Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich

MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH

(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.

See also: bolshevism; circus; futurism

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