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Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

The Russian poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893-1930) is best known for his colorful, declamatory style and his use of the language of the streets as poetic material. His artistic innovations strongly influenced the development of Soviet poetry.

Vladimir Mayakovsky was born on July 19, 1893, in Russian Georgia. When his father, a forester, died in 1906, the family moved to Moscow. This was to be Mayakovsky's city until his death. Between 1906 and 1911 Mayakovsky was arrested several times for his political activities. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1908. In 1909, during one of his terms in prison, he wrote his first verses.

Mayakovsky studied at the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1911 until he was expelled in 1914. During this period he published his first book of poetry, I! (1913), and became the leading figure in the avant-garde futurist movement in Russian poetry.

Russian futurism was as much a way of life as it was a poetic doctrine. It arose as a reaction to the extreme estheticism of Russian poetry at the turn of the century and to the prevailing mysticism in Russian intellectual life. Mayakovsky and his companions advocated the abandonment of the Russian tradition and the creation of a new art, one free of the past. They took their cause to the streets, declaiming their verses to chance audiences and going to any lengths to shock a tradition-bound public. Their shocking behavior and mode of dress gained them an instant reputation. Mayakovsky's poetry of these prerevolutionary years is polemical but not devoid of poetic content. It is an exceptionally personal poetry. Often it takes the form of a monologue addressed to the poet's mother and sister. The poet bares his self to the public in a style which is by turns ironic and sad. The title of his long verse drama is Vladimir Mayakovsky (1913), and it is subtitled "A Tragedy." In his most successful book, A Cloud in Trousers (1915), he acclaims the poet as the thirteenth apostle. Increasingly after 1915 Mayakovsky appears to have been trapped between his public role of apostle and his private suffering, the well-spring of his poetry.

Mayakovsky welcomed revolution in 1917 and put himself wholeheartedly at the service of the new Soviet state. He wrote popular verse, created propaganda posters, and lent his name to numerous public causes. In his own poetry, Mayakovsky continued his attack on the classical Russian tradition and proclaimed a poetry of the masses. He sought to write only for the masses, excluding any reference to the poetic self. Thus, his epic poem 150,000,000 (1921) was published anonymously. Mayakovsky described his postrevolutionary poetry as "tendentious realism," and there is no doubt that he achieved this realism at the expense of his true poetic talent.

Mayakovsky traveled widely in the 1920s. He went several times to western Europe and in 1925 to America. During a trip to Paris, he fell in love with a Russian émigré. Toward the end of the 1920s it became more and more difficult for Mayakovsky to get permission to travel abroad. He felt increasingly the burden of his public posture and the pain of having abandoned his private poetic self. This alienation from the woman he loved and from his very self led him to commit suicide on April 14, 1930, in Moscow. He could no longer maintain the dual role of public apostle and private poet.

Further Reading

A good selection of Mayakovsky's writings is available as The Bedbug and Selected Poetry (1964), which has a good introductory essay by the editor, Patricia Blake. A full-length biography of Mayakovsky is Wiktor Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky (trans. 1971). The account of Mayakovsky's life in "Safe Conduct" in Boris Pasternak, Selected Writings (1949; new ed. 1958), is an interesting interpretive biography. The best treatment of Mayakovsky's artistic innovations and his role in the futurist movement is Cecil Maurice Bowra, The Creative Experiment (1949).

Additional Sources

Terras, Victor, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boston: Twayne, 1983.

 
 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

(born July 19, 1893, Bagdadi, Georgia, Russian Empire — died April 14, 1930, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.) Russian poet. Repeatedly jailed for subversive activity, he began writing poetry during solitary confinement in 1909. On his release he became the spokesman for Futurism in Russia, and his poetry became conspicuously self-assertive and defiant. He was the leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the early Soviet period, producing declamatory works saturated with politics and aimed at mass audiences, including "Ode to Revolution" (1918) and "Left March" (1919) and the drama Mystery Bouffe (performed 1921). Disappointed in love, increasingly alienated from Soviet reality, and denied a visa to travel abroad, he committed suicide at age 36.

For more information on Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, visit Britannica.com.

 
Modern Design Dictionary: Vladimir Mayakovsky

(1893-1930)

A leading Russian graphic designer, painter, writer, poet, and critic of the early 20th century, Mayakovsky was closely involved with the artistic avant-garde in Moscow, including the Russian Futurists and the Constructivists, He designed many propaganda posters and wrote poems and plays in support of the Russian Revolutionary cause. Whilst studying at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture from 1911 to 1914 he met the Burlyuk brothers around whom Russian Futurism was centred. After working on a series of Cubo-Futurist paintings in 1914 he began to design simple anti-German and anti-Turkish war propaganda posters, combining rudimentary images with rhyming script. A keen supporter of the Russian Revolution of 1917 Mayakovsky played a key role in the dissemination of Bolshevik propaganda through his film scripts, plays, and posters. He declared that the ‘streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes’, a statement carried through in his designs for street decorations, propaganda trains, and architecture. From 1919 Mayakovsky worked for Rosta (the Russian telegraph agency), producing a large number of stencilled posters whose readily understood, cartoon-like images visually informed an often illiterate public about the successes of the Red Army or various government campaigns such as the health programme. The format of sequenced images and texts is thought to have derived from folk art, notably the ‘lubok’, a traditional popular, woodblock-printed, almost comic-like literature. Such posters were highly visible through their display in empty shop windows, unoccupied business premises, telegraph offices, railway stations, and elsewhere. After the end of the Civil War in 1921, Mayakovsky became the leader of the Moscow LEF (Left Front of the Arts) and editor of its journal, LEF. The latter was a mouthpiece for the Productivists—those Constructivists who believed that fine artists should apply their talents to the design and production of everyday goods. Under Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) Mayakovsky worked closely with Alexander Rodchenko on the design of advertisements of all kinds, from newspapers to billboards. With the rise of totalitarianism under Stalin from the later 1920s Mayakovsky's work was seen increasingly as elitist and out of touch with the masses.

 
Russian History Encyclopedia: Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

(1893 - 1930), poet, playwright.

Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Bagdadi, Georgia (later renamed Mayakovsky in his honor). His father's death of tetanus in 1906 devastated the family emotionally and financially, and the themes of death, abandonment, and infection recurred in many of Mayakovsky's poems. As a student, Mayakovsky became an ardent revolutionary; he was arrested and served eleven months for his Bolshevik activities in 1909. In 1911 he was accepted into the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, where he met David Burlyuk, who was beginning to gather the Hylaean group of artists and poets: Nikolai and Vladimir Burlyuk, Alexandra Exter, Viktor (Velemir) Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, and Benedikt Livshits. In 1912 the group issued its first manifesto, "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste," the highly charged rhetoric that created a scandalous sensation announcing the arrival of Futurism in the artistic culture of Russia. The poets and artists of Hylaea, Mayakovsky in particular, were associated in the popular press with social disruption, hooliganism, and anarchist politics.

Mayakovsky was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution; much of his artistic effort was devoted to propaganda for the state. He wrote agitational poems and, combining his considerable artistic skill with his ability to write short, didactic poems, constructed large posters that hung in the windows of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA). He also wrote and staged at the Moscow State Circus a satirical play, Mystery Bouffe, which skewered bourgeois culture and the church. His most political poems, "150,000,000" (1919) and "Vladimir Ilich Lenin" (1924), became required reading for every Soviet schoolchild and helped create the image of Mayakovsky as a mythic hero of the Soviet Union, a position that Mayakovsky found increasingly untenable in the later 1920s. Mayakovsky remained a relentless foe of bureaucratism and authoritarianism in Soviet society; this earned him official resentment and led to restrictions on travel and other privileges. On April 14, 1930, the combined pressures of Soviet control and a series of disastrous love affairs, most notably with Lili Brik, led to Mayakovsky's suicide in his apartment in Moscow.

Bibliography

Brown, Edward J. (1973). Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Jangfeldt, Bengt. (1976). Majakovskij and Futurism, 1917 - 1921. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.

Markov, Vladimir. (1969). Russian Futurism: A History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Woroszylski, Wiktor. (1970). The Life of Mayakovsky. New York: Orion Press.

—MARK KONECNY

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich
(vlədyē'mĭr vlədyē'mĭrəvĭch mī'əkôf'skē) , 1893–1930, Russian poet and dramatist. Mayakovsky was a leader of the futurist school in 1912, and he was chief poet of the revolution. His lyrics are highly original in rhythm, rhyme, and imagery. The Cloud in Trousers (1915), a poem written almost entirely in metaphors, describes the agony of unrequited love. After the revolution he devoted almost all his energies to propaganda verse. His early play, Mystery Bouffe (1918, tr. 1933), is an allegory prophesying the victory of the revolution. His later plays, such as the satires The Bedbug (1928, tr. 1960) and The Bathhouse (1930), were more critical of the new order. Mayakovsky grew increasingly disillusioned with Soviet life and committed suicide in 1930. His Complete Plays were published in English in 1971.

Bibliography

See biography by W. Woroszylski (tr. 1971); study by E. J. Brown (1973); V. Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and his Circle (tr. 1972).

 
Quotes By: Vladimir Mayakovsky

Quotes:

"No gray hairs streak my soul, no grandfatherly fondness there! I shake the world with the might of my voice, and walk --handsome, twenty-two year old."

"The love boat has crashed against the everyday."

 
Wikipedia: Vladimir Mayakovsky
Portrait of Vladimir Mayakovsky
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Portrait of Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (Влади́мир Влади́мирович Маяко́вский) (July 19 [O.S. July 7] 1893 – April 14, 1930) was a Russian poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.

Early life

He was born the last of three children in Baghdati, Georgia where his father worked as a forest ranger. His father was of Cossack and Russian descent while his mother was of Ukrainian descent. Although Mayakovsky spoke Georgian at school and with friends, his family spoke primarily Russian at home. At the age of 14 Mayakovsky took part in socialist demonstrations at the town of Kutaisi, where he attended the local grammar school. After the sudden and premature death of his father in 1906, the family — Mayakovsky, his mother, and his two sisters — moved to Moscow, where he attended School No. 5.

In Moscow, Mayakovsky developed a passion for Marxist literature and took part in numerous activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; he was to later become an RSDLP (Bolshevik) member. In 1908, he was dismissed from the Grammar School because his mother was no longer able to afford the tuition fees.

Around this time, Mayakovsky was imprisoned on three occasions for subversive political activities, but being underage, he avoided transportation. During a period of solitary confinement in Butyrka prison in 1909, he began to write poetry, but his poems were confiscated. On his release from prison, he continued working within the socialist movement, and in 1911 he joined the Moscow Art School where he became acquainted with members of the Russian Futurist movement. He became a leading spokesman for the group Gileas (Гилея), and a close friend of David Burlyuk, whom he saw as his mentor.

Literary Life

The 1912 Futurist publication, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Пощёчина общественному вкусу) contained Mayakovsky's first published poems: "Night" (Ночь), and "Morning" (Утро). Because of their political activities, Burlyuk and Mayakovsky were expelled from the Moscow Art School in 1914.

Image from Mayakovsky's Как делать стихи ("How To Make Poetry").
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Image from Mayakovsky's Как делать стихи ("How To Make Poetry").

His work continued in the Futurist vein until 1914. His artistic development then shifted increasingly in the direction of narrative and it was this work, published during the period immediately preceding the Russian Revolution, which was to establish his reputation as a poet in Russia and abroad.

A Cloud in Trousers (1915) was Mayakovsky's first major poem of appreciable length and it depicted the heated subjects of love, revolution, religion, and art written from the vantage point of a spurned lover. The language of the work was the language of the streets, and Mayakovsky went to considerable lengths to debunk idealistic and romanticised notions of poetry and poets.

Your thoughts,

dreaming on a softened brain,
like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,
with my heart's bloody tatters I'll mock again;
impudent and caustic, I'll jeer to superfluity.

Of Grandfatherly gentleness I'm devoid,
there's not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
I go by -- handsome,
twenty-two-year-old.

Вашу мысль
мечтающую на размягченном мозгу,
как выжиревший лакей на засаленной кушетке,
буду дразнить об окровавленный сердца лоскут:
досыта изъиздеваюсь, нахальный и едкий.

У меня в душе ни одного седого волоса,
и старческой нежности нет в ней!
Мир огромив мощью голоса,
иду - красивый,
двадцатидвухлетний.

(From the prologue of A Cloud in Trousers. source: [1])

Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik
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Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik

In the summer of 1915, Mayakovsky fell in love with a married woman, Lilya Brik, and it is to her that the poem "The Backbone Flute" (1916) was dedicated; unfortunately for Mayakovsky, she was the wife of his publisher, Osip Brik. The love affair, as well as his impressions of war and revolution, strongly influenced his works of these years. The poem "War and the World" (1916) addressed the horrors of WWI and "Man" (1917) is a poem dealing with the anguish of love.

Mayakovsky was rejected as a volunteer at the beginning of WWI, and during 1915-1917 worked at the Petrograd Military Automobile School as a draftsman. At the onset of the Russian Revolution, Mayakovsky was in Smolny, Petrograd. There he witnessed the October Revolution. He started reciting poems such as "Left March! For the Red Marines: 1918" (Левый марш (Матросам), 1918) at naval theatres, with sailors as an audience.

Agitprop poster by Mayakovsky
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Agitprop poster by Mayakovsky

After moving back to Moscow, Mayakovsky worked for the Russian State Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) creating — both graphic and text — satirical Agitprop posters. In 1919, he published his first collection of poems Collected Works 1909-1919 (Все сочиненное Владимиром Маяковским). In the cultural climate of the early Soviet Union, his popularity grew rapidly. During 1922-1928, Mayakovsky was a prominent member of the Left Art Front and went on to define his work as 'Communist futurism' (комфут). He edited, along with Sergei Tretyakov and Osip Brik, the journal LEF.

As one of the few Soviet writers who were allowed to travel freely, his voyages to Latvia, Britain, Germany, the United States, Mexico and Cuba influenced works like My Discovery of America (Мое открытие Америки, 1925). He also travelled extensively throughout the Soviet Union.

On a lecture tour in the United States, Mayakovsky met Elli Jones, who later gave birth to his daughter, an event which Mayakovsky only came to know in 1929, when the couple met clandestinely in the south of France, as the relationship was kept secret. In the late 1920s, Mayakovsky fell in love with Tatiana Yakovleva and to her he dedicated the poem "A Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva" (Письмо Татьяне Яковлевой, 1928).

Mayakovsky
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Mayakovsky
1929. Shostakovich, Meyerhold, Mayakovsky and Rodchenko rehearsing Mayakovsky's play The Bedbug
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1929. Shostakovich, Meyerhold, Mayakovsky and Rodchenko rehearsing Mayakovsky's play The Bedbug

The relevance of Mayakovsky cannot be limited to Soviet poetry. While over years, he was considered the Soviet poet par excellence, he also changed the perceptions of poetry in wider 20th Century culture. His political activism as a propagandistic agitator was rarely understood and often looked upon unfavourably by contemporaries, even close friends like Boris Pasternak. Near the end of the 1920s, Mayakovsky became increasingly interested in Communism, his satirical plays The Bedbug (Клоп, 1929) and The Bathhouse (Баня, 1930), dealing with the Soviet philistinism and bureaucracy, illustrates this development.

On the evening of April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself. The unfinished poem in his suicide note read, in part:

The love boat has crashed against the daily routine. You and I, we are quits, and there is no point in listing mutual pains, sorrows, and hurts.

Mayakovsky was interred at the Moscow Novodevichy Cemetery.

Mayakovsky's grave at Novodevichy
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Mayakovsky's grave at Novodevichy

In 1930, his birthplace of Bagdadi in Georgia was renamed Mayakovsky in his honour. Following Stalin's death, rumours arose that Mayakovsky did not commit suicide but was in fact murdered at the behest of Stalin, however, there is no evidence that he was murdered. During the 1990s, while KGB files were being declassified, there was hope that new evidence would come to light on this question, but none has been found and the hypothesis remains unproven.

After his death, Mayakovsky was attacked in the Soviet press as a "formalist" and a "fellow-traveller" (попутчик) (as opposed to officially recognised "proletarian poets", such as Demyan Bedny). When, in 1935, Lilya Brik wrote to Stalin about this, Stalin wrote a comment on Brik's letter:

"Comrade Yezhov, please take charge of Brik's letter. Mayakovsky is still the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime. Brik's complaints are, in my opinion, justified..." (Source: Memoirs by Vasily Katanyan (L.Yu.Brik's stepson) p.112)

These words became a cliché and officially canonized Mayakovsky but, as Boris Pasternak noted [2], it "dealt him the second death" in some circles.

Poetically, Mayakovsky had no followers among Russian poets, his style was never properly analysed or further developed. Mayakovsky, however, was the most influential futurist in Lithuania and his poetry helped to form The Four Winds movement [3].

Statue of Mayakovsky in Vologda
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Statue of Mayakovsky in Vologda

External links

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References

  • Mayakovsky, Vladimir (Patricia Blake ed., trans. Max Hayward and George Reavey). The bedbug and selected poetry. (Meridian Books, Cleveland, 1960).
  • Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Mayakovsky: Plays. Trans. Guy Daniels. (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Il, 1995). ISBN 0810113392.
  • Mayakovsky, Vladimir. For the voice (The British Library, London, 2000).
  • Mayakovsky, Vladimir (ed. Bengt Jangfeldt, trans. Julian Graffy). Love is the heart of everything : correspondence between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik 1915-1930 (Polygon Books, Edinburgh, 1986).
  • Mayakovsky, Vladimir (comp. and trans. Herbert Marshall). Mayakovsky and his poetry (Current Book House, Bombay, 1955).
  • Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Selected works in three volumes (Raduga, Moscow, 1985).
  • Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Selected poetry. (Foreign Languages, Moscow, 1975).
  • Mayakovsky, Vladimir (ed. Bengt Jangfeldt and Nils Ake Nilsson). Vladimir Majakovsky: Memoirs and essays (Almqvist & Wiksell Int., Stockholm 1975).
  • Mayakovsky, Vladimir. Satira ('Khudozh. lit.,' Moscow, 1969).
  • Brown, E. J. Mayakovsky: a poet in the revolution (Princeton Univ. Press, 1973).
  • Jangfeldt, Bengt. Majakovsky and futurism 1917-1921 (Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1976).
  • Stapanian, Juliette. Mayakovsky's cubo-futurist vision (Rice University Press, 1986).
  • Charters, Ann & Samuel. I love : the story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik (Farrar Straus Giroux, NY, 1979).
  • Lavrin, Janko. From Pushkin to Mayakovsky, a study in the evolution of a literature. (Sylvan Press, London, 1948).
  • Mikhailov, Aleksandr Alekseevich. Maiakovskii (Mol. gvardiia, Moscow, 1988).
  • Terras, Victor. Vladimir Mayakovsky (Twayne, Boston, 1983).
  • Vallejo, César (trans. Richard Schaaf) The Mayakovsky case (Curbstone Press, Willimantic, CT, 1982).
  • Wachtel, Michael. The development of Russian verse : meter and its meanings (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
  • Humesky, Assya. Majakovskiy and his neologisms (Rausen Publishers, NY, 1964).
  • Shklovskii, Viktor Borisovich. (ed. and trans. Lily Feiler). Mayakovsky and his circle (Dodd, Mead, NY, 1972).
  • Novatorskoe iskusstvo Vladimira Maiakovskogo (trans. Alex Miller). Vladimir Mayakovsky: Innovator (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976).
  • Rougle, Charles. Three Russians consider America : America in the works of Maksim Gorkij, Aleksandr Blok, and Vladimir Majakovsky (Almqvist & Wiksell International, Stockholm, 1976).
  • Aizlewood, Robin. Verse form and meaning in the poetry of Vladimir Maiakovsky: Tragediia, Oblako v shtanakh, Fleita-pozvonochnik, Chelovek, Liubliu, Pro eto (Modern Humanities Research Association, London, 1989).
  • Noyes, George R. Masterpieces of the Russian drama (Dover Pub., NY, 1960).
  • (Lithuanian) Nyka-Niliūnas, Alfonsas. Keturi vėjai ir keturvėjinikai (The Four Winds literary movement and its members), Aidai, 1949, No. 24.

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