DESCRIPTION:
Aleksander Wertyński -- Ach, duszo moja (Oh You, The Soul Of Mine!) Romans rosyjski (Russian romance) Odeon c. 1929 (Poland)

NOTE: Aleksander Wertyński (Alexandre Vertinsky) - bard of the white Russian emigration society in Paris of the 1920s -- needs no special introduction in this channel. A lot of his recordings had been presented and many notes with details about his complicated life can be found in You Tube. Let us only remember a few facts: shortly before the bolshevik revolution of 1917, Wertyński was already well known in Russia as the young poet, who beautifully sings his own texts to a piano or a guitar. His songs -- the lovely mini-scetches wery strongly adapted into an old tradition of the Russian romance, but also enriched by a touch of a decadent and cosmopolitan chic, as well as his handsome, melancholic powdered face of Pierrot - quickly won the audiences among the artistic as well as the snobistic, upper middle class circles of Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, in 1920 via Odessa and Constantinople he loyally accompanied his clientele to Warsaw, to Bucharest, Berlin, Zurich or Paris in their escape from the bolshevik terror. In Paris -- again, as a "Russian pierrot" -- he was very busy with his artistical performances, yet also -- sorry to say - his very effective cooperation with the Soviet embassy... The reason, why they were successful in enlisting him as their agent was, as it seems, his addiction to cocaine.

Vertinsky's hayday were the middle and the late 1920s, when he made hundreds of successfull shows solo or with a literary Russian cabaret "Sinaya Ptica" (A Blue Bird) throughout Europe, Middle East and, in the beginning of the 1930s, also in USA and Asia (Shanghai). In 1923 he gave series of concerts in Poland (Warsaw) where -- inspired by unsuccessfull love to uncredited Polish lady - he wrote one of his most beautiful songs, "Madame Irene". However, the Polish press was not so enthusiastic about his performances like were the West European audiences. In one of reviews commenting his concert in Bialystok, local columnist wrote about that "artistic zero" who was "pale like death, trying with his voice - weak and trembling from neurosis - to sing out his hymns to the feminine crowd of degenerates and nymphomaniacs, hungry for the carnal excitement and vocal cocaine, he provides them with".

Wertyński succesfully continued his career in almost all continents until the end of the 1930s, when suddenly - as soon as German-Russian war broke out in June 1942 - he returned (had been called back?) to Russia (then named: the Soviet Union) where he was enthusiastically welcomed by the Soviet press as well as the Soviet audiences. And again - he kept singing to the crowds, till the very end of his days, in 1957.

The slideshow consist of the rare photographs of Russian actresses who, born in Russia and sometimes, already well known to their pre-revolutionary audience, had to leave Russia in 1917 or shortly after and continued their artistic career with or without success - in various places of the world. Mostly, these ladies were very talented and successfull (Tschechowa, Nazimova, Olga Baclanova, Eugenia Leontovich), others alas, fell into oblivion (von Annenikoff, Poplavska, Malinovska). But all of them were unbelievably classy and beautiful. The lost diamonds, the wasted pearls of the high culture of pre-bolshevik Russia.