Vladimir Vysotsky: Man of the People

Vladimir Vysotsky wrote more than seven hundred songs and poems and played iconic roles in theater and film. He was one of the few Soviet people who could travel around the world freely. But was his life as easy and cloudless as it might seem at first glance? He always lived by extremes and went straight ahead, never acknowledging moderation in anything. He only lived forty-two years.

But even during his lifetime, and forty years after his death, his biography remains the subject of fierce disputes. This book is another attempt to understand and unravel some facets of this unique personality—and above all, to try to answer questions: what made him who he was, where that tragic strain comes from in his songs, and in his poems—where the pulsating, bared nerve is…

His thoughts and memories about Vladimir Vysotsky, and how they relate to different aspects of his life and work, are shared by the poet’s cousin Irina Vysotskaya; his colleagues in the acting world Larisa Luzhina and Nikolay Burlayev; film screenwriter Ilya Rubinstein; director and scriptwriter Andrey Levitsky; editor-in-chief of the journal “Our Contemporary” Stanislav Kunyaev; rock musician Alexander F. Sklyar; poet and literary scholar Konstantin Kedrov; sculptor and artist Grigory Pototsky, and many others…