Futurism’s loudest poet died by his own hand in 1930
Vladimir Mayakovsky (19 July 1893 – 14 April 1930) was Russian futurism’s booming poet, playwright, and poster artist. He cheered Bolshevik ideology and Lenin yet fought the state’s cultural police, and after his suicide even Stalin-era praise could not smooth a jagged official relationship.
His father was a forester of noble descent, his mother a housewife, and the family mixed Cossack and Ukrainian roots; they spoke Russian at home while he used Georgian at school. In a 1927 interview he said three cultures were united in him, and Georgia remained his image of paradise. At fourteen he joined socialist marches in Kutaisi with his mother's blessing. In 1906 his father died of blood poisoning after pricking a finger on a rusty pin, and the widow sold their belongings and moved the children to Moscow.
There he devoured Hegel and above all Marx, joined the Social Democratic party in 1907 under the alias Comrade Konstantin, and left school the next year when fees became unaffordable. As a teenage Bolshevik he handed out leaflets, carried an unlicensed pistol and helped smuggle women activists out of prison in 1909, earning eleven months behind bars. In solitary confinement at Butyrka he first wrote verse; a warden confiscated the notebook, but he always dated his career from that year.
Freed in January 1910, he quit party work to study art. A near-fight with fellow student David Burlyuk in 1911 became a lasting friendship: Burlyuk called him a genius, lent him books and paid him 50 kopeks a day to write rather than starve. Their group Hylaea read on street corners and threw tea at audiences. He first performed at the Stray Dog cellar in Saint Petersburg in November 1912, and his poems Night and Morning appeared that December in the manifesto that urged tossing Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy off the steamship of modernity. A Cloud in Trousers followed in 1915.
During the Civil War he drew agitprop posters for the Communists and later edited the journal LEF. Yet satires such as The Bedbug and The Bathhouse, both 1929, drew official scorn, and after his death Stalin pronounced him the most talented poet of the Soviet era.
Source: Vladimir Mayakovsky
