Vladimir Vysotsky - Biography

Biography

Vladimir Vysotsky was born in Moscow at the 3rd Meshchanskaya St. (61/2) maternity hospital. His father, Semyon Volfovich (Vladimirovich) (1915–1997), was a Jewish colonel in the Soviet army, originally from Kiev. His mother, Nina Maksimovna, (née Seryogina, 1912–2003) was Russian, and worked as a German language translator. Vysotsky's family lived in a Moscow communal flat in harsh conditions, and had serious financial difficulties. When Vladimir was 10 months old, Nina had to return to her office in the Transcript bureau of the Ministry of Geodesy and Cartography of the USSR (engaged in making German maps available for the Soviet military) so as to help her husband earn their family's living.

Vladimir's extraordinary theatrical inclinations became obvious at a very early age, and were supported by his paternal grandmother Dora Bronshteyn, a theater fan. The boy used to recite poems, standing on a chair and "flinging hair backwards, like a real poet", often using in his public speeches expressions he could hardly have heard at home. Once, at the age of two, when he had tired of the family’s guests’ poetry requests, he, according to his mother, sat himself under the New-year tree with a frustrated air about him and sighed: "You silly tossers! Give a child some respite!" His sense of humor was extraordinary, but often baffling for people around him. A three-year-old could jeer his father in a bathroom with unexpected poetic improvisation ("Now look what's here before us / Our goat’s to shave himself!") or appal unwanted guests with some street folk song, promptly steering them away. Vysotsky remembered those first three years of his life in the autobiographical Ballad of Childhood (Баллада о детстве, 1975), one of his best-known songs.

As WWII broke out, Semyon Vysotsky, a military reserve officer, joined the Soviet army and went to fight the Nazis. Nina and Vladimir were evacuated to the village of Vorontsovka, in Orenburg Oblast where the boy had to spend 6 days a week in a kindergarten and his mother worked for 12 hours a day in a chemical factory. In 1943, both went back to their Moscow apartment at 1st Meschanskaya St., 126. In September 1945, Vladimir joined the 1st class of the #273 Moscow Rostokino region School.

In December 1946, Vysotsky's parents divorced. In 1947 Vladimir went to live for two years with Semyon Vladimirovich and his Armenian wife, Yevge′nya Stepanovna Liholatova, whom the boy called "aunt Zhenya". "We decided that our son would stay with me. Vladimir came to stay with me in January 1947, and my second wife, Yevgenia, became Vladimir's second mother for many years to come. They had much in common and liked each other, which made me really happy," Semyon Vysotsky later remembered. Vladimir spent 1947–1949 with his father (then an army Major) and "aunt Zhenya" at a military base in Eberswalde in the Soviet-occupied section of post-World War II Germany (later East Germany). Here living conditions, compared to those of Nina's communal Moscow flat, were infinitely better; the family occupied the whole floor of a two-storeyed house, and the boy had a room to himself for the first time in his life. In 1949 along with his stepmother Vladimir returned to Moscow. There he joined the 5th class of Moscow's School #128 and settled at Bolshoy Karetny, 15 (where they had to themselves two rooms of a 4-roomed flat), with "auntie Zhenya" (then just 28), a woman of great kindness and warmth whom he later remembered as his second mother. In 1953 Vladimir Vysotsky, now much interested in theater and cinema, joined the Drama courses led by Vladimir Bogomolov. "No one in my family has had anything to do with arts, no actors or directors were there among them. But my mother admired theater and from the earliest age... each and every Saturday I've been taken up with her to watch one play or the other. And all of this, it probably stayed with me," he later reminisced. The same year he's got his first ever guitar, a birthday present from Nina Maksimovna; a close friend (and future well known Soviet poet and bard), Igor Kohanovsky, taught him basic chords. In 1955 Vladimir re-settled into her mother's new home (at 1st Meshanskaya, 76). In June of the same year he graduated from school with five A's.