Vladimir Vysotsky

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Lore & Background

Mayakovsky was born in 1893 in Baghdati, Kutais Governorate, Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, to Alexandra Alexeyevna (née Pavlenko), a housewife, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, a local forester. His father belonged to a noble family and was a distant relative of the writer Grigory Danilevsky. Vladimir Vladimirovich had two sisters, Olga and Lyudmila, and a brother Konstantin, who died at the age of three. The family was of Russian and Zaporozhian Cossack descent on their father's side and Ukrainian on their mother's. At home the family spoke Russian. With his friends and at school, Mayakovsky spoke Georgian. '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,' he told the Prague newspaper Prager Presse in a 1927 interview. For Mayakovsky, Georgia was his eternal symbol of beauty. 'I know, it's nonsense, Eden and Paradise, but since people sang about them // It must have been Georgia, the joyful land, that those poets were having in mind', he wrote later. In 1902, Mayakovsky joined the Kutaisi gymnasium. Later as a 14-year-old, he took part in socialist demonstrations in the town of Kutaisi. His father died suddenly in 1906, when Mayakovsky was thirteen. (The father pricked his finger on a rusty pin while filing papers and died of blood poisoning.) His widowed mother moved the family to Moscow after selling all their movable property. In July 1906, Mayakovsky joined the 4th form of Moscow's 5th Classic gymnasium and soon developed a passion for Marxist literature. 'Never cared for fiction. For me it was philosophy, Hegel, natural sciences, but first and foremost, Marxism. There'd be no higher art for me than "The Foreword" by Marx', he recalled in the 1920s in his autobiography I, Myself. In 1907 Mayakovsky became a member of his gymnasium's underground Social Democrats' circle, taking part in numerous activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), which he, given the nickname 'Comrade Konstantin', joined the same year. In 1908, the boy was dismissed from the gymnasium because his mother was no longer able to afford the tuition fees. For two years he studied at the Stroganov School of Industrial Arts, where his sister Lyudmila had started her studies a few years earlier. As a young Bolshevik activist, Mayakovsky distributed propaganda leaflets, possessed a pistol without a license, and in 1909 got involved in smuggling female political activists out of prison. This resulted in a series of arrests and finally an 11 month imprisonment. It was in solitary confinement in the Moscow Butyrka prison that Mayakovsky started writing verses for the first time. 'Revolution and poetry got entangled in my head and became one,' he wrote in I, Myself. As a minor Mayakovsky was spared a serious prison sentence (with associated deportation) and in January 1910 was released. A warden confiscated the young man's notebook. Years later Mayakovsky conceded that was all for the better, yet he always cited 1909 as the year his literary career started. Upon his release from prison, Mayakovsky remained an ardent Socialist, but realised his own inadequacy as a serious revolutionary. Having left the RSDLP (never to re-join it), he concentrated on education. 'I stopped my Party activities. Sat down and started to learn... Now my intention was to make the Socialist art,' he later remembered. In 1911, Mayakovsky enrolled in the Moscow Art School. In September 1911 a brief encounter with fellow student David Burlyuk (which nearly ended with a fight) led to a lasting friendship and had historic consequences for the nascent Russian Futurist movement. Mayakovsky became an active member (and soon a spokesman) for the group Hylaea (Гилея), which sought to free the arts from academic traditions: its members would read poetry on street corners, throw tea at their audiences, and make their public appearances an annoyance for the art establishment. Burlyuk, on having heard Mayakovsky's verses, declared him 'a genius poet'. Later Soviet researchers tried to downplay the significance of the fact, but even after their friendship ended and their ways parted, Mayakovsky continued to give credit to his mentor, referring to him as 'my wonderful friend'. 'It was Burlyuk who turned me into a poet. He read the French and the Germans to me. He pressed books on me. He would come and talk endlessly. He didn't let me get away. He would subsidise me with 50 kopeks each day so that I'd write and not be hungry,' Mayakovsky wrote in 'I, Myself'. On 17 November 1912, Mayakovsky made his first public performance at Stray Dog, the artistic basement in Saint Petersburg. In December of that year his first published poems, 'Night' (Ночь) and 'Morning' (Утро) appeared in the Futurists' Manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, signed by Mayakovsky, as well as Velemir Khlebnikov, David Burlyuk and Alexey Kruchenykh, calling among other things for... 'throwing Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc, etc, off the steamboat of modernity.' In October 1913, Mayakovsky gave a performance at the Pink Lantern café, reciting his new poem 'Take That!' (Нате!) for the first time. The concert at Petersburg's Luna-Park saw the premiere of the poetic monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky, with the author in a leading role, stage decorations designed by Pavel Filonov and Iosif Shkolnik. In 1913 Mayakovsky's first poetry collection, I, (Я) came out, its original limited edition 300 copies lithographically printed. This four-poem cycle, handwritten and illustrated by Vasily Tchekrygin and Leo Shektel, later formed Part One of the 1916 compilation Simple as Mooing. In December 1913, Mayakovsky along with his fellow Futurist group members embarked on the Russian tour, which took them to 17 cities, including Simferopol, Sevastopol, Kerch, Odessa and Kishinev. It was a riotous affair. The audiences would go wild and often the police stopped the readings. The poets dressed outlandishly, and Mayakovsky, 'a regular scandal-maker' in his own words, used to appear on stage in a self-made yellow shirt which became the token of his early stage persona. The tour ended on 13 April 1914 in Kaluga and cost Mayakovsky and Burlyuk their education: both were expelled from the Art school, their public appearances deemed incompatible with the school's academic principles. They learned of it while in Poltava from the local police chief, who chose the occasion as a pretext to ban the Futurists from performing on stage. Having won 65 rubles in a lottery, in May 1914, Mayakovsky went to Kuokkala, near Petrograd. Here he put the finishing touches to A Cloud in Trousers, frequented Korney Chukovsky's dacha, sat for Ilya Repin's painting sessions and met Maxim Gorky for the first time. As World War I began, Mayakovsky volunteered but was rejected as 'politically unreliable'. He worked for the Lubok Today company which produced patriotic lubok pictures, and in the Nov (Virgin Land) newspaper, which published several of his anti-war poems ('Mother and an Evening Killed by the Germans', 'The War is Declared', 'Me and Napoleon' among others). In the summer of 1915 Mayakovsky moved to Petrograd where he started contributing to the New Satyrikon magazine, writing mostly humorous verse in the vein of Sasha Tchorny, one of the journal's former stalwarts. Subsequently, Maxim Gorky invited the poet to work for his journal, Letopis. In June of that year, Mayakovsky fell in love with a married woman, Lilya Brik, who eagerly took upon herself the role of a muse. Her husband Osip Brik seemed not to mind and became the poet's close friend; later he published several books by Mayakovsky and used his entrepreneurial talents to support the Futurist movement.

Reader's Guide

Mayakovsky's significance lies in his role as a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement and his large and diverse body of work. He co-signed the Futurist manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1913), and wrote such poems as A Cloud in Trousers (1915) and Backbone Flute (1916). He produced 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 his work demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the Bolsheviks and a strong admiration of Vladimir Lenin, his relationship with the Soviet state was complex and often tumultuous. He 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' (1926), and the plays The Bedbug (1929) and The Bathhouse (1929), met with scorn from the Soviet state and literary establishment. In 1930, Mayakovsky committed suicide. Even after death, his relationship with the Soviet state remained unsteady. Though Mayakovsky had previously been harshly criticised by Soviet governmental bodies such as the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, Premier Joseph Stalin described Mayakovsky after his death as 'the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch'.

Did You Know?

• Mayakovsky started writing verses for the first time in solitary confinement in the Moscow Butyrka prison in 1909.
• He co-signed the Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1913), which called for 'throwing Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc, etc, off the steamboat of modernity.'
• Mayakovsky's first poetry collection, I, (Я) came out in 1913 in a limited edition of 300 copies, handwritten and illustrated.
• He fell in love with a married woman, Lilya Brik, in June 1915; her husband Osip Brik became the poet's close friend and published several of his books.
• Premier Joseph Stalin described Mayakovsky after his death as 'the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.'