Late Socialism as a Time of Weeping: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Vladimir Vysotskii

Abstract

Late Socialism as a Time of WeepingThe Life, Death, and Resurrection of Vladimir Vysotskii Joy Neumeyer (bio) In October 1985, a fan of Vladimir Vysotskii attended the unveiling of a new sculpture at his grave. People came dressed up, "as if to a holy place," he noted in his typed observations of the scene. Reflecting on the enormous number of poems on Vysotskii's death that were circulating in both official publications and samizdat, he tried to identify the source of Vysotskii's appeal. Comparing him to a 15th-century prophet who called on the people to pity Mother Russia for her suffering, he determined that Vysotskii performed a similar function: "Vysotskii is the prophet of our age … he gathered all the people's pain in his heart, and his heart was big enough for all!" He concluded that "although for a long time we haven't believed in God or the devil, and all holidays, whether old or new, are just another average day," many people "believe in Vysotskii like the new Christ."1 Crowds had begun to gather at Vysotskii's grave in the days and months after his death during the 1980 Moscow Olympics, when thousands lined up outside the Taganka Theater in a display of grief that some observers compared to the death of Stalin.2 Bearing flowers, food, and tape recorders playing his songs, they formed a cemetery subculture that continued to grow in the coming years. Visitors from across the Soviet Union made special trips [End Page 511] or stopped by on their way through town to pay homage to the bard whose work was considered an "encyclopedia" of Soviet life.3 Meanwhile, evenings of memory, listening parties, poetry readings, and other mourning events proliferated across the country. Recent scholars have reframed traditional views of late socialism as a time of stagnation, calling attention to its dynamic social milieus, consumption habits, and other signs of vibrancy.4 As both a state-backed movie star and a semi-underground singer, Vysotskii performed the paradoxes of late Soviet life, reaping benefits from the system while mocking its absurdities. The huge amount of fan activity surrounding Vysotskii testifies to the period's cultural effervescence, considerable leisure time, and strong social networks. But it also reveals a society that wept as much as it winked. Vysotskii voiced the late Soviet Union's sense of feast in the time of plague, its mixture of relative material comfort and spiritual malaise. In the process of suffocation (udush´e, or hypoxia), which Vysotskii sang about in one of his most beloved songs, the dissipation of oxygen is accompanied by a sense of euphoria. While expressing desperation, he and his fans operated in late socialism's flourishing space between the permitted and the prohibited, where illicit goods were obtained and a good time was had. This article's first half explores Vysotskii's creative output and contemporary image. He specialized in playing rebels who acted out while remaining part of the pack, in a persona that drew on the tension between mass popularity and marginality. His fusion of absurdist humor and maximalist melancholy culminated in his fixation on death and dying. He sang from the perspective of a wolf cornered by hunters, a horseback rider falling off the edge of a precipice, and a corpse witnessing its own funeral. The morbidity of his songs was projected onto his body: his voice was often described as sounding strangled, and he seemed to perform on the brink of death.5 [End Page 512] Against the backdrop of the aging Politburo, Vysotskii's exuberant borderline condition appeared to be an affirmation of individual vigor. Some listeners drew on his lyrics to confess their own ailments, forming an "emotional community" based on the aestheticization of despair.6 The article's second half follows Vysotskii's death and transfiguration, when grieving fans diagnosed Soviet society as sick. Vysotskii brought the era's central tendencies to their culmination and breaking point; the shock of his passing (and its relative absence from the media) exposed the fissures in his image and fed exhaustion with late socialism's atmosphere of irony. By the mid-1980s, Vysotskii's sense of...