'This exhibition is not a jubilee, it's an account of my work. I demand help - not the glorification of non-existent virtues. That's what we are talking about, comrades, and not about glorifying private persons.' Mayakovsky was a poet, playwright, artist, director, actor, diarist, producer of agitprop posters and advertisement slogans, and writer of articles, essays and speeches. The inherent conflict of his status as an avant-garde communist writer working within the steadily narrowing cultural conditions of early Soviet Russia runs vividly throughout his work, and was a significant contributing factor to his suicide at the age of thirty-six. This groundbreaking collection draws together for the first time Mayakovsky's key translators from the 1930s to the present day, bringing some remarkable works back into print in the process and introducing poems which have never before been translated.The radical scope of its representation makes for the most comprehensive account of Mayakovsky's work to date - an account which charts not only the extraordinary range of his creative output, his rigorous and passionate innovation of language and form, and the intense power of his electrifying live performances, but also the fascinating and turbulent history of Mayakovsky's cultural and political representation in the western world.
Edited by Rosy Patience Carrick
Author Biography:
Vladimir Vladimirovich 'Volodya' Mayakovsky (1893-1930) was born in Georgia on 19 July 1893. Following the death of his father in 1906 he moved to Moscow with his mother and two sisters. At the age of fifteen he became a member of the Bolshevik party, and between 1908 and 1910 was arrested three times for revolutionary activity, and imprisoned for a total of seven months. In 1912 Mayakovsky co-founded the Russian Futurist move- ment and in 1915, the same year 'A Cloud in Trousers' was first published, he met Lily and Osip Brik, who would become his lifelong friends and, respec- tively, his lover and muse, and his publisher. Between 1919 and 1922 he produced thousands of agitational posters for the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) and, in the following year, began to create advertisement posters for state-produced goods including light bulbs, cigarettes, dummies, watches and galoshes. From 1923 to 1925 he co-edited, with Osip Brik, the arts journal LEF (Left Front of Arts), the successor to which (New LEF, 1927-29), he co-edited with Sergei Tretyakov. Between 1922 and 1929 Mayakovsky gave lectures and readings in Riga, Paris, Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Mexico and various cities around the United States, including New York, where he fathered a child with Russian emigree Yelizaveta Jones (nee Ziebert). His daughter Yelena was born on June 15th, 1926, in New York, where she still lives. From the mid-twenties, much of Mayakovsky's work expressed criticism of those who capitalized on the reintroduction of free trade under Lenin's 1921 New Economic Policy, and fought for ways to avoid slipping back into the conditions of pre-revolutionary life. His final works included poems that defended his own commitment to communism - a position frequently challenged on the basis of perceived individualism and the 'incomprehensible' aesthetics of many of his works - and satirical attacks on the emergence of a new privileged class of high-ranking party members in Stalin's increasingly bureaucratic society. The last and most direct of these, the 1930 play The Bathhouse, was scathingly attacked in return by the literary bureaucrats of the State-run press, by whom Mayakovsky's subsequent Twenty Years of Work exhibition was almost entirely boycotted. On many occasions throughout his life Mayakovsky had expressed suicidal intentions, and on April 14th, 1930, he shot himself through the heart in his office room in Lubyanka Passage, Moscow. He is buried in Novodevichy cemetary in Moscow, alongside his mother and sisters.
