The revolution’s megaphone and satirist
On 21 January 1930, at the Lenin memorial meeting in the Bolshoi Theatre, Mayakovsky read the third part of his long poem *Vladimir Ilyich Lenin*. Stalin, seated in the government box, applauded the poet warmly. Three months later Mayakovsky was dead by his own hand.
The loudest voice of Russian Futurism, he forged the new regime's language through ROSTA-window posters and long poems. Yet his late satires on bureaucracy met hostility from the literary establishment and state; he died by suicide in 1930.
Career Timeline
- 1912–1915Russian Futurism and *A Cloud in Trousers*
- 1917–1921Revolutionary poetry and ROSTA-window agitprop posters
- 1923Founded LEF and worked in the avant-garde
- 1924Published the long poem *Vladimir Ilyich Lenin*
- 1925–1926Travelled through Mexico, Cuba and the United States; wrote American poems
- 1929–1930Wrote *The Bedbug* and *The Bathhouse*; died by suicide
Related historical events
The ROSTA Windows, Poetry Turned Poster
Vladimir Mayakovsky joined the Bolshevik party at fourteen, was arrested three times, and began writing poems in cell 103 of Butyrka prison. The enfant terrible of Futurism embraced 1917 as "my revolution", and with "Left March" (1918) and Mystery-Bouffe, staged by Meyerhold, he became the revolution's first poet.
From the autumn of 1919 until 1922 he threw himself into the "satire windows" of the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA). These posters, translating news from the fronts, epidemic warnings and literacy slogans into cartoons and short verses, went up in shop windows wherever newspapers could not reach, and Mayakovsky drew and captioned thousands of them himself through overnight shifts. The program of the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), art into the streets and poetry into production, grew out of this experience.
Final Days and the Suicide Letter
In early 1930 Mayakovsky was crushed by converging pressures. In February the Briks left for Europe. Not a single literary or state figure turned up to his "20 Years of Work" retrospective. His play The Bathhouse was panned at its premiere, and the journal Print and Revolution pulled his 20th-anniversary tribute from a ready-to-print issue. Literary circles whispered that he was "finished"; a foreign-travel visa was denied. On April 12 a readers' meeting at the Polytechnic Museum turned into a torrent of heckling.
On the morning of April 14, Mayakovsky summoned his lover Veronika Polonskaya to his Lubyanka workroom. Weeping, he begged her to skip her theatre rehearsal and stay; she insisted she had to go. Moments after she stepped out the door, a shot rang out.
He had written his suicide letter two days earlier. It opens: "In the event of my death, blame no one — and please, no gossip. The deceased detested that." He named Lilya Brik, his mother, his sisters and Polonskaya as his family, and left all manuscripts to the Briks. It closes with the famous stanza: "As they say — 'the incident is closed.' / The love boat / has smashed against the daily grind. / I've settled accounts with life — / no need for a list / of mutual pains, / troubles / and slights."
14 April 1930, and the Posthumous Canon
The Mayakovsky of 1930 was exhausted. His satirical play The Bathhouse had been savaged, fellow writers and officials stayed away from the exhibition marking his twenty years of work, and his personal life was in knots. On the morning of 14 April he ended his life with a revolver in his workroom on Lubyansky Passage. The note spoke of "the love boat crashed against the everyday" and asked that his family be cared for. A hundred and fifty thousand people followed the funeral procession.
In 1935 Lilya Brik wrote to Stalin that the poet's legacy was being neglected. Stalin's reply became a formula: "Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his memory and his works is a crime." The resolution placed Mayakovsky at the center of the Soviet literary canon: squares and metro stations took his name, and his stepped verse line became the standard grammar of Soviet poetry for decades.