Chekhov's Gun

Here's a wonderful interview with Vysotsky and Dan Rather for 60 Minutes in 1976.  It was an "unauthorized" visit, as Vysotsky had only been granted a visa to France to spend time with his wife, Marina Vladi.  The two then flew to Montreal, Canada, and onto New York, where he met up with Brodsky and other expatriated Soviet dissidents.  But, as Vysotsky states in this interview, he didn't consider himself a dissident, and had no intention of seeking asylum.  He soon returned to the Soviet Union.

We found ourselves watching part of this television series from the late 1970s, which featured Vladimir Vysotsky and Natalya Fateyeva among many others.  It was one of Vysotsky's last films before his tragic death.  He was in very good form as a tough-minded homicide detective following a complicated trail of leads to a vicious gang known as "Black Cat" in 1930s Moscow.  Along the way, he and his young idealistic partner come across Fateyeva on a riverboat restaurant. It was a very popular five-part series, which you can see in its entirety with English subs on youtube, or order a copy through amazon.  It was distributed as The Age of Mercy , which was the title of the novel by Arkadiy Vayner and Georgiy Vayner, outside the Soviet Union.  So good to see Vystotsky in fine form.  One doesn't have any sense of his own private demons.  Unfortunately, the book is not so easily available.