Book Biography of Vertinsky

Born: March 9, Vertinsky’s father, private attorney Nikolai Petrovich Vertinsky - came from the family of a railway employee; In addition to legal practice, he was also engaged in journalism - he published feuilletons under the pseudonym Count Niver in the newspaper Kiev Word. Mother, Evgenia Stepanovna Skolatskaya, was born in a noble family; Nikolai Petrovich could not marry her, since his first wife did not give a divorce, and “adopted” his own children a few years later.

When the boy was three years old, she died ... Mother, and two years later his father died from a fleeting consumption. After the death of his parents, Alexander and his sister Nadezhda were in different families of his mother’s relatives, and his brother assured that his sister was dead. Later, Alexander and Nadezhda quite by chance met and very close. At the age of nine, Alexander Vertinsky perfectly passed the exam to the first imperial Alexandrian gymnasium, but two years later he was expelled for poor performance and bad behavior and transferred to the fourth Kyiv classical gymnasium.

Here he became interested in the theater, played for some time on an amateur stage and was a statist in the Kiev Theater of Solovtsov, although he later recognized his first acting experience extremely unsuccessful. Gradually, Vertinsky acquired a reputation as a novice Kyiv writer - he wrote theatrical reviews for celebrities performances, published small usually “decadent” stories in local newspapers.

Vertinsky earned a living in different ways: selling postcards, working as a loader, a corrector in the printing house, playing in amateur performances; He also visited the accountant at the European Hotel, from where he was fired "for inability." His acquaintance with the poets M. Kuzmin, V. Elsner and B. Livshits, artists A. Osmerkin, K. Malevich, M. Shagal and other guests of the literary salon, created by S.

Zelinsky, the teacher of the very Alexandrian gymnasium from which Vertinsky was excluded was also excluded. In the year, Vertinsky, in the hope of making a literary career, moved to Moscow. Here he began performances in literary and dramatic communities, including putting a “booth” as a director, one of the plays of A. Blok, for some time worked in the atelier A.

The Vertinsky Kino -Debets took place in the year in the film by Ilya Tolstoy son Lev Nikolaevich based on the story of his father “What are people alive? He starred in several dumb films of Khanzhonkov studio in secondary roles; It is known that the basis of the script of one of the paintings was the story told by Vertinsky in the poem "Ball of the Lord". At the beginning of the year, A.

Vertinsky, in addition, began to perform on the stage of the Miniature Theater in Mamonovsky Lane along Tverskaya, which was led by M. his first number here, “Tango”, was made using erotic elements: a prima-ballerina and her partner, and Vertinsky, standing at the Kulis, performed a song-a parody of what was happening on the stage in spectacular costumes. The premiere was successful, and the novice artist bothering one line in the review of the “Russian word”: “The witty and chemannaya Alexander Vertinsky”.

Subsequently, continuing to cooperate with the theater M. Artebusheva, Vertinsky wrote the topical parodies of Furlan, Warm Sin, etc. In the year, A. Vertinsky tried to fulfill a long-standing dream and enter the Moscow Art Theater, but was not accepted due to a defect in diction: the exam was taken by K. Stanislavsky, who did not like that the examiner poorly pronounces the letter "P".

On the same days, Vertinsky became close to the futurists and met Mayakovsky.

At the same time, as noted later, the philosophy of the futurists was not close to Vertinsky; The "poetry" Igor Seversin made a much greater impression on him. However, Vertinsky wrote about the poetry of the latter that "in his poems there was a true feeling, talent and sincerity, but there was not enough taste, a sense of proportion and genueness of feelings." As for the futurists, with the exception of Mayakovsky, the talent of which Vertinsky sincerely admired, they, according to the artist, simply “shuttled the bourgeois, wrote abstruse poems, exhibited obviously mocking canvases and pretended to be geniuses.” At the end of the year, after the outbreak of World War I, Alexander Vertinsky volunteered for the front as a orderly on a Ma Naistan train of the All -Russian Union of Cities, which ran between the advanced and Moscow.

Under the leadership of the Count of Nikita Tolstoy, he worked here until January of the year, making a total of 35 thousand dressings according to the magazine. Having received a slight wound, Vertinsky returned to Moscow, where he learned about the death of his sister by rumors - from an overdose of cocaine, the only person close to him. The debut of Alexander Vertinsky on the stage took place in the year, in the familiar Artsybushevsky Theater of Miniatures, to which he proposed his new program: "Pierrot's songs." Artsybusheva approved the idea: for the artist they made an exotic decoration, picked up the "lunar" lighting.Vertinsky began to go on stage with a made-up and in a specially sewn suit Pierrot, under the dead, lemon-purple light of the ramp.

Gradually, performing songs both on his own poems and on the poetry of the Silver Age poets, Marina Tsvetaeva, Igor Seversyan, Alexander Blok, Vertinsky developed his own style of speech, an important element of which was a singing recitative with characteristic grahi; This style allowed the poems "to remain precisely with poems on the shadeing background of the melody." Vertinsky and his art, as noted, "represented the phenomenon of almost hypnotic impact not only on the philistine, but also on the demanding elite audience." The basis of the repertoire of A.

Vertinsky of those years was the original material: “Little Creole”, “Your fingers smell of incense”, “The lilac Negro” three songs dedicated to faith in the cold, “gray -eyed”, “Minute”, “I laugh at myself”, “Behind the scenes”, “Crystal pan -firing”, “Smoke without fire”, “Beznoseli”, “Ball Ball Ball” The Lord ”,“ Dog Douglas ”,“ About six mirrors ”,“ Jamais ”,“ I am a little ballerina ”in collaboration with N.

Grushko,“ Cocaine ”text by V. Collaboration with various entrepreneurs Leonidov and Varyagin, Galanter, Grossbaum, he began to hold numerous tour, which took place with unchanged success. Meanwhile, life in Moscow became more and more difficult for Vertinsky. The romance “What I must say”, written under the impression of the death of three hundred Moscow junkers, excited the interest of the Extraordinary Commission, where the author was called for explanation.

According to legend, when Vertinsky noticed the representatives of the Cheka: “This is just a song, and then, you cannot forbid me to pity them! At the end of the year, Vertinsky went on tour in the southern cities of Russia, following the retreating White Army. He spent almost two years in the south, speaking in Odessa, Rostov, Yekaterinoslav, in the Caucasus and in Crimea, by this time changing Pierrot's costume to a tailcoat.

In the year, Vertinsky left for Kyiv, from there moved to Kharkov, where he gave many concerts, then ended up in Odessa and, finally, in Sevastopol. In November, on the ship “Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich”, along with white officers, Alexander Vertinsky crossed to Constantinople, where he began to give concerts again - mainly in the clubs “Stella” and “Black Rose”.

Some time later, having bought a Greek passport, which provided him with freedom of movement, Vertinsky left for Romania, where he performed in cheap nightclubs and toured a lot of Bessarabia before the Russian -speaking population. Later, the singer said that it was emigration that turned him from a capricious artist into a hard worker who earns on a piece of bread and shelter.

Over the next ten years, Vertinsky replaced many countries Poland, Germany, France, the USA, China - I am actively tour and remaining faithful to creativity everywhere. In the middle of X settling in Shanghai, he meets the poetess Larissa Andersen, in whom he was at one time in love, and whose work he praised highly. The artist performed in the Renaissance Kabar, in the Summer Garden of Arkady, in the Mari-Rose cafeusantan, but concerts did not bring him large fees: it was during these years that for the first time in exile, he knew the need.

Soon he had the first daughter - Marianne. To feed the family, the artist had to give two concerts a day. In the second half of the x, Vertinsky repeatedly turned to Soviet representative offices with a request to allow him to return to his homeland. Vertinsky was invited to the Soviet embassy in China and presented the “official invitation of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, inspired by the initiative of the Komsomol”, but the documents for entry into the USSR were never executed because of the Second World War that began in the year.

In the year, Vertinsky made the last attempt and wrote a letter in the name of V. permission was obtained during the Great Patriotic War, it was allowed to return to some other cultural figures. He arrived in Moscow in November with his wife and three -month -old daughter Marianna, and settled on Gorky Street at first - at the Metropol Hotel. Exactly a year later, the spouses had a second daughter, Anastasia.

Vertinsky toured at the front, performed patriotic songs - both Soviet authors and his own composition “About us and about the Motherland”, “Our Woe”, “In the Snow of Russia”, “Another Song”, “Kitezh”, wrote the song “He” dedicated to Stalin in the year. His love lyrics, despite a happy marriage, was marked by notes of hopelessness and tragedy. Vertinsky, according to the memoirs of his daughter, Marianne said about himself: "I have nothing but a world name." To earn a living, he again had to actively start touring, 24 concerts per month.

Only in a duet with the pianist Mikhail Brokes over 14 years did he give more than two thousand concerts, having drove throughout the country, speaking not only in theaters and concert halls, but in factories, mines, hospitals and orphanages. As noted in the biography of E. Sekacheva, from a hundred and more songs from the Vertinsky repertoire for execution in the USSR, no more than thirty was allowed, a censor was present at each concert.

Concerts in Moscow and Leningrad were a rarity, they were not invited to Vertinsky’s radio, there were almost no records, there were no reviews in the newspapers. Despite the enormous popularity of the singer, the official Soviet press referred to his work with restrained hostility. According to the artist’s biography on the website “Actors of Soviet and Russian Cinema”, “shortly after the end of the war, a campaign was deployed against lyrical songs, allegedly leading listeners from the tasks of socialist construction.

Directly about Vertinsky was not mentioned, but it was implied as it were. And now his records are withdrawn from the sale, deleted from catalogs. Not one of his songs sounds on the air, newspapers and magazines about Vertinsky's triumphal concerts stored ice silence. An outstanding singer does not seem to exist. ” After the war, Vertinsky continued to act in films. The directors mainly exploited his characteristic appearance and manners: both he demonstrated as the prince in the film “Anna on the neck” in the film.

For his role in the film “Conspiracy of the Doomed” Cardinal Birnch, he received his only state award: the Stalin Prize was also awarded his work in the film “The Great Warrior of Albania Scanderbeg”, where he played the role of the Dozge of Venice. Despite this, the artist in the last years of his life was in a deep spiritual crisis. Alexander Nikolaevich Vertinsky died from acute heart failure on May 21 at the Astoria Hotel in Leningrad, where he came on tour.

His last concert was held on the same day in the house of veterans of the stage. He was buried in the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow. Detailed biography.