Mayakovsky, Vladimir (1893–1930)

views updated

MAYAKOVSKY, VLADIMIR (1893–1930)

Russian poet.

One of the most influential poets and dramatists of his time, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born in Georgia to parents of Russian descent. The family moved to Moscow in 1906, and Mayakovsky, who joined the Bolsheviks, was soon arrested for revolutionary activities. After his third incarceration, Mayakovsky enrolled in art school and came under the influence of the painter and poet David Burlyuk (1882–1967) and the burgeoning movement of futurism.

Mayakovsky allied himself with cubo-futurism, the most important of the four groups that made up Russian futurism. His first two published poems, "Day" and "Night," appeared in the futurist miscellany A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912), and he signed the famous manifesto of the same title. In so doing, he endorsed futurism's rejection of the past and its provocation of a bourgeois audience both in print and in person: Mayakovsky participated in the early futurist tours of Russia and in publicity stunts that in significant ways anticipated performance art. Even his first verse drama, entitled simply Tragedy (1913), was intended as an absolute break with the theatrical past. Despite Mayakovsky's intentions, the play, which alternated with Victory over the Sun (1913) by Alexei Kruchonykh (1886–1968), owes a significant debt to Alexander Blok's lyric dramas and to Nikolai Evreinov's monodramas.

Much of Mayakovsky's best poetry, the work that established and secured his reputation, is to be found in lyric poems such as "Lilichka!, Instead of a Letter," "Our March" (1917), and "Good Relations with Horses," and in his prerevolutionary narrative poems. In Cloud in Pants (1915), The Backbone Flute (1916), War and the World (1916), and Man (1918), Mayakovsky developed a style of startling originality. Mayakovsky employs accentual meters, liberal and creative rhymes, jarring dislocations of syntax, and an innovative visual presentation, together with an extravagance of hyperbole and metaphor, which often take on a life of their own.

Mayakovsky embraced the Russian Revolution of 1917 and laid his considerable talents at the feet of the fledgling Bolshevik state. His work, from the time of the Revolution until his death, proved uneven, ranging from the politically expedient narrative poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1924) to such fine lyrics as "I Love" and "Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva," the narrative poem About That (1923), and the play The Bedbug (1929). The unevenness of Mayakovsky's work owes in no small part to a conscious and theoretically elaborated surrender of poetry's autonomy to the needs and demands of the state. Mayakovsky was swayed by his close friend, the critic Osip Brik, whose ideas about "sound repetition" helped to shape the poet's early work and whose conception of "social demand" helped to channel the later work. Not surprisingly, Mayakovsky devoted enormous energy to agitprop during this period and even created advertisements for state-owned stores.

To celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution, Mayakovsky wrote Mystery-Bouffe (1918), which combines elements of mystery plays with low comedy to portray the triumph of the "unclean" proletariat over the "clean" bourgeoisie. Despite its defects and criticism from Bolshevik authorities, Mystery-Bouffe was important because it marked the first collaboration between Mayakovsky and the great director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940). Mayakovsky, who grew increasingly disenchanted with the Soviet state, again turned to Meyerhold with his next play, the biting satire The Bedbug, the production of which proved to be a theatrical landmark. The two again collaborated on Mayakovsky's last play, The Bathhouse (1930), which satirizes Soviet philistinism. The suppression of the play marked the end of an era not only for Mayakovsky and Meyerhold, but for Soviet culture as well.

Mayakovsky worked assiduously throughout the last years of his life to shape the aesthetic of the Revolution and the Soviet state. To that end, he joined and helped to found numerous cultural organizations, the most important of which was the Left Front of Art. As editor of the organization's journal Lef and its successor New Lef, Mayakovsky attempted to safeguard a revolutionary, avant-garde art for a revolutionary society. Despite the important work published in these journals, Mayakovsky's efforts to shape Soviet society ultimately ended in failure. He made one more, last-ditch effort when he founded Ref, the Revolutionary Front of Art, but soon had to abandon it. Under political pressure, Mayakovsky capitulated and joined the aesthetically conservative Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) in the last year of his life. Together with the suppression of The Bathhouse and personal problems, this failure contributed to his eventual suicide. Mayakovsky's legacy includes not only great poems he wrote, but also a persona and style that fused politics and aesthetics into an influential model of the activist poet.

See alsoFuturism; Russia; Socialist Realism; Soviet Union.