Smoke-free bathhouse (or White Bathhouse; in Russian: Банька по-белому, "Heat the bath for me, hostess...", "Heat the smoke bath for me...")Petrakov A. Каталог песен и стихов В. Высоцкого. М.: ГКЦМ В. С. Высоцкого, 1991. Iss. 2. P. 5. is a song by Vladimir Vysotsky, composed in the summer of 1968 during the filming of the movie Master of the Taiga in Siberia. A variant of the title is the Bathhouse.Vysotsky V. Собрание сочинений в пяти томах. Том 2. Песни и стихи. 1968—1972. Тула: Тулица, 1994. V. 2. P. 429. The first known concert performance of the song by the author dates back to 1969. The poem was published in Russian during the poet's lifetime in Paris in 1977 in the third part of the collection Songs of Russian Bards, and in the autumn of the same year the song was released in France on the record La corde raide. 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. The first official publication of this poem in the USSR took place in 1986 (Druzhba Narodov, No. 10).
The song was received with mixed reactions by the poet's contemporaries. Along with Smoke Bathhouse and Ballad of the Bathhouse — is part of Vysotsky's conventional Bathhouse Cycle. The poem has a lot of symbols and allegories, its genre is close to historical elegy. When composing the music, the author used the technique of crescendo, which allowed him to express the feelings of the main character-narrator as accurately as possible.
In 2000, the lyrics of the song Smoke-free bathhouse were included in the textbook on 20th century literature for Russian secondary schools. The work was translated into Japanese and a number of European languages and included in albums recorded by musicians from Austria, Poland and Italy. In 1996, a memorial bas-relief with Vysotsky's image was erected at the place where the film crew of Master of the Taiga worked in Vyezhny Log. The plaque is inscribed with lines from the song : "Warm me a white bath, I've got used to the white light..."
Description In an interview conducted in June 1974 during the tour of the Taganka Theater in Naberezhnye Chelny, a journalist asked Vysotsky: "Which of your songs are particularly dear to you?" "It has to be all of them," Vysotsky replied. After some thought, he listed several of his songs, putting Bathhouse first.Duz-Kryatchenko V. Листая старые страницы… // Вагант: журнал. М.: ГКЦМ В. С. Высоцкого, 1999. № 7—9. pp. 8—9.
The narrator of the song is a released prisoner who spent many years in Stalin's camps. It presumably takes place in 1956, when an amnesty was announced for many innocent people convicted under political Article 58 ("counterrevolutionary agitation and propaganda").
The hero of the song expresses his condition metaphorically, allegorically. He asks the "hostess" to heat the bathhouse without smoke. It symbolizes the man's purification and his return to his former, normal life, to which he had become unaccustomed during his years of imprisonment. The bathhouse becomes the central image of the entire song, a place of reflection, experience, and rethinking of the past. In this place, originally perceived by Russians as the border between life and death, the hero of the song makes a choice for "life", steaming the "cold past" out of himself: "...and I whip with a birch broom // On the legacy of dark times".Rudnik N. M. Проблема трагического в поэзии В. С. Высоцкого. Курск: КГПУ, 1995. 245 p.
The hero's story is reconstructed in a very general way. 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.Kryuchkov V. P. Русская поэзия XX века: Очерки поэтики. Анализ текстов: Учебное пособие. Саратов: Лицей, 2002. 272 p. The narrator's "self" balances on the edge of someone else's collective consciousness, merging with it: "And then, whether in the quarry or drowning, // swallowing tears and raw material,"Raw materials" (untreated, low-grade) refer to ethyl or wine semi-finished product of drinking alcohol, usually used for technical needs. In the system of Soviet camps, the issuance of alcohol “to protect against colds” to prisoners “engaged in hard labor” was practiced until 1934.Skobelev A. V. Много неясного в странной стране… II. Попытка избранного комментирования. Воронеж: Эхо, 2009. pp. 44—45. // closer to the heart we stabbed profiles, // so that it could be heard the hearts tearing".Dykhanova B. S., Krylov A. E., Skobelev A. V., Shpilevaya G. A. Владимир Высоцкий: исследования и материалы 2007–2009 гг.: сборник научных трудов. Воронеж: ВГПУ, 2009. pp. 21—22.
The last line of the song is "short, to the point and expressive": "Heat it up!../ No, don't do it!... / Heat it up!", expressing the emotional anguish and confusion over the contradictions of the era.
History
The song was written in the summer of 1968 in the village of Vyezzhiy Log, Krasnoyarsk region, where the film Master of the Taiga was shot. Vysotsky played one of the main roles in the movie. Actor Valeri Zolotukhin (who, in his words, received an autograph from Vysotsky: "To Valeri Zolotukhin — a co-conspirator of Bathhouse") described in detail the history of the song's creation. During the filming of the movie Zolotukhin and Vysotsky several times changed their place of residence, including some time lived in an empty, abandoned Siberian house, which left, going to the city, the son of one of the villagers — Anna Filippovna. Mosfilm allocated for accommodation only two cots and some supplies. A photographer of the film crew gave them a lamp. At night, by the light of this lamp, Vladimir Vysotsky wrote his songs, because during the day he was busy working on the film.There was nothing in the house to make curtains, and quite often the locals came to the artists to see the "living Vysotsky" — some looked through the window, and some asked to be shown "up close". Enterprising Zolotukhin began to ask the villagers to bring milk. That summer Vladimir often steamed in a bathhouse: "There is no lack of bathhouses in Siberia". Sometimes he would ask Zolotukhin questions: "What's the difference between a white-style bathhouse and a black-style bathhouse?",A non-smoke o white bathhouse is the one where the smoke from the stove goes out through a chimney (in a smoke or black bathhouse there is no chimney, and soot and grime leave the room through natural cracks, settling on the ceiling and walls).Vysotsky V. Песни. Стихотворения. Проза. М.: Эксмо, 2010. pp. 691—814. (Библиотека всемирной литературы). Zolotukhin V. Как скажу, так и было, или этюд о беглой гласной // Огонёк: журнал. М.: Правда, 1986. July (№ 28). pp. 20—21. "What do you call the place where they steam, shelf?", and once woke him up "with a guitar at the ready" and played the song "White-style bathhouse": "in a humming, abandoned house, filled with milk pots, in the light of a lamp with five hundred obvious candles sounded 'banya'..."
The actress Lionella Pyryeva, who played the role of the cook Nyurka in Master of the Taiga, says in her memoirs that Vysotsky played this song for the first time after the gathering of the film crew in a local club. According to her, it was obvious from Zolotukhin's reaction that he was hearing the song for the first time.Blinova A. I. Экран и Владимир Высоцкий (Размышления об актёрском мастерстве, о ролях, о среде). М.: Логос, 1992. P. 84.
Stanislav Govorukhin gives an account from his diary of his arrival in Vyezzhiy Log in August of that year. He reached the village only at night, and the first thing he heard from Vysotsky was: "What a song I wrote!" Govorukhin had not yet had time to remove his backpack from the road, and Zolotukhin and Vysotsky "were already sitting side by side on a bench, singing in two voices Bathhouse. Never again have I heard such a heartfelt performance".
Vysotsky's classmate and friend Igor Kokhanovsky, recalling Vysotsky's return from the filming of Master of the Taiga, says that right from the Kazan station he came to his house "all impatient" and first sang "Heat me a white bathhouse..." Kokhanovsky asked him to sing it again and made an assessment: "It seems to me... everything that happened before this song was a warm-up. And the real thing is just beginning". According to him, Vysotsky agreed with him.
Marina Vlady wrote the following lines remembering this song:You brought a song from Siberia about people who went to a prison camp under Stalin: a man returns after serving his time and asks his mistress to make him a white bath to kill his doubts and purify his soul. A scary song, where for the first time you mention my pet name — Marinka....
First editions, recordings and performances The first concert performance of the song was recorded on a phonograph in 1969. In Russian, the poem was published during the poet's lifetime in Paris in 1977 in the collection Songs of Russian BardsПесни русских бардов. Париж: YMCA-Press, 1977. V. 3. pp. 54—55. Tsybulsky M. «Песни русских бардов» - первое собрание сочинений Владимира Высоцкого. Сайт «Владимир Высоцкий. Каталоги и статьи» (12 December 2013). and in the fall of the same year the song was released on the record under the title "L'étuve chauffée a blanc". In 1979, the poem was published in the first, scandalous issue of the almanac Metropol, published by the American publishing house Ardis.
The anthology contained twenty of the poet's poems. 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.Tsybulsky M. Как это было. Записки об альманахе «Метрополь». Сайт «Владимир Высоцкий. Каталоги и статьи» (14 August 2015).
Vasily Aksyonov, who actively participated in the organization of the almanac, recalls that Vladimir was "delighted" with the invitation to publish in Metropol. During the persecution of the authors and organizers of the collection, when "the bigwigs of the Union of Soviet Writers, on the orders of the competent authorities, of course, tightened the screws more and more, and also spread vile gossip", Vysotsky organized a spontaneous concert in the apartment where the Metropol people gathered:Aksyonov V. Аксёнов Василий: Певец метрополии. Новое русское слово. Нью-Йорк (24 July 1983). We were all suddenly revived, feeling as if we were in the rays of a star. He was a superstar, and in his best creative hours he gave us a powerful charge of life-giving prana. He sang then and Volky and Bathhouse and The domes in Russia are covered with pure gold... and all the people here in the metropolis stirred and hummed.In the USSR, the poem Smoke-free bathhouse was first officially published in 1986 in the 10th issue of the magazine Druzhba Narodov. The Melodiya company released the song in 1990 on the record Masquerade (the fifteenth in the series On Vladimir Vysotsky's Concerts, M60 49469 002) in a 1977 recording.Владимир Семенович Высоцкий: что? где? когда? : библиографический справочник (1960-1990 г.г.) / Х.; М.: Прогресс; Студия-Л, 1992. pp. 57, 75. The last known public performance of the piece dates from 1976.
Reviews and memories