Final Years
In 1943 the Soviet government allowed Vertinsky to return to Russia. Despite lack of media coverage, he performed about two thousand concerts in the USSR, touring from Sakhalin to Kaliningrad. In order to feed his family, he also appeared in Soviet films, often playing prerevolutionary aristocrats, as in the screen version of Chekhov's "Anna on the Neck" (1955). His role of an anti-Communist cardinal in "The Doomed Conspiracy" even won him the Stalin Prize for 1951.
The artist died on May 21, 1957, at Hotel Astoria in Leningrad. Both his daughters, Marianna and Anastasiya, made spectacular careers in Soviet cinema. The former conducted a much-aired liaison with Andrei Konchalovsky, while the latter married his brother Nikita Mikhalkov. Vertinsky is still influential in Russian musical culture, and has been covered by the likes of Vladimir Vysotsky and Boris Grebenshikov. There is even an album of electronic lounge covers, by the Cosmos Sound Club.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Vertinsky
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