Lyubimov had in his head like an inspired conductor unfolded before astounded audiences, unused to such art, helping to deliver the dissident subtext that existed in almost every work he produced, be it a staging of John Reed’s reportage about the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, a montage of poems dear to Lyubimov’s heart (by Voznesensky, Mayakovsky, or Yevtushenko), or an unorthodox Hamlet in Pasternak’s translation.

The audiences took delight in unearthing all the director’s hints. The authorities also understood that Lyubimov was playing cat and mouse with them, but how could they catch him out? They certainly tried. For instance, at the deliberations by the Moscow Culture Administration’s acceptance committee over Lyubimov’s production about Mayakovsky, the cultural bureaucrats were outraged that in the play Lenin “criticized the poet. And Lenin’s text is disrespectfully pronounced through a window above which hangs the letter M, like over a toilet.”³

Whenever the threat of a ban for “incorrect associations” hung over a production, Lyubimov managed to get through to the top, including Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov, and often they supported the director—to some extent. Since open political discussion was impossible, Lyubimov’s theater had turned into an influential public forum, comparable to the early Moscow Art Theater of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko or Meyerhold’s revolutionary theater.

The play Anti-Worlds was based on the poetry of Voznesensky and was performed almost a thousand times at the Taganka. The poet recalled that he had looked around at one of Lyubimov’s premieres and saw “sitting in close proximity the out-of-favor Academician Sakharov, dissidents, Politburo member Dmitri Polyansky, a cosmonaut, an underground millionaire, a liberal Party apparatchik, social lionesses, and students rustling pages of samizdat.”⁴ Voznesensky maintained that many of the ideas of perestroika were born at Lyubimov’s theater. It may be an exaggeration, but not a wild one.

The Taganka Theater’s influence on a mass audience was increased many times over by the enormous popularity of its young leading actor, Vladimir Vysotsky. His fame, comparable only to Chaliapin’s before the revolution, was not for his theater roles (even though he was an impressive Hamlet) but his songs, which he performed to his own guitar accompaniment, and of which there were several hundred.

Vysotsky, with his older contemporaries Bulat Okudzhava and Alexander Galich, created the phenomenon of magnitizdat (bootleg copies of banned music, on the analogy of samizdat) when the USSR began manufacturing tape recorders in the 1960s. The domestic unofficial chansonniers, who had no records and were not played on radio, much less television, and were only berated in the newspapers, were known as “bards,” and hundreds of thousands of copies of their songs circulated throughout the Soviet Union. Some of them had more in common with their French brethren, for instance, the delicate and slightly sentimental Okudzhava, who continued the old tradition of Russian Gypsy romance and the best of Vertinsky on contemporary material, while Vysotsky was much more of a Soviet phenomenon.

Okudzhava had served in the front lines and he sang of war and love like a true Russian officer, with a shade of aristocratic nostalgia (even though he had joined the Party in 1956, in the period of Thaw hopes). Despite his dandyish mustache, he was no fop, nor did he drink much, unlike Galich and Vysotsky, who were alcoholics and drug users. But Galich was distinguished by a noble mien, unlike Okudzhava and Vysotsky, who seemed quite ordinary when not performing in their jackets with upturned collars, sometimes resembling sparrows with their feathers fluffed.

But once they had a guitar in their hands, Okudzhava and Vysotsky were instantly transformed. I heard both frequently, and every time I marveled at the metamorphosis: quiet Okudzhava, seemingly created for intimate singing in small cellars, held large audiences in sway with his sorrowful ballads; Vysotsky turned into a hoarsely shouting rock star with twisted mouth, sweaty brow, and taut neck tendons who could conquer the most reluctant audience.

The incredible fame of Vysotsky, Okudzhava, Galich, and a few other Russian bards never crossed beyond the borders of the Russian-language world. I remember persuading the New York Times rock critic to attend a Vysotsky concert in New York—he was baffled, finding the music and the performance primitive and the energy affected.

Okudzhava, with his refined balance between the slightly surreal lyrics and lilting melodies, made a better impression on the Western audiences. Still, he and the more political Galich remained purely Russian phenomena, and in the nation’s collective consciousness, their best songs continue to resonate powerfully. Like Vertinsky’s chansons, they are the diary of the twentieth-century Russian soul.

In the last third of the century Vysotsky was more popular in Russia than the Beatles and Elvis Presley combined. His songs were about athletes, soldiers, and criminals, and because of that many of his fans wrongly believed that Vysotsky had fought in a penal battalion and served time in a prison camp. He avoided openly political themes, unlike Galich, who was forced out of the country for his anti-Sovietism.

Galich’s songs about winos, waitresses, prostitutes, and minor clerks continued the satirical tradition of Zoshchenko’s stories, his characters having a lower social status and vocabulary than those in Okudzhava’s songs. Vysotsky descended even lower, into the criminal underworld.

Prison-camp songs were popular in Russia back at the turn of the century. The new impulse for their dissemination came, paradoxically, from the lofty stage of the Moscow Art Theater’s 1902 production of Gorky’s Lower Depths, where a prison song, “The Sun Rises and Sets,” was performed; afterward, thousands of gramophone records of this ballad were played in every corner of the empire.

In the Soviet period, the folklore of the criminal milieu went underground until the post-Stalin amnesties that freed huge numbers of inmates who injected prison camp culture into daily life. Vysotsky moved it to the center of the national discourse, even though officially it did not exist. He did it with the utmost conviction and seriousness, without a hint of condescension or commercialization, and that brought him widespread admiration, even as his songs made The Lower Depths look like nursery school.

Vysotsky, Okudzhava, and Galich outraged and delighted people on the left and the right. I remember the composer Vassily Solovyov-Sedoy, whose many hits include the ever-popular “Moscow Nights,” frothing at the mouth as he denounced Vysotsky as an immoral author who corrupted Soviet youth. Okudzhava was also seen by the authorities as an individualist, dangerous for Soviet morality, and Galich as openly anti-Soviet, but Vysotsky’s message bordered on anarchy. The official poet Yevgeny Dolmatovsky was direct: “Make no mistake: that’s not a guitar in his hands but a terrible weapon.”⁵

That is why the death and funeral of Vysotsky at age forty-two in 1980—he was destroyed by alcohol and drugs—turned into a political event on a national scale, comparable to the funerals of Leo Tolstoy, Esenin, and Pasternak. Despite the total information vacuum, tens of thousands of people bearing flowers and guitars and playing the singer’s tapes came to the Taganka Theater, where the coffin was arranged for a viewing. People wept.