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). Because of their political activities, Burlyuk and Mayakovsky were expelled from the Moscow Art School in
1914.
His work continued in the Futurist vein until 1914. His artistic development then shifted increasingly in the direction of narrative and it was this work, published during the period immediately preceding the
Russian Revolution, which was to establish his reputation as a poet in Russia and abroad.
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.
(From the prologue of A Cloud in Trousers.)
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; unfortunately for Mayakovsky, she was the wife of his publisher,
Osip Brik. The love affair, as well as his impressions of
war and revolution, strongly influenced his works of these years. The poem "War and the World" (1916) addressed the horrors of WWI and "Man" (1917) is a poem dealing with the anguish of love.
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. At the onset of the
Russian Revolution, Mayakovsky was in Smolny, Petrograd. There he witnessed the
October Revolution. He started reciting poems such as "Left March! For the Red Marines: 1918" (Левый марш (Матросам), 1918) at naval theatres, with sailors as an audience.
After moving back to Moscow, Mayakovsky worked for the Russian State Telegraph Agency (
ROSTA) creating — both graphic and text — satirical
Agitprop posters. In 1919, he published his first collection of poems
Collected Works 1909-1919 (Все сочиненное Владимиром Маяковским). In the cultural climate of the early Soviet Union, his popularity grew rapidly. During 1922-1928, Mayakovsky was a prominent member of the Left Art Front and went on to define his work as 'Communist futurism' (комфут). He edited, along with
Sergei Tretyakov and
Osip Brik, the journal
LEF.
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). He also travelled extensively throughout the Soviet Union.
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. While over years, he was considered the Soviet poet par excellence, he also changed the perceptions of poetry in wider
20th Century culture. His
political activism as a
propagandistic agitator was rarely understood and often looked upon unfavourably by contemporaries, even close friends like
Boris Pasternak. Near the end of the 1920s, Mayakovsky became increasingly interested in
Communism, his satirical plays
The Bedbug (Клоп, 1929) and
The Bathhouse (Баня, 1930), dealing with the Soviet
philistinism and bureaucracy, illustrates this development.
On the evening of
April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself. The unfinished poem in his suicide note read, in part:
:
The love boat has crashed against the daily routine. You and I, we are quits, and there is no point in listing mutual pains, sorrows, and hurts.
Mayakovsky was interred at the Moscow
Novodevichy Cemetery. In
1930, his birthplace of Bagdadi in Georgia was renamed Mayakovsky in his honour. Following Stalin's death, rumours arose that Mayakovsky did not commit suicide but was in fact murdered at the behest of Stalin, however, there is no evidence that he was murdered. During the
1990s, while
KGB files were being declassified, there was hope that new evidence would come to light on this question, but none has been found and the hypothesis remains unproven.
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. Mayakovsky is still the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime. Brik's complaints are, in my opinion, justified..."
(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
http://www.russ.ru/krug/20030723_ls.html, 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. Mayakovsky, however, was the most influential futurist in Lithuania and his poetry helped to form
The Four Winds movement
http://www.tekstai.lt/tekstai/4vejai/apie/nyliunas.htm.
rss feed