Three thirds of the way

Twenty years have passed since Vysotsky’s death—exactly as long as his creative life lasted. And almost as much as it took him to create his “backstory,” from birth to the composition of his first song. The current anniversary is a kind of rough test of time, an occasion to reflect on the posthumous period of his fate.

It is now clear that the physical absence of Vladimir Semenovich in our world has a rather weak effect on his popularity and role in the public consciousness. This was to be expected - after all, even during his lifetime, not many contemporaries had the opportunity to sense his presence other than through his voice on film. (And in this sense, he was most real, perhaps, in the first posthumous years - from the funeral, which incidentally pushed aside the scandalous Moscow Olympics, and approximately until the celebration of the 50th anniversary.) Much more noticeable is the absence of new songs by Vysotsky. “It’s a pity that Vysotsky is not here - he would have sung about all this!” - our contemporaries exclaim orally and in writing on a variety of occasions. And they can be understood: the publication of the amazing song encyclopedia of our national life was interrupted twenty years ago at the most interesting place - literally on the eve of the start of drastic changes in it.

However, it is precisely the saturation of his songs with Soviet life, their colorfulness and one hundred percent recognition that would seem to make them vulnerable today, when the features of Soviet Atlantis are more likely to be imagined than actually seen through the thickness of the Lethean waters. Serious publishers of Vysotsky's texts are faced with the need to comment on almost every line - precisely in those very songs that once aroused admiration for their skillful play on the well-known. Who now remembers, for example, not only some kind of “Indo-Pakistan incident”, but also the 1972 World Chess Championship match itself, which served as the occasion for writing the famous diptych? How can I explain to a person who did not live in the Soviet Union what actually happens in the song “Instructions before traveling abroad”? That is, it’s just possible to explain: they say, Soviet citizens traveled abroad only with a special permit, the receipt of which was necessarily accompanied by... etc. But this is like explaining a joke: a person will understand what everyone is laughing at, but he himself He won’t laugh anymore, but if that’s the case, then why does he need this joke? It’s not just everyday realities that have changed—cultural stereotypes, norms, and people’s perceptions of the world have changed, which cannot help but affect the perception of such non-domestic and “timeless” songs as “Fasicky Horses” or “Wolf Hunt.”

However, those who happen to introduce Vysotsky’s songs to modern schoolchildren note with surprise: they themselves, without prompting, laugh in the same places where the first listeners once laughed. Everything has changed, all the cornerstones have crumbled into dust or have shown enviable plasticity - but such an ephemeral thing as the spirit of the people (or, as is now commonly expressed, “national mentality”) has remained by itself.