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
Georgian film director whose Repentance fired the cultural starting gun of glasnost
When Repentance was shelved, Abuladze kept the only video copy under his bed, fearing it would be destroyed.
A Georgian Soviet film director. His debut Magdana's Donkey (1955), co-directed with Rezo Chkheidze, won the Cannes short film prize and signaled Soviet cinema's return to the international stage. His trilogy of The Plea (1967), The Wishing Tree (1976), and Repentance (1984) marked his peak; Repentance, shelved for two years after completion, was the first Soviet film to confront the Stalinist terror in allegorical form, and its 1986 release at the Fifth Congress of the Filmmakers' Union became the cultural starting gun of glasnost. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1987; Abuladze later served as a People's Deputy of the USSR (1989–1991).
Career timeline
1943Entered Tbilisi Theatre Institute, graduated 1946
1953Graduated VGIK, joined Gruziya-film
1955Co-directed Magdana's Donkey, Cannes short film prize (1956)
1967Completed The Plea, first film of the trilogy
1976Completed The Wishing Tree, professor at Tbilisi Theatre Institute
1984Completed Repentance, banned for two years
1986Repentance released, became a symbol of glasnost
