Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born in 1893 in
Baghdati,
Kutais Governorate,
Georgia, then part of the
Russian Empire, to Alexandra Alexeyevna (née Pavlenko), a housewife, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, a local forester. His father belonged to a noble family and was a distant relative of the writer
Grigory Danilevsky. Vladimir Vladimirovich had two sisters, Olga and
Lyudmila, and a brother Konstantin, who died at the age of three. The family was of Russian and
Zaporozhian Cossack descent on their father's side and Ukrainian on their mother's. At home the family spoke Russian. With his friends and at school, Mayakovsky spoke
Georgian. "I was born in the Caucasus, my father is a Cossack, my mother is Ukrainian. My mother tongue is Georgian. Thus three cultures are united in me," he told the
Prague newspaper
Prager Presse in a 1927 interview. For Mayakovsky, Georgia was his eternal symbol of beauty. "I know, it's nonsense, Eden and Paradise, but since people sang about them // It must have been Georgia, the joyful land, that those poets were having in mind", he wrote later. In 1902, Mayakovsky joined the Kutaisi
gymnasium. Later as a 14-year-old, he took part in
socialist demonstrations in the town of
Kutaisi. In July 1906, Mayakovsky joined the 4th form of Moscow's 5th Classic gymnasium and soon developed a passion for
Marxist literature. "Never cared for fiction. For me it was philosophy,
Hegel, natural sciences, but first and foremost, Marxism. There'd be no higher art for me than '
The Foreword' by
Marx", he recalled in the 1920s in his autobiography
I, Myself. In 1907 Mayakovsky became a member of his gymnasium's underground Social Democrats' circle, taking part in numerous activities of the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), which he, given the nickname "Comrade Konstantin", joined the same year. In 1908, the boy was dismissed from the gymnasium because his mother was no longer able to afford the tuition fees. For two years he studied at the Stroganov School of Industrial Arts, where his sister Lyudmila had started her studies a few years earlier. "Revolution and poetry got entangled in my head and became one," he wrote in
I, Myself. In 1911, Mayakovsky enrolled in the
Moscow Art School. In September 1911 a brief encounter with fellow student
David Burlyuk (which nearly ended with a fight) led to a lasting friendship and had historic consequences for the nascent Russian Futurist movement. Later Soviet researchers tried to downplay the significance of the fact, but even after their friendship ended and their ways parted, Mayakovsky continued to give credit to his mentor, referring to him as "my wonderful friend". "It was Burlyuk who turned me into a poet. He read the French and the Germans to me. He pressed books on me. He would come and talk endlessly. He didn't let me get away. He would subsidise me with 50 kopeks each day so that I'd write and not be hungry," Mayakovsky wrote in "I, Myself". signed by Mayakovsky, as well as
Velemir Khlebnikov, David Burlyuk and
Alexey Kruchenykh, calling among other things for... "throwing
Pushkin,
Dostoyevsky,
Tolstoy, etc, etc, off the steamboat of modernity." As
World War I began, Mayakovsky volunteered but was rejected as 'politically unreliable'. He worked for the Lubok Today company which produced patriotic
lubok pictures, and in the
Nov (Virgin Land) newspaper, which published several of his anti-war poems ("Mother and an Evening Killed by the Germans", "The War is Declared", "Me and Napoleon" among others). his first major poem of appreciable length, followed by
Backbone Flute (1915),
The War and the World (1916) and
The Man (1918). On 7 November 1918, Mayakovsky's play
Mystery-Bouffe premiered at the Petrograd Musical Drama Theatre. In March 1919, Mayakovsky moved back to Moscow, where ''Vladimir Mayakovsky's Collected Works 1909–1919'' was released. The same month he started working for the Russian State Telegraph Agency (
ROSTA), creating both graphic and text—based satirical
Agitprop posters, aimed mostly at informing the country's largely illiterate population of the current events. In May 1923, Mayakovsky spoke at a massive protest rally in Moscow, in the wake of
Vatslav Vorovsky's assassination. In October 1924 he gave numerous public readings of the 3,000-line epic
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin written on the death of the Soviet Communist leader. Next February it came out as a book, published by Gosizdat. Five years later Mayakovsky's rendition of the third part of the poem, at the Lenin Memorial evening in the
Bolshoi Theatre ended with 20-minutes ovation. and
Cuba. In the US, he visited
New York,
Cleveland,
Detroit,
Chicago,
Pittsburgh, and
Philadelphia, and planned a trip to
Boston that was never realised. His book of essays
My Discovery of America came out later that year. categorised Mayakovsky as one of the 'petit bourgeois revolutionary intelligentsia', adding that "we hear a false 'leftist' note in Mayakovsky, a note which we know not only from literature". This was a potentially deadly political accusation, in that it implied an intellectual link between Mayakovsky and the
Left Opposition, led by
Leon Trotsky, whose supporters were in exile or prison. (Trotsky was known to admire Mayakovsky's poetry). Mayakovsky retaliated by creating a huge poster mocking Yermilov, but was ordered by RAPP to take it down. In his suicide note Mayakovsky wrote "Tell Yermilov we should have completed the argument." The smear campaign continued in the Soviet press, sporting slogans like "Down with Mayakovshchina!" On 9 April 1930 Mayakovsky, reading his new poem "At the Top of My Voice", was shouted down by the student audience, for being 'too obscure'.
Death On 12 April 1930, Mayakovsky was seen in public for the last time: he took part in a discussion at the
Sovnarkom meeting concerning the proposed copyright law. The handwritten death note read: "To all of you. I die, but don't blame anyone for it, and please do not gossip. The deceased disliked that sort of thing terribly. Mother, sisters, comrades, forgive me – this is not a good method (I do not recommend it to others), but there is no other way out for me. Lily – love me. Comrade Government, my family consists of Lily Brik, mama, my sisters, and Veronika Vitoldovna Polonskaya. If you can provide a decent life for them, thank you. Give the poem I started to the Briks. They'll sort them out." The 'unfinished poem' in his suicide note read, in part: "And so they say – "the incident dissolved" / the love boat smashed up / on the dreary routine. / I'm through with life / and [we] should absolve / from mutual hurts, afflictions and spleen." Mayakovsky's funeral on 17 April 1930, was attended by around 150,000, the third largest event of public mourning in Soviet history, surpassed only by those of
Vladimir Lenin and
Joseph Stalin. He was interred at the Moscow
Novodevichy Cemetery. That evening Mayakovsky recited the yet unpublished poem
A Cloud in Trousers and announced it as dedicated to the hostess ("For you, Lilya"). "That was the happiest day in my life", was how he referred to the episode in his autobiography years later. In 1922 Lilya Brik fell in love with
Alexander Krasnoshchyokov, the head of the Soviet
Prombank. This affair resulted in a three month rift, which was to some extent reflected in the poem
About That (1923). Brik and Mayakovsky's relationships ended in 1923, but they never parted. "Now I am free from placards and love", he confessed in the poem called "For the Jubilee" (1924). Still, when in 1926 Mayakovsky was granted a state-owned flat at the Gendrikov Lane in Moscow, all three of them moved in and lived there until 1930, having turned the place into the LEF headquarters. Literary critic and historian
Viktor Shklovsky who resented what he saw as the Briks' exploitation of Mayakovsky both when he lived and after his death, once called them "a family of corpse-mongers". In summer 1925, Mayakovsky travelled to New York, where he met Russian émigré Elli Jones, born Yelizaveta Petrovna Zibert, an interpreter who spoke Russian, French, German and English fluently. They fell in love, for three months were inseparable, but decided to keep their affair secret. Soon after the poet's return to the Soviet Union, Elli gave birth to daughter
Patricia. Mayakovsky saw the girl just once, in
Nice, France, in 1928, when she was three. In the late 1920s, Mayakovsky had two more affairs, with student (later
Goslitizdat editor) Natalya Bryukhanenko (1905–1984) and with Veronika Polonskaya (1908–1994), a young
MAT actress, then the wife of actor
Mikhail Yanshin. It was Veronika's unwillingness to divorce the latter that resulted in her rows with Mayakovsky, the last of which preceded the poet's suicide. Yet, according to Natalya Bryukhanenko, it was not Polonskaya but Yakovleva whom he was pining for. "In January 1929 Mayakovsky [told me] he … would put a bullet to his brain if he didn't see that woman any time soon", she later remembered. Which, on 14 April 1930, he did. ==Works and critical reception==