Vladimir Vissotski

Origins and early life

Vladimir Vysotsky was born in Moscow on 25 January 1938 to a Jewish father, Semyon Vladimirovich Vysotsky, born Volfovich, a career Red Army officer from Kyiv, and to a Russian mother, Nina Seryogina, a translator; no conversion is recorded on the paternal side, and it is that parent through whom the site records him. He spent part of his childhood with his father's unit in occupied Germany, studied engineering for a term, then trained at the Moscow Art Theatre school, and in 1964 joined the Taganka Theatre, where he became the defining actor of his generation, above all as Hamlet in Yuri Lyubimov's production, which he played for a decade in jeans with a guitar.

What made him a national figure was not the stage but the songs: hundreds of them, sung in a rasping voice to his own guitar, about the war his parents' generation had fought, about prisoners, miners, mountaineers, drunks and ordinary people, written in a Russian that was both slangy and exact.

Work and career

The state never allowed him a proper record; the songs spread instead on home-made tape copies, magnitizdat, passed hand to hand until they were known in every corner of the Soviet Union. He was never a declared dissident and never a member of the party, and the authorities tolerated him uneasily; his marriage to the French actress Marina Vlady let him travel abroad. He drank and used morphine, and he died in Moscow on 25 July 1980, at forty-two, during the Olympic Games; despite an official silence, an enormous crowd came to his funeral.