Mayakovsky, Vladimir, << muh yih KAWF skee, VLAD uh mihr or vlah DEE mihr >> (1893-1930), a Russian poet and playwright, was one of the great poets of the 1900’s. He became known as the Poet of the October Revolution of 1917, the revolution that established the Communist Soviet government in Russia.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born in the Georgian city of Bagdadi on July 19 (July 7 on the Russian calendar then in use), 1893. At the age of 14, Mayakovsky joined what became the Bolshevik wing of the Communist Party. He was imprisoned for political activities in 1909 and began writing poetry while in prison. Upon his release after serving 11 months, he entered the Moscow Art School to study painting. There, he joined a group that shared his revolutionary attitude toward Russia’s social order and cultural traditions and had an equally radical program in the arts.
Mayakovsky’s strikingly unconventional love poems “The Cloud in Trousers” (1914-1915) and “The Backbone Flute” (1916) achieved popular success. They treated romantic love in terms of revolutionary street violence and pain, all in jarring, marchlike rhythms.
Mayakovsky soon devoted himself to pro-Soviet propaganda. In 1924, he wrote a long elegy on the death of the revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin. In the mid-1920’s, Mayakovsky traveled to western Europe and Latin America as a cultural ambassador. During this period, he wrote the narrative poem “Good” (1925), an example of his praise of his Soviet homeland. “The Brooklyn Bridge” (1925) is an odelike poem that shows the futuristic worship of technology and urban life.
In the late 1920’s, Mayakovsky came to regret having sacrificed his talent on what he saw as propaganda. He wrote two satirical plays, The Bedbug (1929) and The Bathhouse (1930), which exposed the bureaucracy and artistic narrow-mindedness of Soviet life. Both plays angered Soviet authorities. Suffering from depression brought on by personal and artistic frustration, Mayakovsky committed suicide on April 14, 1930.
See also Russian literature (Post-Symbolism) .
