http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj3pd-a-js8

I've read so many translations of this ^ one -- it's so beautiful...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4rbXVG9Ih0

I already put this ^ in the foreign songs thread I can't stop listening to it. I cried even when I read a very flawed translation, broken English and all.

Russian arrogance would be the word. And I'm pretty sure Ilya is a guy's name.

What are your definitions of "successful" and "loser"? Because based on general definitions, while Vysotsky was (and is) beloved throughout Russia and the Russian diaspora, he was far from successful, and could very much be considered a loser. While even top party leaders privately loved his songs and reportedly played them at their million-dollar summer homes, he was prevented from releasing most of his works officially, often prevented from touring, and even film directors often got in trouble for casting him in his films because he was considered trouble. (Kira Muratova, I think, is one of the directors who talked about how she was "discouraged" from casting him.) While pretty much every Russian household had recordings of his songs and knew most of them by heart, the overwhelming majority of them were "underground" recordings, often bad quality 50th-generation copies.

He might have been the world's first viral success, but he was continuously prevented from being an "official" success, both as a poet, and to a lesser degree, as an actor. And of course he died at 42 - a result, to a great degree, of his alcoholism and drug use, which in turn was a result of repressions he had been subjected to throughout his life.

I agree that his appeal is due to his uncanny ability to voice other people's thoughts and feelings. His WW2 songs are a great example - he was too young to be in the war, but his songs managed to capture its horrors so perfectly that even the most guarded veterans accepted him as the voice of THEIR generation. His prison songs are another great example: this man who had never been jailed gave Russia's prison population the platform it never had before (or, one could argue, since).

My other question is, what is your definition of "the West"? In terms of turning individualism into a religion, America is unique in the world. It's easy to see why by looking at America's very short history, the way it was initially formed, and the way its economy (and by extension its world domination) functions. America has done its best to impose this good-for-business individualistic attitude throughout the world, but everywhere else this religious individualism has had an uphill battle against the much older and more established communal structures on which all societies have depended throughout their history. This limited definition of "the West" as America also applies to your statement that people in the West don't value the arts: this is profoundly not true of Europe, which is also supposed to be part of the West.

I agree with you about the value of looking outside of ourselves - we cannot fully function without this, at least not for long, as America has proven. But the value of looking inside ourselves cannot be discounted either. While American history (and its present situation) shows the pitfalls of always focusing inside at the expense of everything else, Russia's pre- and post-revolutionary history shows that going too far to the other side can have disastrous consequences as well, and Vysotsky's story is one of many examples of that. When a society focuses exclusively on the "external", the individual falls by the wayside, or worse, becomes the "enemy of the people" just by being an individual - and as a result, Russia's greatest artists, geniuses like Vysotsky, Iosif Brodsky, and countless others, have been crushed by their own country whose voice they were representing, BECAUSE they as individuals were so good at representing it.

No one has the right to be arrogant.  I fucking hate arrogance anyway.

Maybe it's a little bit OT, but I always found Russian people to posses some deep spirituality that Westerners lack. Must be because of that  mysterious entity called ''Russian soul'', born out of centuries of suffering and almost fatal acception of one's fate.

And although I don't know Russian music, I'm willing to bet if I looked I'd find as many self-centered songs as in "the West."

"Oh you murderous colonial countries, you have not suffered therefore you can not understand real suffering"