Russian bard song (avtorskaya pesnya, 'author's song') is built on a single voice with a single acoustic guitar. The melodies are plain; the real protagonist is the sharp, literary lyric. The dynamic range is enormous — from Vladimir Vysotsky's hoarse full-throat delivery on 'Кони привередливые (Wilful Horses)' to Bulat Okudzhava's near-conversational whisper on 'Молитва (Prayer)'. Alongside them run Yuri Vizbor's climbing songs and Novella Matveyeva's poet-woman variant. What unites them is the format: a single poet on a stool with a six-string, and an audience listening to words.

In the 1960s Thaw, poets, actors, and scientists who were not professional composers began setting their own poems to their own guitar accompaniment. Okudzhava (1924-1997, Moscow) was the pioneer; Vysotsky (1938-1980, Moscow) became the national colossus with his hoarse voice and sharp social observations. Vizbor (1934-1984) added the climbing-song strand; Matveyeva (1934-2016) established the lyrical female bard voice. Alexander Galich (1918-1977) was more directly political and was expelled from the USSR in 1974. Official releases were rare; the music travelled almost entirely through magnitizdat, home-recorded tapes copied from friend to friend across the country.

In Vysotsky, the strain of a voice pushed past its comfortable limits is itself the expression. On 'Кони привередливые' you can hear his voice crack when the narrator tries to stop the horses that have already run past control. Okudzhava is the polar opposite: near-recitation, restrained volume, treating the audience as intimates. The two of them define the space, and the other bards populate it in between. The muffled tape-recorder texture of the recordings themselves tells you the story of how the music circulated.

Vladimir Vysotsky, 'Песня о друге (Song about a Friend)' (1966) — the mountaineering song about friendship and trust that lands most easily first. Then his 'Кони привередливые (Wilful Horses)' (1972) for the full-throat side. Bulat Okudzhava, 'Молитва (Prayer)' (1970) for the quiet pole. Headphones, everything else off, and a translation of the lyrics on the side.

Vysotsky died of a heart attack on 25 July 1980, in the middle of the Moscow Olympics. The state wanted to avoid disruption during the Games and kept the announcement minimal, but tens of thousands gathered at his funeral in Moscow, and it became a de facto national mourning event. His grave at Vagankovskoye cemetery is still visited constantly. Estimates for the volume of magnitizdat Vysotsky tapes circulating by the end of the Soviet era run into the tens of millions — an artist who became a national figure without ever securing state release permission.