Among the numerous poems of Vladimir Vysotsky, there are those in which a romantic perception of the world sounds. A romantic poet, an uncompromising maximalist in his demands on people, Vysotsky looked for heroes who would engage in combat with the elements, capable of accomplishing feats in the name of lofty goals. That is why so often in his songs situations arose that required a person to exert extreme spiritual and physical strength.
Many of Vysotsky’s songs are dedicated to mountains and mountaineering. One of the climbing songs is “Song of a Friend,” written in 1966. It talks about real male friendship that arises between people in the mountains.
If a friend
Suddenly it turned out
Neither friend nor enemy,
If you don't understand right away,
Whether he is good or bad,
Pull the guy to the mountains -
Mountains give you the opportunity to check what kind of person is next to you, how reliable he is:
If he walked with you
Like going into battle
At the top stood - intoxicated -
So, as for yourself,
Rely on him.
Mountains as a symbol of dreams, an unattainable search, appear in the poems: “This is not a plain for you here” and “Farewell to the mountains.” The following lines testify to Vysotsky’s love for the mountains:
In the bustle of cities and traffic flows
We are returning - there is simply nowhere to go
Get away! –
And we go down from the conquered peaks,
Leaving in the mountains
Leaving your heart in the mountains...
While in the mountains on the set of the film “Vertical,” Vysotsky realized that better than mountains, “the only thing better than mountains that you have never been to before... “Vysotsky dedicated the song “To the Top” to the beautiful climber Mikhail Khergiani, who died in the Alps. He was not afraid of danger:
You are walking along the edge of a glacier,
Without taking your eyes off the top
The mountains are sleeping, breathing in the clouds,
Exhaling snow avalanches...
In the song “Execution of a Mountain Echo,” Vysotsky describes an echo responding to human screams. It can help a person who is in trouble and needs help. And if his moans and screams are not heard by anyone, the echo will pick up the cry for help and amplify it many times over. But people did not want to hear the echo and “came to kill, to silence the living gorge.” They shot the echo and stones fell from the mountains, which Vysotsky compares to tears:
By morning they shot the quiet mountain,
Mountain echo -
And tears flowed like stones from the wounded rocks!..
Vysotsky's lyrics are characterized by creative interest to the world of elements, to the internal dialectics of nature, integral part which is man with his joys and sufferings. And no matter how cruel life is, a person’s courage and perseverance are always rewarded: In the poem “White Silence”, in the conditions of the far North, a person matures and grows stronger:
...Our throat will let go of silence,
Our weakness will melt like a shadow, -
And a reward for the nights of despair
There will be an eternal polar day!
Many of Vysotsky’s songs sounded the motif of anxiety, unsettledness, and searching for one’s place in life. The lyrical hero of the poem “Sail” reminds us of Lermontov’s hero in the poem of the same name. He is just as free, rebellious and restless:
Many summers -
To everyone who sings in their sleep!
All parts of the world
They may lie on the bottom
All continents
Can burn in fire -
Only all this -
Not for me!
Sail! The sail was torn!
I repent! I repent! I repent!
In one of his poems, Vysotsky said: “I, of course, will return, full of friends and dreams. Of course, I’ll sing, he won’t come for even six months... “He kept his word, turning to us, his contemporaries. However, he never left us, having entered our lives firmly and forever. More than twenty years have passed since Vysotsky is no longer with us, but his voice still sounds with the same strength and utmost sincerity, making the heart beat anxiously.
Vysotsky's time has not passed. Today we not only listen to Vysotsky - we read him and see the literary path that he traveled. We see the place he occupied in literature. The Vysotsky phenomenon is one of the most striking and original phenomena in the cultural life of Russia in the 20th century.
Vysotsky Vladimir Semenovich (1938, Moscow - 1980), Russian poet, artist. In Vysotsky’s works, social protest against injustice was clearly felt; he was deeply concerned about the restriction of creative freedom in a totalitarian society. For a long time, his poems and songs could not reach the audience through the cordons of bans and censorship corrections. This explains the fact that during Vysotsky’s lifetime his works were not published. It was only in 1981 that his first poetry collection, “Nerve,” was released. However, Vysotsky’s work was widely known from tape recordings from concerts
Vysotsky is known primarily as a poet-bard. However, his activities in the field of art are not limited to poetry. Vysotsky worked in the theater, acted in films, for many films (“I come from childhood” (1966), “Vertical” (1967), “Master of the Taiga” (1968), “Intervention” (1968, restored in 1987), “ Dangerous Tours" (1969), "Ivan da Marya" (1974), "Once Alone" (1974)) wrote songs.
In parallel with his work in theater and cinema, often in direct connection with it, V. Vysotsky brightly reveals his poetic talent, creates numerous poems and songs that have become widely known, meeting the spiritual needs of people and the needs of the time.
About the birth of a new one genre of "art song"", the originality of this artistic phenomenon in Vysotsky is evidenced by his own words, as well as the statements and characteristics of his contemporaries. In his speeches, Vysotsky repeatedly emphasized the difference between an author’s song and a pop song, and on the other hand, from an “amateur” song, believing that the former is always based on his own, original poetic creativity, inseparable from a purely individual, author’s, “live” performance that reveals the subtlest semantic and musical-rhythmic shades of poetry.
In 1980, at one of the concerts, he said: “... when I heard the songs of Bulat Okudzhava, I saw that my poems could be enhanced with music, melody, rhythm. So I also began to compose music for my poems.” As for the specifics of V. Vysotsky’s song creativity, then, according to the correct remark of R. Rozhdestvensky, he created “songs-roles”, organically getting used to the images of the characters - the heroes of his poems. Perhaps one of the most successful definitions of this specificity comes from the pen of the Taganka Theater actress Alla Demidova: “Every song of his is one-man show, where Vysotsky was both a playwright, a director, and a performer" And - we must certainly add: first of all - this is a poet m.
He was able to create bright, colorful artistic images, typical characters of his contemporaries, and rose to a deep psychological perception of human nature. The heroes of Vysotsky’s songs are people from various social strata. These include front-line soldiers, criminals, and ordinary people. Artistic images, on behalf of which the conversation was conducted with the listener, turned out to be so visible and expressive for the poet that he often received letters where people asked what regiment he served in and what prison he was in, although in real life the poet was never convicted, and during the war he was still a child.
Due to the fact that in the poet’s work ironic, humorous songs coexist with serious lyrical monologues, the genre palette of his works is quite wide. However, Vysotsky gravitates towards the ballad, a genre that successfully combines a lyrical beginning with a detailed epic plot. In the autobiographical “Ballad of Childhood” (1975), the poet recreates easily recognizable realities of the war and post-war era: the corridor system of Moscow communal apartments, air raid warning, the long-awaited victory and, finally, the metro construction as a symbol of social change. The society, wounded by numerous denunciations and repressions, needed not only material progressive changes, but also a change in the ideological climate. The victorious people no longer wanted and could not be prisoners in their own country. A single lyrical hero is strong, strong-willed person with clear moral guidelines, for whom the world is divided into black and white, without halftones, is connected by a cycle of ballads written for the film “Robin Hood's Arrows” (1975). One feels that the author was close to this image of a noble robber, somewhat cruel, but also a generous hero. The main idea of the cycle is the affirmation of universal human values, unchanged at all times. The specific historical principle in ballads is combined with the universal:
After the poet’s death, publications of his works began to appear one after another in periodicals, and then individual books: “Nerve” (two editions: 1981 and 1982), “Fasicky Horses” (1987), “Favorites” (1988), “ Four quarters of the way" (1988), "Poetry and prose" (1989), "Works in 2 volumes." (from 1990 to 1994 there were seven editions) and a number of others. In 1993, “Collected Works in 5 volumes” began to be published.
Vysotsky did not like it when his early songs were talked about as about thieves, courtyards; he preferred to associate them with the tradition of urban romance. His choice at an early stage of this particular form and genre seems not at all accidental, but completely natural and meaningful. Here are his words: “I started with songs that many for some reason called courtyard songs, street songs. It was such a tribute to urban romance, which was completely forgotten at that time. And people probably had a craving for such a simple, normal conversation in a song, a craving for not simplified, but rather simple human intonation. They were simple-minded, these first songs, and there was one, but fiery passion in them: man’s eternal desire for truth, love for his friends, woman, close people.” Of course, in these songs there are elements of stylization, especially noticeable in the recreation of street flavor, and in other cases - the melodies of urban or gypsy romance. But the main thing in them is the appeal to a living, unemasculated word, taken from life, from colloquial speech. An essential quality of Vysotsky’s style, already at an early stage, was immersion in the folk (everyday and folklore) element of speech, its creative processing, and fluency in it.
It was this quality that gave him the opportunity already in the first half of the 60s, especially closer to the middle, to create such wonderful examples of his song creativity as “Silver Strings”, “On Bolshoy Karetny”, “Penal Battalions”, “Mass Graves” " Actually, the last two songs already seem to open the next big and important period in creative evolution poet.
In the mid and second half of the 60s, the themes of Vysotsky’s poems and songs were noticeably expanded and the genres of Vysotsky’s poems and songs diversified. Following the songs of the military cycle, which included “Song about the Hospital”, “Everyone Gone to the Front”, “sports” appear (“Song about a sentimental boxer”, “Song about a short-distance skater who was forced to run a long distance”), “ cosmic" (“In the distant constellation Tau Ceti”), “climbing” (“Song about a friend”, “This is not a plain for you”, “Farewell to the mountains”), “farewell” (“About a wild boar”, “Fairy-tale song about evil spirits"), "sea" ("Ships stand still - and go on course...", "Sail. Song of anxiety"), parody-satirical ("Song about prophetic Oleg", "Lukomorye is no more. Anti-fairy tale"), lyrical ("Crystal House...") and many, many others.
The end of the 60s turned out to be especially fruitful for Vysotsky. It was then that he wrote magnificent songs, created at the limit of emotion and expressiveness, “Save our souls”, “My Gypsy” (“Yellow lights in my dreams...”), “Bathhouse in White”, “Wolf Hunt”, “Song of the Earth”, “Sons Go to Battle”, “Man Overboard”. Regarding “Bathhouse...” and “Wolf Hunt”, in which, in the words of L. Abramova, one senses “going beyond limits” and, perhaps, breakthroughs into genius, it should be added that they were written in 1968, during the filming of the film “Master of the Taiga”, on the Yenisei, in the village of Vyezhy Log, and it was no coincidence that V. Zolotukhin called this period “Boldino autumn” by V. Vysotsky.
In the 70s, Vysotsky’s songwriting developed in breadth and depth. Enriched with ever new signs of living life, strokes and dashes of characters and situations drawn directly from it, without losing soulful lyricism, it acquires the quality of in-depth philosophy, reflection on the main questions of existence.
In very different poems written at the very beginning of the decade (“I am no more - I left the Race...”, “The Pacer’s Run”, “On Fatal Dates and Figures”), one’s own fate and creativity, the fate of the great predecessors and contemporary poets are comprehended. And in the late 70s (“Paradise Apples”, 1978) and in the first half of 1980, including in the very last poems - “And there is ice below and above - I toil between...”, “My sadness, my melancholy” ( author's phonogram July 14, 1980), - the poet turns to thinking about the tragic fate of the people and again about himself, with with good reason coming to the conclusion: “I have something to sing when I appear before the Almighty, / I have something to justify myself to him.”
But, undoubtedly, the brightest takeoff in last decade Vysotsky's creative activity spanned 1972 - 1975. It was then that he wrote the tragic ballad songs “Finicky Horses”, “Tightrope”, “We Rotate the Earth”, “The One Who Didn’t Shoot”, satirical sketches “Police Protocol”, “Victim of Television”, “Comrade Scientists”, genre pictures “Dialogue at the TV”, “Bridesmaids”, autobiographical “Ballad of Childhood”, lyrical and philosophical “Song of Time”, “Ballad of Love”, “Domes”, “Two Fates”, etc.
In addition to the military, or, perhaps more precisely, anti-war theme, the theme of the Motherland-Russia, taken in its present day and distant historical past, occupies an important place in the poet’s work. Russian, Russian motifs and images are pervasive in Vysotsky’s works, but there are some among them where they are expressed with particular clarity.
Concerning love lyrics, then Vysotsky owns magnificent examples of it, created at different stages of his creative path and in the most different forms. Suffice it to name “The Crystal House” (1967), “Song of Two Beautiful Cars” (1968), “Here the paws of the fir trees are shaking in the air...” (1970), “I Love you now...” (1973), etc. .
Responding in his songs to today's events, the poet saw and comprehended them on a large scale, historically and even cosmically: Earth and sky, natural elements, time, eternity, the universe - live in his poems, the present day is inseparable in them from history, the momentary - from the eternal . Hence the spatio-temporal openness, breadth and scale of his poetic world.
At all times, poetry has had a huge influence on social life. The work of poets contributed to spiritual emancipation, revealed human vices, and made us think about the life around us. One of these poets was Vladimir Vysotsky - the personification of the conscience of the people.
Vysotsky's work is a biography of our time. IN a huge number In his poems written in different periods, the poet touched on very important milestones in history. Three main topics occupied significant place in Vysotsky's civil poetry: the Great Patriotic War, the tragedy of the people during the period of Stalin's personality cult, the stupidity and inertia of the Soviet bureaucracy.
Vysotsky's poems about the Great Patriotic War sound with such piercing power, saturated with such burning truth, that it seems as if the author himself had a hard time in the war. The poem “We Rotate the Earth” is amazing. Symbolic image a soldier stops the movement of fascist hordes:
We turned the earth back from the border,
It happened first.
But our battalion commander spun her back,
Pushing off with your foot from the Urals.
It would seem that everything collapsed, disappeared, “the sun went backwards and almost set in the east.” But the “replacement companies on the march” stopped the rotation of the Earth and “spinned” the planet back until they reached Berlin. Of course, the exploits of our soldiers in this war were sung even before Vysotsky, but with what feeling he writes about it! The poet talks about the courage of Russian soldiers in the poem “They grabbed onto the heights...”:
They clung to the heights as if they were their own.
Mortar fire, heavy.
But again we climb, wheezing, on her
Behind the flash of a signal flare.
And shouts of “Hurray!” froze in your mouth
When we swallowed bullets
Seven times we occupied that height,
We left her seven times.
And this height, to which the fighters went on the attack, became for them the crossroads of all destinies and paths, the personification of the Motherland, which must be defended.
In Vysotsky’s works, war appears not as its ceremonial portrait, but as a harsh truth, ugly, cruel, but always true. In the poem “The One Who Shot...” the poet spoke about a soldier who refused to carry out an unjust sentence. In another work, Vysotsky addressed the fate of people from the penal battalion. These soldiers were little pitied at the front and even less looked after. With their bodies they covered the space in front of the enemy’s fortifications and paved the way for other units:
Penalties have one law, one end:
Stab, chop the fascist tramp.
And if you don't catch lead in your chest,
You'll get a medal for bravery.
Until recently, writing about “penalties” was prohibited. But Vysotsky wrote. He wrote about them and about the rifle companies storming nameless heights, and about pilots dying in unequal battles, about battles with alpine riflemen in the mountains, about paratroopers and submariners. War is not only victories, but also blood and death. Since there were dead, it means there were widows and orphans. The poet in his poems managed to convey the melancholy of wives, mothers, brides who saw off their men to war:
The willows are crying for you,
And without your smiles
The rowan trees turn pale and dry...
Vysotsky's poems about the Great Patriotic War are a tribute to memory and respect to those who died for our future. But they died not only at the front. During the cruel and dark years of Stalin's personality cult, millions honest people were shot and sent to prisons and camps. This fate did not escape the participants in the war. The “Great Leader” stated that we have no prisoners, but only traitors. And many former soldiers became “enemies of the people.” Vysotsky openly sympathized with the victims of repression. His poems on this forbidden topic at that time were especially noticeable amid the almost universal silence. In the poem “The Fellow Traveler,” the poet wrote about how they became “enemies of the people.” Two people met on the train and started talking:
My tongue, like a lace, has come untied,
I scolded someone, mourned.
And then they gave me a little business
According to an article of the criminal code.
Calm down - everything will change,
They gave me a deadline and didn’t let me come to my senses.
In “Wolf Hunt” and its sequel, “Hunting from Helicopters,” the author talked about the psychology of people who became guilty without guilt. They understood the horror and unnaturalness of what was happening, but could not rebel:
You lay down on your stomach and removed your fangs,
Even the one, even the one who dived under the flags,
I smelled wolf pits with my paw pads;
The one whom even a bullet couldn’t catch up with, -
He also stood up in fear and lay down - and weakened.
Among Vysotsky’s poems telling about the time of the cult of personality, the poem “Bathhouse in White” occupies a special place. It gives me chills! The plot is simple, but the poet was so able to convey the feelings and thoughts of an innocently convicted person that we feel like participants in the events. Despite the fact that people suddenly became “enemies of the people,” they continued to believe in Stalin:
And then at the quarry, in the swamp,
Having swallowed tears and raw food,
We injected profiles closer to the heart,
So that he can hear hearts beating.
But then there was too much faith and the forest was knocked down. And so, obviously, after Stalin’s death, the former prisoner with a distorted fate increasingly thought that the leader’s profile on his chest was the mark of a criminal on an innocent person.
The poet’s poems about the cruel lessons of history are a poetic requiem to all those innocently convicted and serve as a warning against the danger of repeating “dark times.”
Vysotsky always responded to events taking place in the country. IN difficult years stagnation, when everything new and progressive was suppressed, every honestly spoken word was persecuted, the poet could not come to terms with the surrounding reality, or withdraw into himself. In the poem " an old house"he wrote with pain and bitterness:
Who will answer me - what kind of house is this?
Why in the darkness - like a plague barracks?
The light of the lamps went out, the air poured out...
Have you forgotten how to live?
The main character was looking for “the land where there is light,” but there is no hope for change for the better. The dream of some other life seems naive:
We have never heard of such houses,
We got used to living in the dark for a long time.
From time immemorial we are in evil and whispers
Under the icons in black soot.
The poet repeatedly addressed the question of how difficult it is to preserve oneself, to remain honest amid the surrounding atmosphere of lies and hypocrisy. In “The Microphone Song” Vysotsky said bitter but very true words:
Often we are replaced by others,
So that we do not interfere with lies.
The poet would also be the author of many satirical poems. Vysotsky ridiculed bureaucrats, officials, sycophants, and ordinary people. He was a merciless judge of himself, his own weaknesses and mistakes. This is what gave him the moral right to castigate bureaucrats and tribune phrase-mongers, respectable scoundrels and militant ordinary people with the power of satire. Thus, the poem “Save Our Souls” tells about the fate of sailors dying on a submarine. It reflects the state of our society during the period of Brezhnev’s “timelessness”:
Save our souls!
We are delirious from suffocation.
Save our souls!
Hurry to visit us!
Vysotsky loved his homeland with all his heart. He said: “Without Russia I am nothing!” He suffered for his people, was proud of them, experienced all their hardships, shouted in his poems so that he could be heard, in order to reach the hearts and minds of people. After all, the first collection of his poems, which, unfortunately, saw the light after the poet’s death, was called “Nerve.” The poet's truthful works were read voraciously and caused a wide public response. It was something of a feat. Now we are undergoing a process of renewal in our country, and how we miss Vysotsky! There is an opinion that he was good for his time. I think people like him are needed now just as people of high civic courage were then.
We should first of all highlight the satirical line of Vysotsky’s work, in which he acts as a representative of the legal opposition. In many songs, the poet-bard ridicules the brainless, limited, conservative government that does not know how to rule without the help of a whip.
And the freak is sitting on the freak
And he drives other freaks,
And all this is in front of the people,
Which greets like
And he seems to approve of everything.
Vysotsky exposed the lies of official propaganda. One of his best songs is called “The Parable of Truth and Lies.” These categories are personified and represented in the form of two women. Lies lured the Truth to sleep for the night, divided it, appropriated property and began to pose as the Truth, and the Truth is now being exposed
Vysotsky made it clear that there is no freedom in the country, and denounced the servile situation to which the people are doomed. These motives are evident in the lyrics of the song “Soldiers and the King”:
No, no, the people do not have a difficult role:
Falling to your knees - what a problem! –
The king is responsible for everything
And if not the king, well then – the queen!
Vysotsky had a negative attitude towards those who, due to their conformism, “fell to their knees.” He himself was a very honest man and tried to show that the principle of social justice in the USSR had been violated a long time ago. One of the works creates a genre scene with deep social implications
Vysotsky has not only songs, but also poems not set to music. In the text “Bridges Burnt,” the poet refutes the myth of the heyday that Soviet society is supposedly experiencing and, like Erofeev, depicts historical progress as a movement in a vicious circle
In many other texts, Vysotsky gives realistically specific scenes of life in Brezhnev’s society in order to bring people closer to reality. Images of the “little man” occupy a very large place in his work. Thus, Vysotsky resists the idealization to which this image was subjected in official literature. Constant characters in many songs are drunkards. Of course, such characters in Vysotsky are most often presented with irony, as in the song “Police Protocol.” In these songs, Vysotsky often uses a literary (character) mask: the hero, as if confessing, talking about one of the incidents in his life, reveals himself to the end. The hero of the song “Police Protocol” attributes his guilt to the quality of the vodka.
Quite naturally, motifs arise in Vysotsky’s lyrics self-destruction, self-destruction: The author and the lyrical hero quite consciously build their life as a race over an abyss in order to more acutely experience the disastrous delight of freedom: “I lay down at the bend of being, / Halfway to the abyss, / And my whole story is / the history of a disease,” - writes Vysotsky in the poem “History of a Case” (1977-1978), one of the most autobiographical and most terrible texts of the late period of his work. Self-destruction is a logical payment for the will to integrity in a carnival world that has lost integrity, knows no boundaries between good and evil, truth and lies, filled with many conflicting and incompatible truths. Grotesque “reverse logic”, in which “everything happens in reverse” in relation to what was set
a man of conscious purpose, also turns on the lyrical hero Vysotsky. Vysotsky was never able to reconcile the romantic maximalism of his lyrical hero(“I don’t like”) with his omnivorousness, openness to “other people’s” words and “someone else’s” truth. It is this grotesque combination of the will to integrity with the fundamental rejection of integrity that transforms all poetry
Vysotsky into a kind of “open text” that goes beyond the boundaries of the social era that gave birth to it.
Vysotsky wrote about people in the most extreme situations, looking death in the face, often becoming senseless victims of war, and at the same time especially emphasizing that this “is our, current problem,” which says a lot. Obviously, even then, especially at the beginning of 1980, when troops had just been sent into Afghanistan, he acutely felt and foresaw that the war would remain ours for a long time national tragedy. In one of the key poems of the war cycle, “He Didn’t Return from the Battle” (1969), the tragic death of one of the countless privates Great War is interpreted as an everyday fact that acquires a symbolic meaning. The bitterness of loss, the blood connection between the living and the dead are contrasted here by a picture so serene against the backdrop of the human tragedy of eternal and beautiful nature:
Today spring has escaped, as if from captivity.
By mistake I called out to him:
“Friend, stop smoking!” - and in response - silence...
He didn't return from the battle yesterday.
Our dead will not leave us in trouble,
Our fallen are like sentries...
The sky is reflected in the forest, as in water, -
And the trees are blue.
Nature, and above all the Earth itself, always appears alive and animated in Vysotsky’s poems. In “Song of the Earth” (1969), the title image is revealed as a synonym for the human soul. Hence the personification lines running through the refrain: “... who said that the Earth is dead?
No, she hid for a while...
Who believed that the Earth was burned?
No, she turned black with grief...
The exposed nerves of the Earth
they know unearthly suffering...
After all, the Earth is our soul,
You can’t trample your soul with boots.”
In Vysotsky's poetry, close-ups and general plans are closely interconnected. The cruel truth of the war, the crude reality of what is depicted (“We use the fallen as cover... With our stomachs - through the mud, breathing the stench of the swamps...”) are intended to confirm the high measure of the feat of each and every one in the poem “We Rotate the Earth” (1972). In the poems of the war cycle, the poet achieves special capacity and soulful lyricism in creating poetic image. This is the symbol of the Eternal Flame, coming to life before our eyes and filling with a new object-tangible meaning in the poem “Mass Graves,” which was first heard in the movie “I Come from Childhood” (1966) and with which Vysotsky usually opened his performances and concerts - right up to the very last 1980
And in the Eternal Flame - you see a tank bursting into flames,
Burning Russian huts
Burning Smolensk and the burning Reichstag,
The burning heart of a soldier.
In addition to the military, or, perhaps more precisely, anti-war theme, the theme of the Motherland-Russia, taken in its present day and distant historical past, occupies an important place in the poet’s work. Russian, Russian motifs and images are pervasive in Vysotsky’s works, but among them there are those where they are expressed with particular clarity.
In “Song of the Volga” (“Like the Mother Volga, the river-nurse...”) everything is filled with the freshness of sources of folk poetry. Measured rhythmic and intonation movement, inclusions of archaic vocabulary that create a temporary flavor (“all the ships with goods, plows and boats”), specific verbal forms (“not overstrained”, “not tired”), characteristic inversions in combination of an epithet with a defined word ( “ancient cities”, “ancient walls”, “well done epics”) - this makes it possible to touch the origins of the present day not only of the great Russian river, but also of the Motherland itself.
In “The Tale of How Tsar Peter Married the Arab,” written in 1975 for the film, in which Vysotsky played main role Ibrahim Hannibal, in the song “Domes” (variant title: “Song of Russia”), a purely earthly, emphatically realistic and at the same time mysterious and enigmatic image of the Motherland appears, from the fate of which the poet does not separate his own life.
How will I look today, how will I be able to breathe?!
The air is cool before a thunderstorm, cool and sticky.
What will I sing today, what will I hear?
Prophetic birds sing - yes, everything is from fairy tales.
I stand as if before an eternal riddle,
Before the great and fabulous land -
Before salty and bitter-sour-sweet,
Blue, spring, rye.
Mixed feelings of joy and sadness, melancholy and hope, fascination with mystery and harbingers of the future are embodied by the prophetic birds from ancient greek myths, Christian - Russian and Byzantine legends and apocrypha: Sirin, Alkonost, Gamayun. In the hope they give and, most importantly, in blue sky In Russia, in its copper bells and church domes covered with pure gold, the poet sees the path of his spiritual healing and exaltation.
And this is expressively conveyed in the structure of each stanza - by means of sound organization of the verse, skillfully used anaphors, internal rhymes, various consonances: assonance, alliteration, etc. The final stanza of the poem is especially characteristic in this regard:
A soul overwhelmed by losses and expenses,
A soul erased by the rifts -
If the flap has thinned to the point of bleeding,
I'll patch it up with gold patches -
So that the Lord notices more often!
Always being sharply modern and deeply historical, Vysotsky’s work invariably turns to the “eternal” themes of lyrics - nature, life and death, human fate, art, time... In “Song of Time” (1975), the poet recalls “campaigns, battles and victories”, about the secrets and legends of the past, resurrecting such eternal feelings and concepts as love, friendship, honor, truth, goodness, freedom. This is the key to his consistent appeal to the experience of the past:
We take purity and simplicity from the ancients,
Sagas, fairy tales - we drag from the past, -
Because good remains good -
In the past, future and present!
