Alexander Vertinsky's short biography
In the distant, pre-revolutionary Russia of 1917, in Moscow's more intimate theatres, with only 300 seats, there appeared a tall, lean youth, dressed in the costume of Pierrot. A white mask of the face set off the dramatic blackened brow and scarlet mouth. Up flew his unusually expressive hands with elongated fingers, and he began to sing...
His miniature novellas-in-song were known as ariettes, or "Pierrot's doleful dities". Either because their themes hit the mark, or simply owing to the young man's rapport with the public, these songs began to circulate, their lyrics transmitted by word of mouth. The novice performer was christened the "Russian Pierrot", gained renown, became an object of imitation, admiration, simultaneously vilified in the press and lionized by the audiences; his career was destined to be brilliant. The young celebrity was Alexander Vertinsky, a poet, singer and composer.
The tidal waves of the October 1917 revolution swept away the finest offspring of Russian culture. Poet Ivan Bunin, bass Feodor Shalyapin, silent screen idol Ivan Moszhukhin, ballerina Anna Pavlova, Alexander Vertinsky - the artistic elite fostered during Russia's "Silver Age" and forced to leave their native land - were doomed to long years of spiritual exile. Unable to accept the revolution, Vertinsky chose emigration, leaving Russia and eventually setting in Europe. This marks the beginning of Russian Pierrot's thorny road. His upraised thin hands now implore not for private joys, but the salvation of a nation. His new muse is the nostalgia of regret. His little dities grew into concise epics inhabited by circis clowns and cocain addicts, cabaret dancers and movies stars, capricious, richly caped femmes fatales and lowly vagrants, bohemians and gigolos, page boys and peers. They all fall in love, suffer, dream of happiness, pine with regret, huri themselves headlong after life's fleeting pieasures and bemoan its bitter disappointments.
He now appeared to the public in coattails, crisp white shirtfront and patent leather shoes. Vertinsky's artistry approached virtuosity, he was called "Shalyapin of the vaudeville stage" and "the Russian bard". His name encapsulates a genre all his own. He is the embodiment of an entire era in Russian history! His voice casts a spell, his songs invoke mysterious, faraway lands. Once experienced, he is permanently etched in memory. He is the toast of Paris, London, New York. His audiences include Russian eminres, Frenchmen and Englishmen. Among his fans he counts choreographer Michel Fokin, impressario Sergey Diaghelev, Feodor Shalyapin... For a second time, Vertinsky is riding on a wave of popularity.
Paradoxically, at the height of his success, Vertinsky is assiduously petitioning the Soviet goverment:"... let me come back, please! My heart yearns for Russia, my home, which has been such hardships, atrocities, famine and privations".
Only in late 1943 was he granted permission to return. The war raged on, the nation just barely beginning to recover from the grueling years of pointless slaughter. Here, in his devastated native land, Vertinsky gave many charity performances to benefit famine victims, wounded soldiers, orphaned children. He was heard throughout the whole country: in Siberia, the Soviet Far East and Central Asia, touring inordinately while he sang himself hoarse, as if believing that his songs would thaw people's hearts. To him this nation was not "Soviet Union"; quite the opposite, it was still "his old Russia", his birthplace and source of comfort. This is where he sang away his remaining years. Fame, which came to him twice before, made a third and final appearance. Russian art, to whose fold he returned a fully formed master, embraced him like any true parent, unquestioningly, despite his years of wandering.
The name of Alexander Vertinsky is legendary. His songs never did acquire the infection of revolutionary rhetoric - he remained a liberated child of his great culture. The fact that he survived Stalin's purges imparted a mythical reputation to his later years in the USSR. Perhaps the explanation was that even a despot's heart has a secret compartment to which the poet holds the key. Vertinsky's poetry, music and singing from the summit of Imperial Russia's period of artistic decline; he is the final ray, gleaning in the twilight of Russian Silver Age.
Anastasia Vertinskaya