Craft: Vladimir Mayakovsky
Vladimir Mayakovsky [Влади́мир Маяко́вский] (1893–1930) was a major Russian poet. He started in the Russian Futurist movement (sometimes called Cubo-Futurism) and co-signed their manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in 1913. He became a supporter of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War (1917–1922), but as the Soviet Union began enforcing Socialist Realism, his relationship to Communism became more tense and atavistic.
Mayakovsky grew up in a Georgian village in the Caucuses where his father worked as a forest ranger. However, the natural world and landscape bored him. His autobiography says: “After seeing electricity, I lost interest in nature. Not up to date enough.”
In his youth, he was a Bolshevik activist, distributing leaflets, smuggling women activists out of prison, and irritating the government in general. All of these lead to an 11-month prison sentence, which is where he began making poems.
At this time, Russian artists in all genres were surpassing numerous Western art movements. Mayakovsky was surrounded by people like Kazimir Malevich, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Roman Jakobson, and Sergei Prokofiev. Attracted to the Revolution because of his antipathy to the conservatism and authoritarianism of imperial Russia, Mayakovsky had all the fuel he needed to do his kind of writing: exciting, theatrical, catastrophic, and disruptive.
In October 1913, he began giving readings with “Take That!” (Нате!) and writing Futurist manifestos, speeches, and statements. Their banners included ideas like:
Every creative work is free.
Freedom to create words and from words.
Hatred for the language that existed before.
To reject with indignation the wreath of cheap fame made of bathhouse switches.
To stand on the rock of the word “we” amidst the sea of boos and outrage.
Destroy the all-canons freezer which turns inspiration into ice.
Destroy the old language, powerless to keep up with life’s leaps and bounds.
Throw the old masters overboard from the ship of modernity.
Stylistically, the Futurists’ poems used processes such as half-words, chopped words, inventive combinations, an emphasis on sound and physicality, and synchrony between visual and verbal elements.
Translators of Mayakovsky, such as Maria Enzensberger, have warned that it is challenging for translators to make straightforward English versions of his poems due to his passionate metaphor and hyperbole, rich symbolic meanings, as well as his rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, which is very different in Russian.
His early poems, written between 1913–1918, were accompanied with drawings:
In 1914, he volunteered to fight in the Great War, but was rejected for being politically unreliable. In June 1915, he met and fell in love with the Russian-Jewish muse of the Russian avant-garde, Lilya Brik [Ли́ля Брик] (1891–1978). Though she was married, she agreed to become his muse. This love affair is described in his poem “The Cloud in Trousers.” [The poem is 25 pages long, so too long to reproduce here.]
With financial help from Brik’s husband, Osip Brik, Mayakovsky tried to start a Futurist organization called Komfut [комфут], a compound word meaning “Communist Futurism,” but this organization was short-lived. He began writing plays, and beginning in 1919, he started working for the Russian State Telegraph Agency creating images and text, such as satirical Agitprop posters. These were to mostly inform a huge illiterate population about current events, but also to advise people to drink boiled water, put their money in the bank, and visit state-owned stores.
Mayakovsky’s work is transgressive, but also fun. Fun is missing from much poetry, but Mayakovsky embraced it. For example, he would perform in a top hat, a big wooden spoon in his lapel, a gold cane, and would give readings through a megaphone. The word people used to describe him was “Mnogo!,” which is Russian for “too much.”
Mayakovsky’s peak success came in 1924. He gave a public reading of his 3,000-line epic poem, an elegy for Vladimir Lenin, that ended with a 20-minutes ovation. In May 1925, he traveled to several European cities, as well as New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia.
Such examples show that from the end of the Civil War until around 1928 when Stalin began dictating cultural production, Mayakovsky was free to behave and write whatever way he wanted. Always fascinated by satire, romantic love, and political action, his style sharpened into a mixture of the three.
However, as Russian society became more bureaucratic, his idealism started slipping. Growing increasingly hostile to his work, Mayakovsky responded by finding his environment intolerable. Though he visited Paris, he started feeling very depressed.
On the morning of April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky put a single bullet in a revolver and shot himself. He was 36.
His suicide note read:
To Everyone—
The fact that I die is no one's fault and, please, don't gossip. The deceased especially hate that.
Mama, sisters and comrades, forgive me—it's not the best way (I don't recommend it to others), but I have no other exit.
Lilya—love me.
My Comrade Government, my family is Lilya Brik, my mother, my sisters, and Veronica Vitoldovna Polonskaya.
If you can arrange a tolerable life for them—thanks.
Give my poems in progress to the Brik family, they will take care of them.
As they say—
'“the final juicy incident is closed”
my beloved boat
is broken on the rocks of daily life.
I’ve paid my debts
and no longer need to count
pains I’ve suffered at the hands of others
The misfortunes
and the insults.
Good luck to those who remain
Vladimir Mayakovsky.
P.S. Comrades, don't think me weak.
4/12/30
Seriously-There's nothing left to be done
Hello.
Tell Ermilov that it's a pity I took down the slogan—
should have cursed.
... In the desk I have 2,000 rubles-use it for taxes.
Get the rest from the State Publishing House.
The State Institute for the Study of the Brain removed his brain, which weighed 1,700 grams, and placed it on display in its “Pantheon of Brains.” His body was put on display and viewed by 150,000 people over the next several days. A wreath was made from flywheels, screws, and hammers, and the banner read: “An iron wreath for an iron poet.”
For further reading:
Mayakovsky, Vladimir. The Bedbug and Selected Poetry. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1975. [Buy at Bookshop]
—. Listen!: early poems, 1913-1918. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1991. [Buy at Bookshop]
—. Pro Eto: That's What. London: Arc Publications, 2013. [Buy at Bookshop]
About Sean Singer