Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Mayakovsky was a Russian Soviet poet and playwright. Born in Baghdati (now Mayakovsky), Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, Mayakovsky moved to Moscow with his family after his father died. At age 15, he joined the Social Democratic Labour Party, and was jailed several times for his involvements with the group. He started to write poetry during solitary confinement in 1909. On his release he attended the Moscow Art School and joined, with David Burlyuk and a few others, the Russian Futurist group and soon became its leading spokesman. In 1912 the group published a manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, and Mayakovsky’s poetry became conspicuously self-assertive and defiant in form and content. His poetic monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky was performed in St. Petersburg in 1913. Between 1914 and 1916 Mayakovsky completed two major poems, “A Cloud in Trousers” and “The Backbone Flute”. Both record a tragedy of unrequited love and express the author’s discontent with the world in which he lived. Mayakovsky sought to “depoetize” poetry, adopting the language of the streets and using daring technical innovations. Above all, his poetry is declamatory, for mass audiences. When the Russian Revolution of 1917 broke out, Mayakovsky was wholeheartedly for the Bolsheviks. Such poems as “Ode to Revolution” and “Left March” became very popular. So too did his Mystery Bouffe, a drama representing a universal flood and the subsequent joyful triumph of the “Unclean” (the proletarians) over the “Clean” (the bourgeoisie). Mayakovsky produced a large and diverse body of work during the course of his career: he wrote poems, wrote and directed plays, appeared in films, edited the art journal LEF, and produced agitprop posters in support of the Communist Party during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. Though Mayakovsky’s work regularly demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of the Bolsheviks and a strong admiration of Vladimir Lenin, his relationship with the Soviet state was always complex and often tumultuous. Mayakovsky often found himself engaged in confrontation with the increasing involvement of the Soviet state in cultural censorship and the development of the State doctrine of Socialist realism. Works that criticized or satirized aspects of the Soviet system, such as the poem “Talking With the Taxman About Poetry”, and the plays The Bedbug and The Bathhouse, met with scorn from the Soviet state and literary establishment. In 1930, Mayakovsky killed himself. Even after death, his relationship with the Soviet state remained unsteady. Though Mayakovsky had previously been harshly criticized by Soviet governmental bodies such as the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), Premier Joseph Stalin described Mayakovsky after his death as “the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch”.