Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Mayakovsky: The Revolution's Loudest Instrument

The note he left on 14 April 1930 was addressed to everyone: "To all of you. I die, but don't blame anyone for it." Three days later roughly 150,000 people came to bury him, the third-largest public mourning Soviet Russia would ever stage, behind only Lenin's and Stalin's. Five years after that, Stalin himself declared him the best and most talented poet of the Soviet epoch and made indifference to his legacy a crime. Almost none of this was what Mayakovsky had wanted, and the poet Boris Pasternak called the canonisation his second death.

Bagdadi to Butyrka

He was born on 19 July 1893 in Baghdati, Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, to a nobleman and forester and his wife Alexandra. The family carried Russian, Zaporozhian Cossack and Ukrainian blood; they spoke Russian at home while the boy spoke Georgian with his schoolfriends. In 1906 his father pricked a finger on a rusty pin, contracted blood poisoning and died, and the family moved to Moscow. Mayakovsky was already politically lit — at fourteen he had joined socialist demonstrations in Kutaisi — and in Moscow he fell on Marxist literature and joined the Social Democrats' underground circle in 1907. Distributing propaganda and helping smuggle activists out of prison put him into one: eleven months in Butyrka in 1909. In the cell, much of it solitary, he started writing verse.

The Yellow Shirt

Released in 1910, he abandoned party work for art and enrolled at the Moscow Art School, where in 1911 he met David Burlyuk, who took one look at his work and pronounced him a genius poet. Burlyuk fed him, funded him and educated him. Mayakovsky became the public voice of the Hylaea group, declaiming on street corners, and gave his first formal performance at Saint Petersburg's Stray Dog cabaret on 17 November 1912. That December his poems "Night" and "Morning" appeared inside the Futurist manifesto *A Slap in the Face of Public Taste*, alongside Khlebnikov, Burlyuk and Kruchenykh, which demanded that Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy be thrown off the steamboat of modernity. A seventeen-city tour in December 1913 turned them notorious; police repeatedly shut down the readings, Mayakovsky's yellow shirt became a national emblem of provocation, and he and Burlyuk were expelled from art school for the spectacle.

A Cloud in Trousers

The tragedy *Vladimir Mayakovsky* came in 1914, and in 1915 the poem that made him — *A Cloud in Trousers*, his first extended work, a piece of enormous, bruised swagger. *Backbone Flute* followed in 1916 and duly outraged the critics. In June 1915 he met Lilya Brik at her dacha outside Moscow. She was married to Osip Brik, a merchant who became Mayakovsky's friend and publisher, and she became the addressee of his major love poetry for the rest of his life. Her own account of the beginning is characteristically blunt: "Volodya did not merely fall in love with me; he attacked me, it was an assault." The romance ended around 1923; the arrangement did not, and from 1926 the three shared a Moscow flat that doubled as a literary headquarters.

Poet of the Telegraph Agency

Mayakovsky met October 1917 with total conviction, working at Smolny in Petrograd and declaring allegiance to the new regime that November. *Mystery-Bouffe*, staged in 1918 and revised in 1921, was the first Soviet play, a pageant of workers inheriting the earth; "Left March" belongs to the same surge. Then came the strangest labour of his career. Between 1919 and 1921 he produced roughly 1,100 ROSTA Windows for the Russian Telegraph Agency — satirical agitprop posters, image and slogan together, hand-made propaganda for a state that had no printing capacity and a population that often could not read. He was, in the phrase of the period, a spokesman of the Soviet nation, and he had made himself into one deliberately.

LEF and the Epic Machine

From 1922 to 1928 he helped found and define the Left Front of the Arts, editing its journal *LEF* with Sergei Tretyakov and Osip Brik on a programme of rejecting individualism and putting art to work for communism. The long poems of these years are monuments: *150,000,000* (1921), which conspicuously failed to impress Lenin; the intimate *I Love* (1922) and *About That* (1923); the three-thousand-line *Vladimir Ilyich Lenin* (1924); and *All Right!* (1927), which Lunacharsky called the October Revolution set in bronze. He also travelled, first in May 1922 to Riga, Berlin and Paris, where he met Léger and Picasso, and in 1925 across Europe to New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, then Mexico and Cuba, producing *My Discovery of America*.

The Bedbug and the Bullet

The satirical plays that closed the decade, *The Bedbug* and *The Bathhouse*, turned his weapons on Soviet bureaucracy and were savaged by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. His private life narrowed with his public one. He had a son by Lilya Lavinskaya, a daughter by Elli Jones in New York, and in Paris in 1928 he met Tatyana Yakovleva, a Chanel model he intended to marry; in late 1929 the state refused him the visa. On 14 April 1930, as the actress Veronika Polonskaya left his flat after a quarrel about her refusal to divorce her husband, he shot himself. The scene has never quite settled — the recovered bullet did not match his pistol model, neighbours reported hearing two shots, and the investigating officer was killed ten days later.

Why Vladimir Is Called a Genius

The word was applied to him at the source: Burlyuk called him a genius poet in 1911, before he had published anything of consequence, and Stalin's 1935 resolution named him the best and most talented poet of the Soviet epoch. Neither is disinterested — Burlyuk was recruiting, Stalin was managing a corpse. The durable claim is technical. Mayakovsky is credited as a radical reformer of the Russian poetic language, manufacturing expressive neologisms and building experimental verse forms that reshaped what a poem in Russian could do. He fused that invention with a performer's physical presence, which is why the street corner, the cabaret and the seventeen-city tour mattered as much as the printed page — the work was built to be delivered aloud to a crowd that might be hostile.

The honest counter-case is heavy. A great deal of his output was propaganda made to order, including 1,100 posters and slogans that were later mined for wall-text by the state, and his most ambitious civic epic left Lenin cold. He worked in willing service of a regime that became murderous, and his highest official endorsement came from its chief. Pasternak's verdict on the posthumous cult — a second death, imposed forcibly, with the awkward work censored — is the necessary corrective. What remains genuinely his is a reconstruction of how Russian could sound: loud, jagged, colloquial, capable of tenderness and abuse in the same breath.

Legacy

The cult buried him twice, but it did not hold. From the late 1950s a younger Soviet generation reclaimed Mayakovsky as a symbol of artistic freedom rather than obedience, reading past the slogans to the shattered love poems. Abroad his influence ran through Nâzım Hikmet, Louis Aragon, Pablo Neruda and Frank O'Hara. Baghdati was renamed after him, a Moscow metro station opened in his name in 1938, and his example survives wherever a poem still wants to be heard rather than merely read.

Achievements

• Lenin Komsomol Prize
• Genres: verse, narrative poetry and agitprop