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Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Bagdadi, Georgia, on 7th July, 1893. At the age of fourteen Mayakovsky took part in socialist demonstrations at the town of Kutaisi.
In 1906 Mayakovsky moved to Moscow with his mother. He joined the illegal Social Democratic Labour Party and over the next ten years was arrested several times and spent eleven months in prison. While in Butyrka Prison in 1909, he began to write poetry.
On his release from prison in 1909 he attended Moscow Art School where he formed the Cubo-Futurist Group with David Burlyuk. Mayakovsky attempted to join the Russian Army on the outbreak of the First World War. Instead he found employment at the Petrograd Military Automobile School as a draftsman. During this period he completed two major poems, A Cloud in Trousers (1915) and The Backbone Flute (1916), a poem that dealt with his affair with a married woman, Lilya Brik and the trauma of the war.
Mayakovsky fully supported the October Revolution and this inspired such poems as Ode to Revolution (1918) and Left March (1919). He also contributed drawings and text for hundreds of propaganda posters calling for a Bolshevik victory in the Civil War. He also wrote a 3,000 line elegy on the death of Lenin. Mitchell Abidor has argued that: "Mayakovsky... put his considerable talents at the service of the new state. He produced posters, films and political poems in order to reach as broad a mass as possible. The death of Lenin profoundly moved him, and he gave countless readings in factories, clubs, and at party meetings around the Soviet Union."
Mayakovsky became increasingly critical of the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin. His plays, The Bedbug (1929) and The Bathhouse (1930) were thinly disguised satires on Stalin's authoritarianism. As a result he was attacked as a follower of Leon Trotsky.
Increasingly disillusioned with communism and denied a visa to travel abroad, Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide in Moscow on 14th April, 1930. In his suicide note he wrote: In his suicide note he wrote: “Do not blame anyone for my death and please do not gossip. The deceased terribly dislike this sort of thing. Mamma, sisters and comrades, forgive me - this is not a way out (I do not recommend it to others), but I have none other. Lily - love me…Comrades of VAPP - do not think me weak-spirited. Seriously - there was nothing else I could do.”
(1) Vladimir Mayakovsky, Our March (1917)
Beat the squares with the tramp of rebels!
Higher, rangers of haughty heads!
We'll wash the world with a second deluge,
Now’s the hour whose coming it dreads.
Too slow, the wagon of years,
The oxen of days — too glum.
Our god is the god of speed,
Our heart — our battle drum.
Is there a gold diviner than ours?
What wasp of a bullet us can sting?
Songs are our weapons, our power of powers,
Our gold — our voices — just hear us sing!
Meadow, lie green on the earth!
With silk our days for us line!
Rainbow, give color and girth
To the fleet-foot steeds of time.
The heavens grudge us their starry glamour.
Bah! Without it our songs can thrive.
Hey there, Ursus Major, clamour
For us to be taken to heaven alive!
Sing, of delight drink deep,
Drain spring by cups, not by thimbles.
Heart step up your beat!
Our breasts be the brass of cymbals.
(2) Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Call to Account (1917)
The drum of war thunders and thunders.
It calls: thrust iron into the living.
From every country
slave after slave
are thrown onto bayonet steel.
For the sake of what?
The earth shivers
hungry
and stripped.
Mankind is vapourised in a blood bath
only so
someone
somewhere
can get hold of Albania.
Human gangs bound in malice,
blow after blow strikes the world
only for
someone’s vessels
to pass without charge
through the Bosporus.
Soon
the world
won’t have a rib intact.
And its soul will be pulled out.
And trampled down
only for someone,
to lay
their hands on
Mesopotamia.
Why does
a boot
crush the Earth — fissured and rough?
What is above the battles’ sky -
Freedom?
God?
Money!
When will you stand to your full height,
you,
giving them your life?
When will you hurl a question to their faces:
Why are we fighting?
(3) Vladimir Mayakovsky, Past One O’Clock (1930)
Past one o’clock. You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.
(4) Vladimir Mayakovsky, suicide note (12th April, 1930)
Do not blame anyone for my death and please do not gossip. The deceased terribly dislike this sort of thing. Mamma, sisters and comrades, forgive me - this is not a way out (I do not recommend it to others), but I have none other. Lily - love me…Comrades of VAPP - do not think me weak-spirited. Seriously - there was nothing else I could do.
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