Poet and playwright, born in Bagdadi, WC Georgia. He began writing at an early age, and was regarded as the leader of the Futurist school. During the Russian Revolution (1917) he emerged as the propaganda mouthpiece of the Bolsheviks. His plays include Misteriya-Buff (1918, Mystery-Bouffe), and the satirical Klop (1929, The Bedbug) and Banya (1930, The Bath-House). Towards the end of his life he was severely castigated by more orthodox Soviet writers and critics for his outspoken criticism of bureaucracy and his unconventional opinions on art, and this appears to have contributed towards his suicide.
Early Life
He was born the last of three children in Bagdadi, Georgia where his father worked as a forest ranger. After the sudden and premature death of his father in 1906, the family — Mayakovsky, his mother, and his two sisters — moved to Moscow, where he attended School No.
In Moscow Mayakovsky developed a passion for Marxist literature and took part in numerous activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party;
Around this time, Mayakovsky was imprisoned on three occasions for subversive political activities, but being underage, he avoided transportation.
Literary Life
The 1912 Futurist publication, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Пощёчина общественному вкусу) contained Mayakovsky's first published poems: "Night" (Ночь), and "Morning" (Утро).
His work continued in the Futurist vein until 1914.
A Cloud in Trousers (1915) was Mayakovsky's first major poem of appreciable length and it depicted the heated subjects of love, revolution, religion, and art written from the vantage point of a spurned lover. The language of the work was the language of the streets, and Mayakovsky went to considerable lengths to debunk idealistic and romanticised notions of poetry and poets.
|
Your thoughts,
dreaming on a softened brain,
Of Grandfatherly gentleness I'm devoid, 
|
Вашу мысль
У меня в душе ни одного седого волоса, |
(From the prologue of A Cloud in Trousers. source: )
In the summer of 1915, Mayakovsky fell in love with a married woman, Lilya Brik, and it is to her that the poem "The Backbone Flute" (1916) was dedicated;
Mayakovsky was rejected as a volunteer at the beginning of WWI, and during 1915-1917 worked at the Petrograd Military Automobile School as a draftsman.
After moving back to Moscow, Mayakovsky worked for the Russian State Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) creating — both graphic and text — satirical Agitprop posters. During 1922-1928, Mayakovsky was a prominent member of the Left Art Front and went on to define his work as 'Communist futurism' (комфут).
As one of the few Soviet writers who were allowed to travel freely, his voyages to Latvia, Britain, Germany, the United States, Mexico and Cuba influenced works like My Discovery of America (Мое открытие Америки, 1925).
On a lecture tour in the United States, Mayakovsky met Elli Jones, who later gave birth to his daughter, an event which Mayakovsky only came to know in 1929, when the couple met clandestinely in the south of France, as the relationship was kept secret. In the late 1920s, Mayakovsky fell in love with Tatiana Yakovleva and to her he dedicated the poem "A Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva" (Письмо Татьяне Яковлевой, 1928).
The relevance of Mayakovsky cannot be limited to Soviet poetry.
On the evening of April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself in the heart. An unfinished poem in his suicide note read, in part:
Mayakovsky was interred at the Moscow Novodevichy Cemetery.
After his death, Mayakovsky was attacked in the Soviet press as a "formalist" and a "fellow-traveller" (попутчик) (as opposed to officially recognised "proletarian poets", such as Demyan Bedny). When, in 1935, Lilya Brik wrote to Stalin about this, Stalin wrote a comment on Brik's letter:
"Comrade Yezhov, please take charge of Brik's letter. (Source: Memoirs by Vasily Katanyan (L.Yu.Brik's stepson) p.112)
These words became a cliché and officially canonized Mayakovsky but, as Boris Pasternak noted , it "dealt him the second death" in some circles.
Poetically, Mayakovsky had no followers among Russian poets, his style was never properly analysed or further developed.
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