I gulp down the haze, I drink the wind

[tilly_stratford]

With my mother's combined love for Mikhail Baryshnikov's looks and Lionel Richie's music, by the time I was ten I'd watched the movie White Nights - gosh, I don't even know - many times. Never mind I didn't know anything about the Soviet Union or were even that proficient at reading subtitles at the time, so mostly I remember being terribly bored by all the dialogue but always looking forward to the dance numbers.

So tonight I decided to rewatch it, for the first time in twelve years, and for the first time with an understanding of what the plot was about.

Well the story is told in very broad strokes, Baryshnikov is a somewhat wooden actor, Gregory Hines is terribly good at crying, Helen Mirren is as always the classiest person around - and then I heard a piece of music that made me drop the piece of chocolate I was holding: Vysotsky!

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It wasn't a moment of "Go me, I recognized this foreign song" (Vladimir Vysotsky's Koni, usually known in English as 'Steadfasty horses', and which I often sing to myself in Swedish as 'Mina hästar'), it was a revelation.

You might know how Vysotsky's music is the world to me. When I first (!) heard it one cold autumn morning at the Academy I wrote in this journal that I knew how Dorian Gray felt at the beginning of the book when Lord Henry changes his entire worldview during one conversation. Of all the academic papers I've written, I don't think I've ever again researched with such gusto as when I wrote about the interpretation of subversive Vysotsky songs.

And then, turns out Vysotsky was part of my childhood and I never realized! A small part, granted, but perhaps it was the seed that would give me such joy in my adulthood.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_grayswandir_/]

Random story: a Russian friend of mine introduced me to Vysotsky's music some eight or nine years ago, at a time when I was beta-reading a Les Miserables fanfic for her. She linked me to this website where you could download hundreds of his songs for free (they're gone now, alas), and I listened to a ton of them, and found one in particular that I really liked*. I didn't know much Russian at all at the time, so I asked my friend if she'd translate it. She wrote back to me and said, "Holy god, why that song? That's the exact song that the fanfic you're proofreading for me was inspired by!" It was really weird. And there's no way I could have known, because the song is about a WWII fighter pilot, and her fanfic was about... a 19th century French police inspector. Really weird.

Anyway, Vysotsky is amazing. :) I still think it's strange that he's so popular in Norway, though!

*This one, but ignore the weird video game cgi someone decided to put with it... :P

[tilly-stratford.livejournal.com]

:O That's some coincidence! And I hadn't heard that song before, so thanks for the link.

I still think it's strange that he's so popular in Norway, though!

Ah, sorry if I've given that impression; Sadly, he's really not. He's familiar to anyone who's attended the Norwegian Humanistic Academy, like I have (though that means only sixty students a year), and we do have a few artists in Scandinavia who perform his music, but I'm not even sure they make a living off it. From the concerts I've attended it seems it's a very underground thing.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_grayswandir_/]

Well, still, I'm surprised you've got performers that do his songs in translation. I mean, maybe people do that in America too, and I've just never heard about it, but it seems to me like anybody doing Vysotsky stuff in America would have to be a Russian doing the songs in Russian, and non-Russians are unlikely to have ever heard of him. We've never even talked about him in my Russian classes, except one class where students were supposed to pick their favorite Russian songs to share on YouTube, and somebody in the class played "Koni." (My Russian friends online, on the other hand, are all in love with him. Can't blame them! ;)