Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (, ; ; – 14 April 1930) was a Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor.
During his early, pre-Revolution period leading into 1917, Mayakovsky became renowned as a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement. 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). Mayakovsky produced a large and diverse body of work during the course of his career: he wrote 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 Mayakovsky's work regularly demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of the Bolsheviks and a strong admiration of Vladimir Lenin, his relationship with the Soviet state was always complex and often tumultuous. Mayakovsky 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 killed himself. Even after death, his relationship with the Soviet state remained unsteady. Though Mayakovsky had previously been harshly criticized by Soviet governmental bodies such as the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), Premier Joseph Stalin described Mayakovsky after his death as "the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch".
Life and career
Vladimir Vladimirovich 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 Kutais gymnasium. Later as a 14-year-old, he took part in socialist demonstrations in the town of Kutaisi. His mother, aware of his activities, apparently did not mind. "People around warned us we were giving a young boy too much freedom. But I saw him developing according to the new trends, sympathized with him and pandered to his aspirations," she later remembered. 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 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.