Vladimir Vysotsky wrote more than seven hundred songs and poems, played iconic roles in theater and cinema. He was one of the few Soviet people who could freely travel around the world. But was everything in his life as easy and cloudless as it might seem at first glance? He always lived in extremes and went ahead, not recognizing a sense of proportion in anything. He lived only forty-two years. But both during his lifetime and forty years after his death, his biography still remains the subject of fierce debate. This book is another attempt to try to understand and unravel some facets of this unique personality, and most importantly, to try to answer the questions: what made him so , where does this tragic breakdown come from in his songs, and in his poems - a pulsating exposed nerve?.. The poet’s cousin Irena Vysotskaya, colleagues in acting workshop Larisa Luzhina and Nikolai Burlyaev, film playwright Ilya Rubinstein, director, screenwriter, Andrei Levitsky, editor-in-chief of the magazine “Our Contemporary” Stanislav Kunyaev, rock musician Alexander F. Sklyar, poet, literary critic Konstantin Kedrov, sculptor, artist Grigory Pototsky and many others...