Old postcards Vladimir Vysotsky

All the Soviet postcards about Vladimir Vysotsky (1938–1980), the actor, poet and singer-songwriter, were printed in 1989. The captions give the year of each photograph or film, from 1967 to 1979, while the print year is the same for every card.

The stage is represented by a scene from Hamlet at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow. Vysotsky joined the company in 1964, and the production with him in the title role premiered on 29 November 1971; the part is regarded as his signature role. Next to it is a 1976 photograph of Vysotsky with Ivan Bortnik (1939–2019), a fellow Taganka actor who played the bandit Promokashka in The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed.

The film stills include Two Comrades Were Serving (1968) by Yevgeny Karelov, in which Vysotsky played Lieutenant Brusentsov, and Alexander Stolper’s The Fourth (1972), based on a play by Konstantin Simonov, where his character, a journalist, is credited simply as “He”. A still from Stanislav Govorukhin’s television film The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (1979) recalls Captain Zheglov: for this role and his own songs Vysotsky was posthumously awarded the USSR State Prize in 1987.

Portraits dated 1975, 1976 and 1977 complete the selection; in 1975 Vysotsky took on Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard at the Taganka.