Smoke-free bathhouse (Vysotsky's song)
In 1979, it was included, along with other poems by Vysotsky, in the literary almanac Metropol (edited by Vasily Aksyonov, Andrei Bitov, and others), the publication of which was the occasion for a large meeting of the Moscow branch of the Union of Writers of the USSR.
Vysotsky refuses unambiguous signs, the hero of the song is extremely generalized in order to maximally convey the feelings of one of those whose fate was mutilated by the Soviet regime.
According to Evgeny Popov (one of the editors of the collection), Vysotsky took an active part in the preparation of his texts for publication and took very seriously the selection of the best versions, edits and changes of some lines.
[25] According to the artist Mihail Chemiakin, the poet Andrei Voznesensky treated both poems —Smoke bathhouse and Smoke-free bathhouse— rather indulgently: during one of Vysotsky's home concerts, when the guests — Romen Theatre actors- began to shed tears of excitement, he patted the performer on the shoulder, saying "Old man, you're growing up..."[26]
[27] The literary writer Yuz Aleshkovsky also spoke fondly of it, writing in 1982 in the New York weekly Novaya Gazeta that this work was "stamped with a seal of extraordinary depth:[28]I won't tell you how I personally feel when I listen to Bathhouse for the tenth or hundredth time, when I sing it to myself (I don't dare to sing it out loud) in moments of reflection about Russia, about our fate, about the fate of the world.
As the poet Igor Kokhanovsky, who grew up on Neglinnaya Street in Moscow, recalls, one day some friends in common brought them tickets to the Sandunov Baths next door: "Volodya and I, after a decent hangover, of course refused.
After eucalyptus steam, treatments with oak brooms, ice showers, and a mug of cold beer, Vysotsky, according to Kokhanovsky, began to appreciate the healing power of the baths.
[31] Late in 1971, Vysotsky composed Ballad of the Bathhouse, the key message of which ("Here freedom and equality with brotherhood // You feel in the steam of the night") echoes the poems of the parodist Pyotr Schumacher, quoted in Vladimir Gilyarovsky's book Moscow and Muscovites: "And what?
Thus, in Letter to a Friend (1975, 1978), addressed to the actor Ivan Bortnik, the author tells of his French impressions and concludes: "And in general, Vanya, you and I in Paris // need, as in the Russian bath skis".
[31][34] According to the memoirs of Yevgeny Pronin, professor emeritus of Moscow State University, in 1943, as a teenager in a small town in the Tula region, he met a disabled front-line soldier who, holding a helmet in his hands, mechanically repeated the same phrase: "Tanker.
Years later, after hearing Smoke-free bathhouse, the scientist confessed that he was amazed and verbatim reproduced "grammatical incident", and Vysotsky's ability to convey the human drama in two lines: "On the left part of the chest - Stalin's profile, // and on the right Marinka's full face".
But the tension does not subside — the hero, warmed by the hot steam, continues to reflect aloud, openly, on his experiences, coming to a terrible conclusion, bordering on "the death of the soul": "As it turned out, I was branded in vain".
This demonstrative movement toward marginality, according to researchers, looked like a kind of challenge to the authorities with the help of illegal vocabulary, society seemed to declare a spontaneous desire for freedom.
[39] In contrast to Vysotsky's early songs, which do not contain global social generalizations, Smoke-free Bathhouse has already acquired epic features, but the author remained true to himself: in the narrator's monologue, the poet combined the speech of a Moscow intellectual with the colloquialisms of a "simple Siberian".
"[39]Vysotsky pressed and melted rhythms, words and metaphors, so that the information flow was laid down itself in a logical way of thought and generalization emerged with the immutability of truth, self-evident, exhaustive and useful for the future.
[41]The Smoke-free Bouthhouse (as well as the later Ballad of Childhood) —with its enduring memory and equally complex "collective past"— is, according to literary scholars, close to the historical elegy, a genre that goes back to the experiences of the poet Konstantin Batyushkov.
Its image contains a deep allegorical meaning, based on the folk belief that in this space — devoid of icons, open to passions and temptations — a person is particularly defenseless and vulnerable.
According to Valeri Zolotukhin's recollections, when he answered a comrade's question about the difference between a smoky and a smoke-free bathhouse during a film expedition, he said that the latter was usually "cultured, clean inside" and that the smoke from it was led through the chimney directly "into the white light".
Vysotsky probably realized that the hope for a "bright future" promised by Soviet ideologists was a collective illusion; in his later poem Paradise Apples, the poet developed the theme: "We came skipping.
The hero of Bathhouse gradually comes to the same realization, discovering that the seemingly immutable idol turns out to be defeated, and that he himself has been deceived in his aspirations for many years.
[46] At the same time, literary scholars Andrei Skobelev and Sergei Shaulov remind us that Vysotsky carefully studied the mythopoetics of the bathhouse, according to which the suggestion to "take a bath" in the old days meant a touch with other, otherworldly worlds.
Certain echoes of this theme were heard in Galich's work a few years later in the novel Once More About the Devil: for example, the interior of a certain "safe house" involved in the story was an empire "of the times of the cult of personality".
Other reminiscences can be found in Galich's poem Reflections on Long-Distance Runners, when the political prisoners working with a pickaxe suddenly hear a loud voice as if from heaven: "I was your leader and your father, / How many tortures are planned!
The increasing volume of the sound together with the change of intonation allows the author to convey the whole palette of emotional experiences and mental metamorphosis of the character, in whose consciousness memories keep reappearing in waves, dulled, it seems.
When the arranger explained that it was Vysotsky's wish and taste, Urevitch talked to the poet and got carte blanche for Kazansky - in the recording of some songs an orchestra can be heard.
[53] In 1990, the literary and art magazine Avrora reproduced the actor Rolan Bykov's prediction about Vysotsky's work made ten years earlier: "I think that very soon schools will study such a poet".
In 2004, the song about banya, translated as "Łaźnia", was included in the CD Mam jedno oko zielone prepared by the singer Wiktor Zborowski.
There is a version published by members of the Siberian Society of History and Culture, according to which the stone found in the Manskaya taiga and later used for the memorial sculpture could be a "hypothetical fragment of the Tunguska meteorite".
[62] In 2002, Norwegian musician Jørn-Simen Everly visited Vyzezhny Log, who made a documentary film dedicated to Vysotsky as a result of his Siberian expedition.
In one of the episodes of the work it is told how the young Victor Sluzhkin, suffering from unrequited love for Lena Anfimova, listens to a tape of Vysotsky's songs for a long time at night and feels that it is him, "a convict painted with tattoos, being steamed by the hostess in the bathhouse".
