The Presidential Library tells about Vladimir Mayakovsky

Brutal and touching, almost two-meters tall, with soft and childishly vulnerable soul, “the Voice of the people’s revolution” in work affairs, loyal in personal affairs, a wonderful lyrical poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was born on July 19, 1893.

The electronic collection Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) is available on the Presidential Library’s portal. It features digital copies of the poet’s works, including the very first editions, documents, visual and research materials.

When the boy was only 13 years old, his father died by a ridiculous accident – he pricked his finger with a paper stitching needle and got a blood poisoning. After that, Mayakovsky was afraid of needles for the rest of his life. In addition, he extremely feared germs, had soap with him at all times so he could wash hands as often as possible, and always checked whether fruits and vegetables were processed in boiling water.

When his family moved from Georgia to Moscow, Mayakovsky decided to become an artist and continue his studies in a gymnasium. Soon, he published his first poem in an illegal magazine, joined the Bolsheviks party and got himself into trouble.

“V. V. Mayakovsky got familiarized with the tsar’s prison quite early, when he was only 14 years old”, Grigory Lurye wrote in the historical-revolutionary bulletin Hard Labour and Exile of 1931, digitized by the Presidential Library. It tells the story of the arrest of the future poet. “A young man with a scroll” in his hand came into an apartment of a tailor, which was already searched by the time and revealed a “fully operating” typography of the Moscow Committee of RSDLP. The young man, taken to the police department, introduced himself as a nobleman Vladimir Mayakovsky. The scroll contained about 76 copies of an underground newspaper Rabocheye znamya and other prohibited materials.

After his third arrest, Mayakovsky spent, as he said himself, “11 butyrsky months” in prison. Nevertheless, this time wasn’t wasted: he read numerous books, wrote poems, dreamt of a future, of a new art.

Mayakovsky was lead by fate. After his release, he was accepted to the Moscow School of Painting, where an encounter with David Burliuk and Aleksei Kruchyonykh, fateful both for Mayakovsky himself and for the whole Russian literature, took place. They were united by the idea of a new art, against the “aesthetics of old stuff” that the avant-garde authors were planning to “throw off the ship of modernity”. Mayakovsky wrote poems that left his new friends amazed. They called themselves futurists, propagandists of the art of the future, they shocked and surprised readers, argued with the audience during performances. For these performances, Vladimir Mayakovsky was expelled from the school, but his artistic flame was already lit.

In 1913, Mayakovsky got interested in theatre. Therefore, he wrote a tragedy titled Vladimir Mayakovsky which he himself produced and played a main role in. Then, he wrote “the first communistic play”, Mystery-Bouffe. It was produced in the Theatre of Musical Drama by Vsevolod Meyerhold and was decorated in the best traditions of avant-garde by Kazimir Malevich.

Everything he wrote during that time, he combined in the book Everything Written by Vladimir Mayakovsky. 1909-1919. This edition of 1919 is available on the Presidential Library’s portal among other digitized books.

This was the first book by Mayakovsky read by Dmitri Shostakovich. They met “in real life” much later when the composer had to write music for Mayakovsky’s revolutionary play The Bedbug. It’s not hard to imagine the excitement of Shostakovich with which he anticipated meeting the poet. Nevertheless, the famous tribune and orator impressed him with his gentleness, politeness and manners.

Korney Chukovsky recounted his first meeting with the poet: when he started to wholeheartedly praise one of Mayakovsky’s books, he was asked by the poet to convey all of these rapturous words to the old man in a white tie seating nearby: “I’m courting his daughter. She already knows that I’m a great poet… Her father though has his doubts. So tell him…”. Chukovsky called Mayakovsky “Gulliver”, being next to whom “the most arrogant people couldn’t look down on him”.

There is an interesting story about his height featured in the digitized magazine Children’s Literature of 1939, available on the Presidential Library’s portal.

Once, Mayakovsky was walking down the street, upright, tall, in a wide flowing coat, when some kids called on him:

– Uncle! Fetch a sparrow!

Mayakovsky stopped and asked matter-of-factly:

– Perhaps you want an eagle?

“I don’t care that I’m a poet. I’m not a poet, instead, above all else I’m someone who put his pen in service… for today’s hour, for current reality”, Victor Pertsov quotes Mayakovsky in his book Makyakovsky is a Patriot (1941). His words were proven in his actions, including the hard work on the creation of a series of agitation posters ROSTA Windows. He had to work in big smoky rooms, where, as Mayakovsky recollected, even the paint didn’t lie well on the paper because of the cold.

These agitation posters are often called the first Soviet social ads. They were put up and displayed in empty windows of stores, located in the most crowded places. They allowed people to learn the latest news from the fronts and constructions, to pick up the party’s and the government’s appeals, and to believe in the rightness of their work, in the name of which they endured all of the hardships. Many of the posters were lost, but some of them were published in the book Menacing Laughter. ROSTA Windows (1932), released two years after Mayakovsky’s death. The Presidential Library’s portal allows to explore the electronic pages of this and many other publications, dedicated to the poet’s work.