Vladimir Mayakovsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart on the 14th of April 1930, and then the suspicions began. The bullet pulled from his body did not match the model of his pistol. Neighbors reported hearing two shots, not one. Ten days later, the officer investigating the death was himself killed. The suicide note, it turned out, had been written two days before he died. For a man who had spent his life shouting poetry on street corners in a self-made yellow shirt, even his death refused to stay quiet. Here was a Russian poet who threw tea at his audiences, co-signed a manifesto demanding that Pushkin and Tolstoy be thrown off the steamboat of modernity, and then poured his talent into propaganda posters for the Communist Party. He admired Lenin and embraced the Bolshevik Revolution as his own. Yet his last plays were savaged by the Soviet literary establishment as the work of a petit bourgeois. How did a man become both the rebel against all taste and the official poet of a revolution? Why would the same state that scorned him later canonize him on Stalin's personal order? And what drove a poet who once wrote that revolution and poetry had become one thing in his head to put a bullet in his own chest?

• 2. Three Cultures United

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  "I was born in the Caucasus, my father is a Cossack, my mother is Ukrainian. My mother tongue is Georgian. Thus three cultures are united in me," Mayakovsky told the Prague newspaper Prager Presse in a 1927 interview. He was born in 1893 in Baghdati, in the Kutais Governorate of Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Vladimir Mayakovsky, worked as a local forester and belonged to a noble family, a distant relative of the writer Grigory Danilevsky. His mother, Alexandra Alexeyevna, kept the house. At home the family spoke Russian, but with his friends and at school the young Mayakovsky spoke Georgian. Georgia became for him an eternal symbol of beauty. He once wrote that if Eden and Paradise existed, the poets who sang of them must have had the joyful land of Georgia in mind. The boy had two sisters, Olga and Lyudmila, and a brother Konstantin who died at the age of three. In 1906, when Mayakovsky was thirteen, his father pricked his finger on a rusty pin while filing papers and died of blood poisoning. His widowed mother sold all the family's movable property and moved them to Moscow.

• 3. Comrade Konstantin

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  At fourteen, Mayakovsky was already taking part in socialist demonstrations in the town of Kutaisi, and his mother chose not to stop him. "People around warned us we were giving a young boy too much freedom. But I saw him developing according to the new trends, sympathized with him and pandered to his aspirations," she later remembered. In July 1906 he entered Moscow's 5th Classic gymnasium and fell hard for Marxist literature. "Never cared for fiction. For me it was philosophy, Hegel, natural sciences, but first and foremost, Marxism," he recalled in his autobiography I, Myself. In 1907 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party under the nickname "Comrade Konstantin." As a young Bolshevik he handed out leaflets, carried a pistol without a license, and in 1909 got involved in smuggling female political activists out of prison. A string of arrests followed, ending in eleven months of imprisonment. In solitary confinement at Moscow's Butyrka prison, he started writing verses for the first time. "Revolution and poetry got entangled in my head and became one," he wrote. A warden confiscated his notebook, and years later he conceded that was all for the better, yet he always cited 1909 as the year his literary career began.

• 4. The Yellow Shirt

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  A near-fight in September 1911 became the friendship that made Mayakovsky a poet. He had enrolled in the Moscow Art School, where a brief and almost violent encounter with fellow student David Burlyuk turned into a lasting bond. Burlyuk heard Mayakovsky's verses and declared him "a genius poet." "It was Burlyuk who turned me into a poet," Mayakovsky later wrote. "He read the French and the Germans to me. He pressed books on me. He would subsidise me with 50 kopeks each day so that I'd write and not be hungry." Together they joined the group that sought to free the arts from academic tradition, reading poetry on street corners and throwing tea at their audiences. On the 17th of November 1912, Mayakovsky made his first public performance at the artistic basement Stray Dog in Saint Petersburg. The next month his first published poems, "Night" and "Morning," appeared in the Futurists' manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, alongside Velemir Khlebnikov, Burlyuk, and Alexey Kruchenykh. In December 1913 the Futurists set off on a riotous tour of seventeen cities, where audiences went wild and police often stopped the readings. Mayakovsky, a self-described "regular scandal-maker," appeared in a self-made yellow shirt that became his early stage trademark. The tour cost him and Burlyuk their education. Both were expelled from the Art school, their public antics judged incompatible with academic principles.

• 5. For You, Lilya

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  In July 1915, at a dacha in Malakhovka near Moscow, Mayakovsky met Osip and Lilya Brik, a married couple who were then successful coral traders with no interest in literature. That evening he recited the unpublished poem A Cloud in Trousers and announced it as dedicated to Lilya. "That was the happiest day in my life," he later wrote. His pursuit of her was relentless. "Volodya did not merely fall in love with me; he attacked me, it was an assault," Lilya remembered. "For two and a half years I didn't have a moment's peace." To please her, he attended a dentist, started wearing a bow tie, and took up a walking stick. Osip Brik fell for the poet too, published A Cloud in Trousers in September 1915, and used his entrepreneurial talents to support the Futurist movement. From then on Mayakovsky dedicated nearly every one of his large poems to Lilya, even adding such dedications to texts written before they met, much to her displeasure. In summer 1918, after the two starred in the film Encased in a Film, Mayakovsky and the Briks moved in together, eventually turning a flat on Gendrikov Lane into the LEF headquarters. Other women moved through his life. There was the artist Lilya Lavinskaya, who bore him a son in 1921, and in New York in 1925 the interpreter Elli Jones, who gave birth to a daughter, Patricia. Mayakovsky saw the girl just once, in Nice in 1928, when she was three. In Paris that same year he fell madly for Tatyana Yakovleva, a 22-year-old model working for the Chanel fashion house, and wrote two poems for her. He tried to persuade her to return to Russia, but she refused. Many believed Lilya Brik used her connections to block his visa when he tried to travel to Paris to marry his lover.

• 6. Poet Of The Revolution

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  "To accept or not to accept, there was no such question... That was my Revolution," Mayakovsky wrote of 1917. He worked for a while in Smolny, Petrograd, where he saw Vladimir Lenin in person. From 1919 to 1921 he turned out roughly 1,100 satirical Agitprop posters for the Russian State Telegraph Agency, work he called the "ROSTA Windows," aimed at informing a largely illiterate population. His 1921 poem 150,000,000 failed to impress Lenin, who saw in it little more than a formal experiment, but the leader warmed to the biting bureaucratic satire "Re Conferences." From 1922 to 1928 Mayakovsky helped found and lead the Left Art Front, coining its credo of "literature of fact, not fiction," and edited its journal LEF alongside Sergei Tretyakov and Osip Brik. In October 1924 he gave readings of the 3,000-line epic Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, written on the leader's death. Five years later his rendition of the poem's third part at the Bolshoi Theatre ended in a twenty-minute ovation. His travels carried him to Riga, Berlin, and Paris, where he visited the studios of Fernand Leger and Picasso, and in 1925 to the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, producing the essay collection My Discovery of America. Among the early Bolshevik government, only Anatoly Lunacharsky supported his Futurist art, while others treated it with skepticism.

• 7. The Bedbug And The Bathhouse

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  "Talking with the Taxman about Poetry," written in 1926, was the first in a series of works in which Mayakovsky turned his satire on the new Soviet philistinism born of the New Economic Policy. His two late plays sharpened that edge. The Bedbug, from 1929, and The Bathhouse, from 1930, both lampooned bureaucratic stupidity and opportunism, and both drew stormy criticism from the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. Vsevolod Meyerhold rated The Bathhouse as high as the best of Moliere, Pushkin, and Gogol, calling it "the greatest phenomenon of the history of the Russian theatre." The Party leadership felt otherwise. An exhibition marking the twentieth anniversary of his literary career, along with the parallel "20 Years of Work" event in February 1930, were ignored by RAPP and by Stalin, whose attendance Mayakovsky had eagerly anticipated. In February 1930 he joined RAPP. On the 9th of March, in Pravda, the 23-year-old RAPP member Vladimir Yermilov, who had not seen the play but had read part of the script, branded him part of the "petit bourgeois revolutionary intelligentsia." The accusation implied a link to the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky, then in exile or prison. Mayakovsky made a huge poster mocking Yermilov, but RAPP ordered him to take it down. On the 9th of April 1930, reading his new poem "At the Top of My Voice," he was shouted down by a student audience for being "too obscure."

• 8. Like Potatoes

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  "Tell Yermilov we should have completed the argument," Mayakovsky wrote in his suicide note. On the 12th of April 1930 he made his last public appearance, joining a discussion at a Sovnarkom meeting about a proposed copyright law. Two days later, his partner the actress Veronika Polonskaya heard a shot behind a closed door as she was leaving his flat. The handwritten note named his family as Lilya Brik, his mother, his sisters, and Polonskaya, and asked the government to provide for them. His funeral on the 17th of April drew around 150,000 mourners, the third largest event of public mourning in Soviet history, surpassed only by those of Lenin and Stalin. Marina Tsvetayeva wrote that for twelve years Mayakovsky the man had been destroying Mayakovsky the poet, and that on the thirteenth year the poet rose up and killed the man. After his death his work was cancelled and his name vanished from the Soviet press. Then, in a 1935 letter, Lilya Brik appealed to Stalin, who inscribed his reply: "Mayakovsky is the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage amounts to a crime." The effect was startling. His birthplace of Baghdati was renamed Mayakovsky, a Moscow square took his name, and in 1938 the Mayakovskaya Metro Station opened. Boris Pasternak called this forced canonization a second death, saying the authorities imposed him "like Catherine the Great did with potatoes." Decades later, young poets seeking artistic freedom would gather for readings at his statue in Moscow, reclaiming the rebel the state had tried to turn into a slogan.