Background

Ethnicity: Vladimir's family was of Russian and Zaporozhian Cossack descent on his father's side and Ukrainian on his mother's.

Vladimir Mayakovsky was born on July 19, 1893, in Baghdati, Kutais Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Baghdati, Georgia). He was a son of Vladimir Konstantinovich Mayakovsky, a forester, and Alexandra Alexeyevna (Pavlenko) Mayakovskaya, a housewife. Vladimir also had two sisters — Olga and Lyudmila, the latter was a textile designer and teacher.

When Vladimir's father died in 1906, the family moved to Moscow. This was to be Mayakovsky's city until his death.

Education

In 1902, Vladimir enrolled in a gymnasium in Kutaisi, Georgia. During that time, he took part in socialist demonstrations in the city. In 1906, when, after the death of his father, Mayakovsky's family settled down in Moscow, he entered the 4th form of the Moscow's Fifth Classical Gymnasium and soon developed a passion for Marxist literature. In 1908, he was dismissed from the school due to his mother's inability to afford tuition.

Then, during the period from 1908 till 1910, Vladimir studied at the Stroganov School of Industrial Arts (present-day Stroganov Moscow State Academy of Arts and Industry). In 1911, he entered Moscow Art School, later known as Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. It was there, at the school, that Vladimir became acquainted with members of Russia's futurist movement. He became a leading spokesman for the group Hylaea and a close friend to David Burlyuk, an older student, whom he saw as his mentor.

In 1914, Mayakovsky was expelled from the Moscow School of Painting due to his public appearances, deemed incompatible with the school's academic principles.

Career

In 1908, Vladimir sided with Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (Bolsheviks) and did propaganda work for it. In 1909, he got involved in smuggling female political activists out of prison. All these actions led to a series of arrests and finally an 11-month imprisonment in Moscow Butyrka prison. It was during his years of imprisonment, that Mayakovsky began writing verses for the first time. Being a juvenile, he was released in January 1910.

The same year after his release from prison, Vladimir broke with the Bolsheviks party and concentrated on education, having entered, in 1911, Moscow Art School, which was later known as Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. While studying there, Mayakovsky befriended the cubist painter David Burlyuk, who exposed Mayakovsky to avant-garde styles and innovations in the various arts.

On November 17, 1912, Mayakovsky made his first public performance at Stray Dog, the artistic basement in Saint Petersburg. The same year, he began to publish his first poems in Futurist collections. Also, it was in 1912, that Vladimir, together with Velimir Khlebnikov, David Burlyuk and Alexey Kruchenykh, founded Cubo-Futurist group and signed the Futurists' Manifesto "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste".

Mayakovsky eventually became involved with a band of touring artists, who acted and recited poems and speeches. He joined the troupe and provided recitations of his poetry. The artists embarked on a tour, which took them to several cities, including Simferopol, Sevastopol, Kerch, Odessa and Kishinev. During the performances, which Mayakovsky gave during the trip, Vladimir appeared on stage in a self-made yellow shirt, which became the token of his early stage persona. Also, it was at that period of time, that he wrote and performed in "Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy", which Robert Payne later described — in his introduction to "The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky" — as "the celebration of Mayakovsky’s own poetic genius and apotheosis as the divine poet, crowned with laurel leaves".

In May 1914, Mayakovsky traveled to Kuokkala (present-day Repino), where he finished his poem "A Cloud in Trousers". During that time, Vladimir also visited Korney Chukovsky's dacha, sat for Ilya Repin's painting sessions and met Maxim Gorky for the first time.

Vladimir wanted to become a volunteer in World War I. However, he was rejected as "politically unreliable". At that time, he began working for the Lubok Today company, which produced patriotic lubok pictures, and for the Nov (Virgin Land) newspaper. In 1915, the poet settled down in Petrograd (present-day Saint-Petersburg) and began contributing his works to the New Satyrikon magazine. Some time later, he was invited by Maxim Gorky to work for his journal "Letopis".

Also, in 1915, a year after leaving the Moscow Institute of Art, Mayakovsky met Osip Brik and his wife, Lili. The Briks exerted a considerable influence on Mayakovsky's life: Osip Brik became Mayakovsky’s publisher, Lili became his mistress and the inspiration for his passionate love poems. Among Mayakovsky’s publications from this time are the volumes "A Cloud in Trousers" and "The Backbone Flute", both of which feature radical, passionate poetry.

During the period from 1915 till 1917, Vladimir also served his military service as a draftsman at Petrograd Military Driving school. In November 1917, he participated in the Communist Party's Central committee-sanctioned assembly of writers, painters and theatre directors, who expressed their allegiance to the new political regime, which was established after the Bolshevik Revolution.

When the Czar was overthrown as a result of the Russian Revolution of 1917, Mayakovsky was at the forefront of artists, devoting themselves to the Bolshevik cause. In the years immediately following the revolution, Mayakovsky produced song lyrics, slogans and even propaganda posters, substantiating Bolshevik ideology and the establishment of the Soviet Republic. Notable among his many achievements during this period is "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin", a lengthy poem, extolling the virtues of the Bolshevik leader.

In 1918, Vladimir established the short-lived "Futurist Paper". At that time, he also acted in three silent films, made at the Neptun Studios in Petrograd and he had written scripts for. At the end of the same year, 1918, the poet, together with Osip Brick, took part in discussions with the Viborg district party school of the Russian Communist Party to set up a Futurist organisation, affiliated to the party. As a result of these discussions, the organization, titled Komfut, was established in January 1919. However, it was soon dissolved.

In March of 1919, Vladimir arrived in Moscow, where, the same month, he started working as a painter of posters and cartoons for Russian State Telegraph Agency (ROSTA), creating both graphic and text satirical Agitprop posters, a post he held till 1921. It was in 1919, that he published his first collection of poems "Collected Works 1909-1919".

In 1922, Mayakovsky became a prominent member of the Left Art Front organization, defining his work as "Communist futurism". In 1923, he founded LEF journal, which he edited along with Sergei Tretyakov and Osip Brik. In January 1927, Mayakovsky issued New LEF magazine. In summer 1928, dissatisfied with LEF, he left both the organization and its magazine.

By the end of the 1920's, Mayakovsky was regularly traveling abroad on behalf of the Soviet leaders. He came to the United States, where New York City’s imposing structures inspired him to write his celebrated poem cycle, which includes the poem "Brooklyn Bridge", wherein Mayakovsky celebrates the struggles of workers. In this poem, in characteristically self-important fashion, Mayakovsky ties his own achievements and struggles to those of the common folk.

During the mid-1930's, as Josef Stalin began wielding overwhelming dictatorial power within the Soviet Union’s communist regime, Mayakovsky became increasingly disillusioned with his country’s political system. He complained, that the Communist Party was becoming increasingly bourgeois and alienated from the workers’ cause. The communists, meanwhile, criticized Mayakovsky as an artist, whose individuality was at odds with the party’s — and, thus, the country’s — emphasis on the collective. Political pressure eventually drove Mayakovsky to resign from his staff positions on various political publications and enlist instead at a party-controlled organization.

Mayakovsky turned on the Soviet leadership and mocked the communists in his plays "The Bedbug" and "The Bathhouse". In "The Bedbug", a dedicated communist, Prisypkin, is revealed as an obnoxious bureaucrat. His frozen corpse is discovered fifty years later — with communism prevalent throughout the world — and thawed. But once having returned to life, the hero finds, that his boorish behavior is unacceptable to ruling communists, and so he is caged at a zoo. "The Bathhouse" is even more vehement in its negativity towards communism. Here, a dictator spends his time, extolling the virtues of his own regime. "The Bathhouse" proved particularly offensive to Soviet authorities, who sanctioned literary attacks on Mayakovsky by various party-supported critics.

For Mayakovsky, the communist bureaucracy — with its double speak and its opposition to individual expression — was intolerable, but it was also too powerful to overcome. Thus, in the spring of 1930 Mayakovsky shot himself and died.

In the years since Mayakovsky’s death, his reputation has flourished as one of his country’s most important and widely-read artists. Even Stalin was compelled to acknowledge him as the Soviet Union’s leading poet. The ensuing decades saw continued interest in Mayakovsky’s work, and his writings were published in numerous English language volumes.

Achievements

• Vladimir Mayakovsky gained prominence as the most dynamic figure of the Soviet literary scene. His predominantly lyrical poems and his technical innovations influenced a number of Soviet poets, and outside Russia his influence was strong, especially in the 1930's, after Stalin declared him the "best and most talented poet of Soviet epoch".
  
  Moreover, Vladimir Mayakovsky was a central figure of the Russian Futurist movement and the first artistic voice of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
  
  Mayakovsky's most important poems are "A Cloud in Trousers" (1915), "Backbone Flute" (1916), "150 000 000" (1921), "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" (1924) and "All Right!" (1927). His notable satirical plays include "The Bedbug" (1928) and "The Bathhouse" (1929).
  
  There are streets, named after Mayakovsky, in different cities around the world, including Berlin, Kiev, Minsk, Moscow, Perm, Saint-Petersburg and others. Also, a minor planet "2931 Mayakovsky" was named in his honour. There are plenty of museums and theatres, named after him. Mayakovsky is also depicted on a 1955 Bulgarian postage stamp.
  
  The poet received Lenin Komsomol Prize.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Mayakovsky: Plays

    (This work includes "Mystery Bouffe", a mock medieval myst...)

  • Lenin: Vladimir Ilyich

    (Written immediately after the death of Lenin, the poem pr...)

    1924
  • My Discovery of America

    (In this work, the leading poet of Revolutionary Russia Vl...)

    1926
  • Pro Eto: That's What

    ("Pro Eto: That's What" is part love poem, part political ...)

    1923
  • 150 000 000

    (Russian Edition.)

    1921
  • The bedbug: And selected poetry 1928
  • Listen! Early Poems 1987
  • Simple as Mooing 1916
  • The complete plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky 1968

• correspondence

  • Love is the Heart of Everything: Correspondence Between Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik, 1915-1930

    (English and Russian Edition.)

    1986

Religion

In 1929, Mayakovsky took part in the Second Congress of the League of Militant Atheists. In his speech, Mayakovsky called on writers and poets to fight against religion.

Politics

Mayakovsky was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution. Much of his artistic effort was devoted to propaganda of the party. His most political poems, "150,000,000" (1919) and "Vladimir Ilich Lenin" (1924), became required reading for every Soviet schoolchild and helped create the image of Mayakovsky as a mythic hero of the Soviet Union, a position, that Mayakovsky found increasingly untenable in the later 1920's.

During the Russian Civil War, Vladimir created agitprop posters in support of the Communist Party. However, despite the fact, that Vladimir's work demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of communists and a strong admiration of Vladimir Lenin, Mayakovsky's relationship with the Soviet state was always complex and often tumultuous. He often found himself engaged in a confrontation with the increasing involvement of the Soviet State in cultural censorship and the development of the State doctrine of Socialist realism.

In the last years of his life, Mayakovsky remained a relentless foe of bureaucratism and authoritarianism in Soviet society. His last works show his disillusionment with the bureaucracy of the regime.

Views

Mayakovsky was strongly influenced by his love affair with Lilya Brik, his extensive travels and by war and revolution. His lyrical verses are often about love. Yet, his political poems, which show other influences, cover a great range: he wrote a long, high-styled tribute to Lenin, funny political satire and political pamphlets. He wrote children's poems with political subtexts, occasional poems for events, such as the building of a canal and political poems meant to influence — not commemorate — political decisions. His love poems and even his advertisements showed political concern.

As a technician, Mayakovsky favored irregular structure, with broken lines, marked by internal rhymes. With regard to subject matter, Mayakovsky favored himself. His charged, aggressively self-important poems — replete with violent, even grotesque imagery — relate his intense feelings about life and love.

Quotations: "Art must not be concentrated in dead shrines, called museums. lt must be spread everywhere – on the streets, in the trams, factories, workshops, and in the workers' homes."

"If you wish, I shall grow irreproachably tender: not a man, but a cloud in trousers!"

"I want to be understood by my country, but if I fail to be understood – what then? I shall pass through my native land to one side, like a shower of slanting rain."

"I would want to live and die in Paris if there were not such a place as Moscow."

Membership

In his early years, Vladimir was an active member and spokesman of the group Hylaea, 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.

• prominent member

  Left Art Front organization , Soviet Union

  1922 - 1928

Personality

Vladimir was a sentimental, prone to panic man. He was a vulnerable and passionate lover, who desperately wanted to be loved and never actually was.

Connections

Mayakovsky wasn't in any registered marriage. However, during his lifetime, he had numerous romantic affairs. In 1915, he met husband and wife Osip and Lilya Brik. Lilya would eventually become his mistress and muse. In summer 1918, Mayakovsky and the Briks began living together. In March 1919, all three came to Moscow and in 1920 settled in a flat at the Gondrikov Lane, Taganka and lived together until 1930. In 1923, Vladimir and Lilya's relationship ended. However, they never parted.

In 1920, Mayakovsky had a brief relationship with Lilya Lavinskaya, an artist, who would give birth to their son, Gleb-Nikita Lavinsky. Their son would later become a Soviet sculptor.

In summer 1925, the poet visited New York, where he met and fell in love with Russian émigré Elli Jones, born Yelizaveta Petrovna Zibert, an interpreter, who had a good command of Russian, French, German and English. Later, Elli gave birth to their daughter, named Patricia Thompson (also known as Yelena Vladimirovna Mayakovskaya). Mayakovsky saw his daughter only once, in Nice, France, in 1928, when she was three years old. Patricia would later become a philosopher.

In 1928, in Paris, Vladimir met and had an affair with Tatyana Yakovleva, a model, working for the Chanel fashion house.

In the the late 1920s, Mayakovsky had relationships with two other women, including Natalya Bryukhanenko and Veronika Polonskaya, an actress. It is believed, that Vladimir wanted to marry Veronika, but it was her unwillingness to divorce her husband, that resulted in her rows with Mayakovsky.

Father:

Vladimir Konstantinovich Mayakovsky

Mother:

Alexandra Alexeyevna (Pavlenko) Mayakovskaya

child:

Gleb-Nikita Lavinsky

child:

Patricia Thompson

Sister:

Olga Mayakovskaya

Sister:

Lyudmila Mayakovskaya

life partner:

Lilya Brik

life partner:

Lilya Lavinskaya

life partner:

Elli Jones

life partner:

Tatyana Yakovleva

life partner:

Natalya Bryukhanenko

life partner:

Veronika Polonskaya

Friend:

Osip Brik

Friend:

David Burliuk

colleague:

Velimir Khlebnikov

colleague:

Aleksei Kruchenykh

References

• Mayakovsky: How Are Verses Made? Russian Studies.
  1990
• Vladimir Mayakovskii Russian Edition.
  1989
• Mayakovsky: A Biography In this work, Bengt Jangfeldt offers the first comprehensive biography of Mayakovsky, revealing a troubled man, who was more dreamer than revolutionary, more political romantic, than hardened Communist. Jangfeldt sets Mayakovsky’s life and works against the dramatic turbulence of his times, from the aesthetic innovations of the pre-revolutionary avant-garde to the rigidity of Socialist Realism and the destruction of World War I to the violence—and hope—of the Russian Revolution, through the tightening grip of Stalinist terror and the growing disillusion with Russian communism, that eventually led the poet to take his life.
  2014
• I love: The story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik
  1979
• Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution
  1973
• Backbone Flute: Selected Poetry Of Vladimir Mayakovsky In this dual-language selection of Mayakovsky's poetry, Andrey Kneller attempts to capture not only the general meaning, but also the lyrical quality of the poetry that makes Mayakovsky a truly unique writer. English and Russian Edition.
  2008