Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 - 1930) was a Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, actor and graphic artist, and the leading figure of Russian Futurism. [1] His declamatory, typographically inventive verse and his propaganda posters made him the most publicly visible poet of the first Soviet decade. [2] He died by suicide in Moscow in 1930 and was later canonised by the Soviet state as its model revolutionary poet.
Early life
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born on 7 July 1893 in Baghdati, Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, where his father worked as a forester. [1] After his father's sudden death in 1906 the family moved to Moscow in straitened circumstances. As a teenager Mayakovsky joined the Bolshevik party and was arrested three times, spending eleven months in Butyrka prison, where he began to write.
On release he enrolled at the Stroganov school and then at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, training as a visual artist. There he met David Burliuk, who encouraged his poetry and drew him into the Futurist circle. [2]
Futurism
In 1912 Mayakovsky was a signatory of the Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which called for a break with the Russian classical tradition. [1] His early long poems, including A Cloud in Trousers (1915) and The Backbone Flute, combined violent imagery, street language, extreme metaphor and a stepped, stress-based line designed for public recitation.
He performed in yellow jackets at Futurist evenings and toured Russian cities to declaim his work, cultivating a deliberately provocative public persona. He also acted in and wrote for early Russian cinema. [3]
Revolution and public art
Mayakovsky welcomed the October Revolution of 1917 and put his talents at the service of the new state. Working for the Russian Telegraph Agency, he produced hundreds of ROSTA propaganda posters, drawing the images and writing the accompanying rhymed captions himself. [2] He wrote advertising jingles for state enterprises and long political poems, among them 150,000,000, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Good!.
He travelled abroad in the 1920s, to Europe, Mexico and the United States, and published verse and prose reflecting on what he saw. He was also active in the literary group LEF and edited its journals. [1]
Plays and final years
Mayakovsky's plays include Mystery-Bouffe, a revolutionary allegory, and the satires The Bedbug and The Bathhouse, which attacked bureaucratic complacency and philistinism in Soviet society and met with official coolness. [3]
By the late 1920s he was under increasing attack from rival literary factions and from state cultural authorities, and his personal life, including his long attachment to Lilya Brik, was strained. He shot himself in Moscow on 14 April 1930, leaving a farewell note in verse. [1]
Legacy
In 1935 Stalin declared Mayakovsky the best and most talented poet of the Soviet epoch, a pronouncement that made him a compulsory school author and, as later critics observed, somewhat flattened his reception. [2] Outside that official framing he is valued for his formal innovation, his fusion of poetry with visual design, and his influence on twentieth-century performance poetry. Moscow's Mayakovsky Square and metro station, and a museum in the city, carry his name. [3]
