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116-581: In 1909, the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti began the Futurist movement by publishing the Manifesto of Futurism ; it called for a total break with the past, in favour of a completely modern world. Very quickly he gained numerous followers, such as the painter Umberto Boccioni , and the musician Luigi Russolo . In 1910, Marinetti went to Russia to lecture on his ideas; it was this year that one of

232-570: A LEF manifesto, it soon came out as a book illustrated by Alexander Rodchenko who also used some photographs made by Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik. 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

348-561: 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 . His mother, aware of his activities, apparently did not mind. "People around warned us we were giving

464-561: A Soviet sculptor. In 1922 Lilya Brik fell in love with Alexander Krasnoshchyokov , the head of the Soviet Prombank . This affair resulted in the three months' 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

580-667: 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. In May 1925 Mayakovsky's second trip took him to several European cities, then to the United States , Mexico and Cuba . In the US, he visited New York , Cleveland , Detroit , Chicago , Pittsburgh , and Philadelphia , and planned

696-603: A brief affair with the poet before, invited him to the Briks' Petrograd flat. The couple at the time showed no interest in literature and were successful coral traders. 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. According to Lilya Brik's memoirs, her husband too fell in love with

812-545: A critic he considered too harsh. His drama La donna è mobile (Poupées électriques), first presented in Turin , was not successful either. Nowadays, the play is remembered through a later version, named Elettricità sessuale (Sexual Electricity), and mainly for the appearance onstage of humanoid automatons, ten years before the Czech writer Karel Čapek invented the term robot . In 1910 his first novel, Mafarka il futurista ,

928-479: A crowd that in part attended the performances to throw vegetables at them. The most successful "happening" of that period was the publicization of the "Manifesto Against Past-Loving Venice " in Venice. In the flier, Marinetti demands "fill(ing) the small, stinking canals with the rubble from the old, collapsing and leprous palaces" to "prepare for the birth of an industrial and militarized Venice, capable of dominating

1044-465: A dispute with Polonskaya, with whom he had a brief but unstable romance. Polonskaya, who was in love with the poet, but unwilling to leave her husband, was the last one to see Mayakovsky alive. But, as Lilya Brik stated in her memoirs, "the idea of suicide was like a chronic disease inside him, and like any chronic disease it worsened under circumstances that, for him, were undesirable…" According to Polonskaya, Mayakovsky mentioned suicide on 13 April, when

1160-535: A group of four Ego-Futurist poets calling themselves the 'Ego-group' had already been formed that October, they only issued their manifesto after Prolog was published, and began their activities in January the following year. The four original members - Severyanin, Konstantin Olimpov (Fofanov's son), Georgy Ivanov , and Graal Arelsky - then issued a manifesto illustrating their intentions, now calling themselves

1276-547: A lasting friendship and had historic consequences for the nascent Russian Futurist movement. Mayakovsky became an active member (and soon a spokesman) for the group Hylaea  [ ru ] ( Гилея ), which sought to free the arts from academic traditions: its members would read poetry on street corners, throw tea at their audiences, and make their public appearances an annoyance for the art establishment . Burlyuk, on having heard Mayakovsky's verses, declared him "a genius poet". Later Soviet researchers tried to downplay

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1392-538: A lawyer but to develop a literary career. He experimented with every type of literature (poetry, narrative, theatre, words in liberty ), signing everything "Filippo Tommaso Marinetti". Marinetti and Constantin Brâncuși were visitors of the Abbaye de Créteil c. 1908 along with young writers like Roger Allard (one of the first to defend Cubism ), Pierre Jean Jouve, and Paul Castiaux, who wanted to publish their works through

1508-422: A long editorial. However, although a number of artists, including Wyndham Lewis , were interested in the new movement, only one British convert was made, the young artist C.R.W. Nevinson . Marinetti's campaign both threatened and influenced Ezra Pound , who founded his own literary movement, Imagism , and wrote manifestos to publicize it while attacking Futurism. One result of Pound's strong reaction to Marinetti

1624-404: A minor, Mayakovsky was spared a serious prison sentence (with associated deportation) and in January 1910 was released. A warden confiscated the young man's notebook. Years later Mayakovsky conceded that was all for the better, yet he always cited 1909 as the year his literary career started. Upon his release from prison, Mayakovsky remained an ardent Socialist, but realized his own inadequacy as

1740-555: 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

1856-581: A number of visits to London, which he considered 'the Futurist city par excellence', and where a number of exhibitions, lectures and demonstrations of Futurist music were staged. Marinetti sought to establish an English Futurism and initially had an ally in Harold Monro , editor of Poetry and Drama , a London literary journal. Monro devoted the September 1913 issue to Futurism, praising Marinetti in

1972-470: A performance at the House of Publishing at the charity auction collecting money for the victims of Povolzhye famine, he went abroad for the first time, visiting Riga , Berlin and Paris , where he was invited to the studios of Fernand Léger and Picasso . Several books, including The West and Paris cycles (1922–1925) were created as a result. From 1922 to 1928, Mayakovsky was a prominent member of

2088-463: A pistol without a license, and in 1909 got involved in smuggling female political activists out of prison. This resulted in a series of arrests and finally an 11-month imprisonment. It was in solitary confinement in the Moscow Butyrka prison that Mayakovsky started writing verses for the first time. "Revolution and poetry got entangled in my head and became one," he wrote in I, Myself . As

2204-605: A regular army officer in 1917. In May of that year he was seriously wounded while serving with an artillery battalion on the Isonzo front; he returned to service after a long recovery, and participated in the decisive Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto in October 1918. After an extended courtship, in 1923 Marinetti married Benedetta Cappa (1897–1977), a writer and painter and a pupil of Giacomo Balla . Born in Rome, she had joined

2320-561: A self-made yellow shirt which became the token of his early stage persona. The tour ended on 13 April 1914 in Kaluga and cost Mayakovsky and Burlyuk their education: both were expelled from the Art school, their public appearances deemed incompatible with the school's academic principles. They learned of it while in Poltava from the local police chief, who chose the occasion as a pretext to ban

2436-581: A serious revolutionary. Having left the Party (never to re-join it), he concentrated on education. "I stopped my Party activities. Sat down and started to learn… Now my intention was to make the Socialist art," he later remembered. 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

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2552-410: A shot behind the closed door. She rushed in and found the poet lying on the floor; he had apparently shot himself through the heart. 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

2668-513: A source of energy, and calling for the creation of "plastic complexes" to replace natural foods. Food, in turn, would become a matter of artistic expression. Many of the meals Marinetti described and ate resemble performance art, such as the "Tactile Dinner", recreated in 2014 for an exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum . Participants wore pajamas decorated with sponge, sandpaper, and aluminum, and ate salads without using cutlery. During

2784-549: A trip to Boston that was never realized. His book of essays My Discovery of America came out later that year. In January 1927, the first issue of the New LEF magazine came out, again under Mayakovsky's supervision, now focusing on the documentary art. In all, 24 issues of it came out. In October 1927 Mayakovsky recited his new poem All Right! ( Хорошо! ) for the audience of the Moscow Party conference activists in

2900-455: A visa, upon her request. 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

3016-449: A young boy too much freedom. But I saw him developing according to the new trends, sympathized with him and pandered to his aspirations," she later remembered. His father died suddenly in 1906, when Mayakovsky was thirteen. (The father pricked his finger on a rusty pin while filing papers and died of blood poisoning .) His widowed mother moved the family to Moscow after selling all their movable property. In July 1906, Mayakovsky joined

3132-562: Is best known as the author of the Manifesto of Futurism , which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto , in 1919. Emilio Angelo Carlo Marinetti (some documents give his name as "Filippo Achille Emilio Marinetti") spent the first years of his life in Alexandria , Egypt, where his father (Enrico Marinetti) and his mother (Amalia Grolli) lived together more uxorio (as if married). Enrico

3248-574: Is known best as the author of the Futurist Manifesto , which he wrote in 1909. It was published in French on the front page of the most prestigious French daily newspaper, Le Figaro , on 20 February 1909. In The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism , Marinetti declared that "Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice." Georges Sorel , who influenced the entire political spectrum from anarchism to Fascism, also argued for

3364-717: Is likely a series of five murals at the Palermo Post Office (1926–1935) for the Fascist public-works architect Angiolo Mazzoni . In early 1918, Marinetti founded the Partito Politico Futurista or Futurist Political Party, which only a year later merged with Benito Mussolini 's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento . Marinetti was one of the first affiliates of the Italian Fascist Party . In 1919 he co-wrote with Alceste De Ambris

3480-400: 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

3596-536: The Congress of Fascist Culture that was held in Bologna on 30 March 1925, Giovanni Gentile addressed Sergio Panunzio on the need to define Fascism more purposefully by way of Marinetti's opinion, stating, "Great spiritual movements make recourse to precision when their primitive inspirations—what F. T. Marinetti identified this morning as artistic, that is to say, the creative and truly innovative ideas, from which

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3712-404: The Fascist Manifesto , the original manifesto of Italian Fascism . He opposed Fascism's later exaltation of existing institutions, terming them "reactionary". After walking out of the 1920 Fascist party congress in disgust, he withdrew from politics for three years; however, he remained a notable force in developing the party philosophy throughout the regime's existence. For example, at the end of

3828-629: The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party 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. As a young Bolshevik activist, Mayakovsky distributed propaganda leaflets, possessed

3944-945: The Second Italo-Abyssinian War and the Second World War , serving on the Eastern Front for a few weeks in the Summer and Autumn of 1942 at the age of 65. He died of cardiac arrest in Bellagio on 2 December 1944 while working on a collection of poems praising the wartime achievements of the Decima Flottiglia MAS . Vladimir Mayakovsky Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (Russian: Владимир Владимирович Маяковский , IPA: [məjɪˈkofskʲɪj] ; 19 July [ O.S. 7 July] 1893 – 14 April 1930)

4060-525: The 'Academy of Ego-Poetry'. The group began to hold loud public events to gain publicity, but little information is available related to these. The ideology of Ego-Futurism has been described as founded on a personality cult and the poet's abhorrence of the crowd. In November 1912, after an argument with Olimpov and a new member, the poet Ivan Ignatiev, Severyanin officially left the group; nonetheless, he still identified himself as an Ego-Futurist, and continued to publish in their almanacs. Ignatiev took charge of

4176-520: The 1916 compilation Simple as Mooing . In December 1913, Mayakovsky along with his fellow Futurist group members embarked on the Russian tour, which took them to 17 cities, including Simferopol , Sevastopol , Kerch , Odessa and Kishinev . It was a riotous affair. The audiences would go wild and often the police stopped the readings. The poets dressed outlandishly, and Mayakovsky, "a regular scandal-maker" in his own words, used to appear on stage in

4292-469: 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

4408-520: The Abbaye. The Abbaye de Créteil was a phalanstère community founded in the autumn of 1906 by the painter Albert Gleizes , and the poets René Arcos , Henri-Martin Barzun , Alexandre Mercereau and Charles Vildrac . The movement drew its inspiration from the Abbaye de Thélème, a fictional creation by Rabelais in his novel Gargantua . It was closed down by its members early in 1908. Marinetti

4524-555: The Battle of Adrianople, exemplifies words in freedom. Recordings can be heard of Marinetti reading some of his sound poems: Battaglia, Peso + Odore (1912); Dune, parole in libertà (1914); La Battaglia di Adrianopoli (1926) (recorded 1935). Marinetti agitated for Italian involvement in World War I, and once Italy was engaged, promptly volunteered for service. In the fall of 1915 he and several other Futurists who were members of

4640-426: 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 traveled 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

4756-740: The Cubo-Futurist poets completely rejected the past, going so far as to declare that famous authors, for example Fyodor Dostoevsky , had to be "pushed off the steamboat of modernity" immediately. Severyanin also decried excessive objectivity of the Cubo-Futurists , advocating a more subjective attitude. Although other Russian Futurists dismissed the Ego-Futurists as puerile and vulgar, Severyanin argued that his advancement of outspoken sensuality, neologisms and ostentatious selfishness qualifies as futurism . Despite their differences,

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4872-572: The Essence of Love" and "Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva". Some argued that, since it was Elsa Triolet (Lilya's sister) who acquainted them, the liaison might have been the result of Brik's intrigue, aimed at stopping the poet from getting closer to Elli Jones and especially daughter Patricia, but the power of this passion apparently caught her by surprise. Mayakovsky tried to persuade Tatyana to return to Russia but she refused. In late 1929, he made an attempt to travel to Paris in order to marry his lover but

4988-550: The Fascist hierarchy. Towards the end of the 1930s, some Fascist ideologues (for example, the ex-Futurist Ardengo Soffici ) wished to import the concept of " degenerate art " from Germany to Italy and condemned modernism, although their demands were ignored by the regime. In 1938, hearing that Adolf Hitler wanted to include Futurism in a traveling exhibition of degenerate art, Marinetti persuaded Mussolini to refuse to let it enter Italy. On 17 November 1938, Italy passed The Racial Laws , discriminating against Italian Jews, much like

5104-478: The Fascist regime Marinetti sought to make Futurism the official state art of Italy but failed to do so. Mussolini was personally uninterested in art and chose to give patronage to numerous styles to keep artists loyal to the regime. Opening the exhibition of art by the Novecento Italiano group in 1923, he said: "I declare that it is far from my idea to encourage anything like a state art. Art belongs to

5220-753: The Futurist art more skeptically. Mayakovsky's 1921 poem, 150 000 000 failed to impress Lenin, who apparently saw in it little more than a formal futuristic experiment. More favourably received by the Soviet leader was his next one, "Re Conferences" which came out in April. A vigorous spokesman for the Communist Party, Mayakovsky expressed himself in many ways. Contributing simultaneously to numerous Soviet newspapers, he poured out topical propagandistic verses and wrote didactic booklets for children while lecturing and reciting all over Russia. In May 1922, after

5336-478: The Futurist movement. This love affair, as well as his ideas on World War I and Socialism, strongly influenced Mayakovsky's best known works: A Cloud in Trousers (1915), his first major poem of appreciable length, followed by Backbone Flute (1915), The War and the World (1916) and The Man (1918). When his mobilization form finally arrived in the autumn of 1915, Mayakovsky found himself unwilling to go to

5452-537: The Futurists from performing on stage. Having won 65 rubles in a lottery, in May 1914, Mayakovsky went to Kuokkala , near Petrograd. Here he put the finishing touches to A Cloud in Trousers , frequented Korney Chukovsky 's dacha , sat for Ilya Repin 's painting sessions and met Maxim Gorky for the first time. As World War I began, Mayakovsky volunteered but was rejected as 'politically unreliable'. He worked for

5568-514: The Futurists in 1917. They'd met in 1918, moved in together in Rome, and chose to marry only to avoid legal complications on a lecture tour of Brazil. They had three daughters: Vittoria, Ala, and Luce. Cappa and Marinetti collaborated on a genre of mixed-media assemblages in the mid-1920s they called tattilismo ("Tactilism"), and she was a strong proponent and practitioner of the aeropittura movement after its inception in 1929. She also produced three experimental novels. Cappa's major public work

5684-726: The Italian and European classics. At age seventeen he started his first school magazine, Papyrus ; the Jesuits threatened to expel him for publicizing Émile Zola 's scandalous novels in the school. He first studied in Egypt then in Paris, obtaining a baccalauréat degree in 1894 at the Sorbonne , and in Italy, graduating in law at the University of Pavia in 1899. He decided not to be

5800-597: The Left Art Front (LEF) he helped to found (and coin its "literature of fact, not fiction" credo) and for a while defined his work as Communist Futurism ( комфут ). He edited, along with Sergei Tretyakov and Osip Brik, the journal LEF , its stated objective being "re-examining the ideology and practices of the so-called leftist art, rejecting individualism and increasing Art's value for the developing Communism." The journal's first, March 1923, issue featured Mayakovsky's poem About That ( Про это ). Regarded as

5916-631: The Lombard Volunteer Cyclists were stationed at Lake Garda , in Trentino province, high in the mountains along the Italo-Austrian border. They endured several weeks of fighting in harsh conditions before the cyclists units, deemed inappropriate for mountain warfare, were disbanded. Marinetti spent most of 1916 supporting Italy's war effort with speeches, journalism, and theatrical work, then returned to military service as

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6032-683: 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). In the summer of 1915 Mayakovsky moved to Petrograd where he started contributing to the New Satyrikon magazine, writing mostly humorous verse in

6148-573: The Moscow's Red Hall. In November 1927 a play called The 25th (and based upon the All Right! poem) premiered at the Leningrad Maly Opera Theatre. In summer 1928, disillusioned with LEF, he left both the organization and its magazine. In 1929, the publishing house Goslitizdat released The Works by V. V. Mayakovsky in 4 volumes. In September 1929 the first assembly of the newly formed REF group gathered with Mayakovsky in

6264-647: The Palace Royal hotel at the Pushkinskaya Street, Petrograd, not far from where they lived. He introduced the couple to his Futurist friends and the Briks' flat quickly evolved into a modern literary salon. From then on Mayakovsky was dedicating every one of his large poems (with the obvious exception of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ) to Lilya; such dedications later started to appear even in the texts he had written before they met, much to her displeasure. In summer 1918, soon after Lilya and Vladimir starred in

6380-501: The Petrograd Musical Drama Theatre. Representing a universal flood and the subsequent joyful triumph of the "Unclean" (the proletariat) over the "Clean" (the bourgeoisie ), this satirical drama's re-worked, 1921 version enjoyed even greater popular acclaim. However, the author's attempt to make a film of the play failed, its language deemed "incomprehensible for the masses." In December 1918, Mayakovsky

6496-599: The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. In February 1930 Mayakovsky joined RAPP, but in Pravda on 9 March, a leading member of RAPP, Vladimir Yermilov , writing "with all the authority of a 23 year old who had not seen the play but had read part of the script" categorised Mayakovsky as one of the 'petit bourgeois revolutionary intelligentsia', adding that "we hear a false 'leftist' note in Mayakovsky,

6612-538: The Soviet state and literary establishment. In 1930, Mayakovsky committed suicide . Even after death, his relationship with the Soviet state remained unsteady. Though Mayakovsky had previously been harshly criticized by Soviet governmental bodies such as the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers , Premier Joseph Stalin described Mayakovsky after his death as "the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch". Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

6728-594: The Soviet state was always complex and often tumultuous. Mayakovsky often found himself engaged in confrontation with the increasing involvement of the Soviet state in cultural censorship and the development of the State doctrine of Socialist realism . Works that criticized or satirized aspects of the Soviet system, such as the poem "Talking With the Taxman About Poetry" (1926), and the plays The Bedbug (1929) and The Bathhouse (1929), met with scorn from

6844-542: The USSR. Still, she had many detractors (among them Lyudmila Mayakovskaya , the poet's sister) who regarded her as an insensitive femme-fatale and cynical manipulator, who had never been really interested in either Mayakovsky or his poetry. "To me, she was a kind of monster. But Mayakovsky apparently loved her that way, armed with a whip", remembered poet Andrey Voznesensky who knew Lilya Brik personally. Literary critic and historian Viktor Shklovsky who resented what he saw as

6960-491: The X Mas ("A Fifteen Minutes' Poem of the tenth MAS "), Marinetti sought to reconcile his newfound love for God and his passion for the action that accompanied him throughout his life. There were other contradictions in his character: despite his nationalism, he was international, educated in Egypt and France, writing his first poems in French, publishing the Futurist Manifesto in a French newspaper and traveling to promote his ideas. Marinetti volunteered for active service in

7076-525: 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'. 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. On 14 April 1930, his current partner, actress Veronika Polonskaya , upon leaving his flat, heard

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7192-402: The artistic basement in Saint Petersburg. In December of that year his first published poems, "Night" ( Ночь ) and "Morning" ( Утро ) appeared in the Futurists' Manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste , 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

7308-440: The chair. But behind this façade the poet's relationship with the Soviet literary establishment was quickly deteriorating. Both the REF-organized exhibition of Mayakovsky's work, celebrating the 20th anniversary of his literary career and the parallel event in the Writers' Club, "20 Years of Work" in February 1930, were ignored by the RAPP members and, more importantly, the Party leadership, particularly Stalin whose attendance he

7424-433: The collapse of the Soviet Union, looking for her roots, was welcomed there with respect and since then started to use her Russian name, Yelena Vladimirovna Mayakovskaya. In 1928, in Paris Mayakovsky met Russian émigré Tatyana Yakovleva, a 22-year-old model working for the Chanel fashion house, and niece of painter Alexandre Jacovleff . He fell in love madly and wrote two poems dedicated to her, "Letter to Comrade Kostrov on

7540-419: The course of his career: he wrote poems, wrote and directed plays, appeared in films, edited the art journal LEF , and produced agitprop posters in support of the Communist Party during the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. Though Mayakovsky's work regularly demonstrated ideological and patriotic support for the ideology of the Bolsheviks and a strong admiration of Vladimir Lenin , his relationship with

7656-413: The development of modern art. Regardless, the Italian state shut down Artecrazia . Marinetti made numerous attempts to ingratiate himself with the regime, becoming less radical and avant garde with each attempt. He relocated from Milan to Rome. He became an academician despite his condemnation of academies, saying, "It is important that Futurism be represented in the Academy." He was an atheist, but by

7772-475: The discrimination pronounced in the Nuremberg Laws . The antisemitic trend in Italy resulted in attacks against modern art, judged too foreign, too radical and anti-nationalist. In the 11 January 1939 issue of the Futurist journal, Artecrazia , Marinetti expressed his condemnation of such attacks on modern art, noting Futurism is both Italian and nationalist, not foreign, and stating that there were no Jews in Futurism. Furthermore, he claimed Jews were not active in

7888-403: The domain of the individual. The state has only one duty: not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists, to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view." Mussolini's mistress, Margherita Sarfatti , successfully promoted the rival Novecento Group, and even persuaded Marinetti to be part of its board. In Fascist Italy, modern art was tolerated and even approved by

8004-409: 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 . Mayakovsky's suicide occurred after

8120-444: The earliest Russian Futurist groups began: led by David and Wladimir Burliuk , it was called 'Hylea', and its members included poets who would later become Cubo-Futurists , the rivals of the Ego-Futurists. Igor Severyanin , the founder of Ego-Futurism, was already a poet, writing under the influence of two Russian Impressionist poets, Konstantin Fofanov and Mirra Lokhvitskaya . His Futurist ideas were developing in 1910, and by

8236-407: The film Encased in a Film (only fragments of which survived), Mayakovsky and the Briks moved in together. In March 1919 all three came to Moscow and in 1920 settled in a flat at the Gondrikov Lane, Taganka . In 1920, Mayakovsky had a brief romance with Lilya Lavinskaya, an artist who also contributed to ROSTA. She gave birth to a son, Gleb-Nikita Lavinsky  [ ru ] (1921–1986), later

8352-438: The first, truest Futurists. In 1913–4, the Cubo-Futurist poets Vladimir Mayakovsky , Vasilly Kamensky , and David Burliuk decided to tour Russia with poetry recitals. Severyanin occasionally joined in, but it was during this time that the collaboration ended, due to an argument with Burliuk and Mayakovsky. The movement had begun to fall apart when Severyanin officially abandoned the group to begin his solo career in 1912, and

8468-673: The frontlines. Assisted by Gorky, he joined the Petrograd Military Driving school as a draftsman and was studying there until early 1917. In 1916 Parus (The Sail) Publishers (again led by Gorky), published Mayakovsky's poetry compilation called Simple As Mooing . Mayakovsky embraced the Bolshevik Russian Revolution wholeheartedly and for a while even worked in Smolny , Petrograd, where he saw Vladimir Lenin . "To accept or not to accept, there

8584-738: The great Adriatic , a great Italian lake." In 1911, the Italo-Turkish War began and Marinetti departed for Libya as war correspondent for a French newspaper. His articles were eventually collected and published in The Battle of Tripoli . He then covered the First Balkan War of 1912–13, witnessing the surprise success of Bulgarian troops against the Ottoman Empire in the Siege of Adrianople . In this period he also made

8700-417: The group briefly united in 1914; unfortunately for the project, Shershenevich was involved, and he took advantage of a group tour to publish, in the group journal, an attack against the Ego-Futurists and a Moscow Futurist group, 'Centrifuge'. Boris Pasternak , a member of Centrifuge, retorted with a satirical article against him, leading to a verbal battle between certain members of the groups for recognition as

8816-452: The group, and in the January 1913 manifesto signed by himself and several new members, he renamed the academy to its present name. One of the most notable poets from the second phase of Ego-Futurism was Vasilisk Gnedov ; in 1913, he would publish a book of poems, where the quantities of words used would diminish, and end with the phrase The Poem of the End printed on an otherwise-blank page. He

8932-423: The gunshot, the carpet on which Mayakovsky fell, and the authenticity of the suicide note. The possibility of a forgery, suggested by [Andrei] Koloskov, had survived as a theory with different variants. But the results of a detailed hand-writing analysis found that the suicide note was undoubtedly written by Mayakovsky, and also included the conclusion that its irregularities "depict a diagnostic complex, testifying to

9048-535: The importance of violence. Futurism had both anarchist and Fascist elements; Marinetti later became an active supporter of Benito Mussolini . Marinetti, who admired speed, had a minor car accident outside Milan in 1908 when he veered into a ditch to avoid two cyclists. He referred to the accident in the Futurist Manifesto: the Marinetti who was helped out of the ditch was a new man, determined to end

9164-741: The influence… at the moment of execution… of 'disconcerting' factors, among which the most probable is a psycho-physiological state linked with agitation." Although the findings are hardly surprising, the event is indicative of a fascination with Mayakovsky's contradictory relationship with the Soviet authorities which survived into the era of perestroika, despite the fact that he was being attacked and rejected for his political conformism at this time. Mayakovsky met husband and wife Osip and Lilya Brik in July 1915 at their dacha in Malakhovka nearby Moscow. Soon after that Lilya's sister, Elsa Triolet , who'd had

9280-731: The mid-1930s he had come to accept the influence of the Catholic Church on Italian society. In Gazzetta del Popolo , 21 June 1931, Marinetti proclaimed that "Only Futurist artists...are able to express clearly...the simultaneous dogmas of the Catholic faith, such as the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception and Christ's Calvary." In his last works, written just before his death in 1944 L'aeropoema di Gesù ("The Aeropoem of Jesus") and Quarto d'ora di poesia per

9396-540: The model of his pistol, and his neighbors were later reported to say they'd heard two shots. Ten days later, the officer investigating the poet's suicide was himself killed, fueling speculation about the nature of Mayakovsky's death. Such speculation, often alluding to suspicion of murder by State services, especially intensified during the periods of first Krushchevian de-Stalinisation , later Glasnost , and Perestroika , as Soviet politicians sought to weaken Stalin's reputation (or Brik's, and by association, Stalin's) and

9512-425: The movement derived its first and most potent impulse—have lost their force. We today find ourselves at the very beginning of a new life and we experience with joy this obscure need that fills our hearts—this need that is our inspiration, the genius that governs us and carries us with it." As part of his campaign to overturn tradition, Marinetti also attacked traditional Italian food. His Manifesto of Futurist Cooking

9628-468: The next year he was ready. Ego-Futurism was born in either the summer of or in November that year, when Severyanin published a small brochure titled Prolog (Ego-Futurism). The first Ego-Futurist publication, it insulted contemporary verse, declared that poetry would soon have to undergo a complete transformation to suit modernity, and claimed that he himself was already famous throughout Russia. Although

9744-416: The poet ("How could I have possibly failed to fall for him, if Osya loved him so?" – she once argued), whereas "Volodya did not merely fall in love with me; he attacked me, it was an assault. For two and a half years I didn't have a moment's peace. I understood right away that Volodya was a genius, but I didn't like him. I didn't like clamorous people ... I didn't like the fact that he was so tall and people in

9860-745: 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. Patricia Thompson, a professor of philosophy and women's studies at Lehman College in New York City, is the author of the book Mayakovsky in Manhattan , in which she told the story of her parents' love affair, relying on her mother's unpublished memoirs and their private conversations prior to her death in 1985. Thompson traveled to Russia after

9976-484: The positions of contemporary opponents. According to Chantal Sundaram: The extent to which rumours of Mayakovsky's murder remained widespread is indicated by the fact that even as late as the end of 1991 they prompted the State Mayakovsky Museum to commission an expert medical and criminological inquiry into the material evidence of his death kept in the museum: photographs, the shirt with traces from

10092-482: The pretense and decadence of the prevailing Liberty style . He discussed a new and strongly revolutionary programme with his friends, in which they should end every artistic relationship with the past, "destroy the museums, the libraries, every type of academy." Together, he wrote, "We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene— militarism , patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman." The Futurist Manifesto

10208-825: The short-lived Futurist Paper . He also starred in three silent films made at the Neptun Studios in Petrograd he had written scripts for. The only surviving one, The Lady and the Hooligan , was based on the La maestrina degli operai ( The Workers' Young Schoolmistress ) published in 1895 by Edmondo De Amicis , and directed by Evgeny Slavinsky. The other two, Born Not for the Money and Shackled by Film were directed by Nikandr Turkin and are presumed lost . On 7 November 1918, Mayakovsky's play Mystery-Bouffe premiered at

10324-554: 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 subsidize me with 50 kopeks each day so that I'd write and not be hungry," Mayakovsky wrote in "I, Myself". On 17 November 1912, Mayakovsky made his first public performance at Stray Dog,

10440-462: The social change promised by modern technology. His 1913 verses, surreal, seemingly disjointed and nonsensical, relying on forceful rhythms and exaggerated imagery with the words split into pieces and staggered across the page, peppered with street language, were considered unpoetic in literary circles at the time. While the confrontational aesthetics of his fellow Futurist group members' poetry were mostly confined to formal experiments, Mayakovsky's idea

10556-543: The spirit of the recently deceased Marinetti. About the same time Marinetti worked on a very anti- Roman Catholic and anti- Austrian verse-novel, Le monoplan du Pape ( The Pope's Aeroplane , 1912) and edited an anthology of futurist poets. But his attempts to renew the style of poetry did not satisfy him. So much so that, in his foreword to the anthology, he declared a new revolution: it was time to be done with traditional syntax and to use "words in freedom" ( parole in libertà ). His sound-poem Zang Tumb Tumb , an account of

10672-762: The steamboat of the modernity." In October 1913, Mayakovsky gave the performance at the Pink Lantern café, reciting his new poem "Take That!" ( Нате! ) for the first time. The concert at the Petersburg's Luna-Park saw the premiere of the poetic monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky , with the author in a leading role, stage decorations designed by Pavel Filonov and Iosif Shkolnik. In 1913 Mayakovsky's first poetry collection called I ( Я ) came out, its original limited edition 300 copies lithographically printed. This four-poem cycle, handwritten and illustrated by Vasily Tchekrygin and Leo Shektel, later formed Part One of

10788-469: The street would stare at him; I was annoyed that he enjoyed listening to his own voice, I couldn't even stand the name Mayakovsky ... sounding so much like a cheap pen name." Both Mayakovsky's persistent adoration and rough appearance irritated her. It was, allegedly, to please her, that Mayakovsky attended a dentist, started to wear a bow tie and use a walking stick. Soon after Osip Brik published A Cloud in Trousers in September 1915, Mayakovsky settled in

10904-632: The subjects of love, revolution, religion and art, written from the vantage point of a spurned lover. The language of the work was the language of the streets, and Mayakovsky went to considerable lengths to debunk idealistic and romanticized notions of poetry and poets. Вашу мысль мечтающую на размягченном мозгу, как выжиревший лакей на засаленной кушетке, буду дразнить об окровавленный сердца лоскут: досыта изъиздеваюсь, нахальный и едкий. У меня в душе ни одного седого волоса, и старческой нежности нет в ней! Мир огромив мощью голоса, иду – красивый, двадцатидвухлетний. Your thoughts, dreaming on

11020-506: The two were at Valentin Katayev 's place, but she thought he was trying to emotionally blackmail her and "refused to believe for a second [he] could do such a thing." The circumstances of Mayakovsky's death became a matter of lasting controversy. It appeared that the suicide note had been written two days before his death. Soon after the poet's death, Lilya and Osip Brik were hastily sent abroad. The bullet removed from his body didn't match

11136-460: The vein of Sasha Tchorny , one of the journal's former stalwarts. Subsequently, Maxim Gorky invited the poet to work for his journal, Letopis . In June of that year, Mayakovsky fell in love with a married woman, Lilya Brik , who eagerly took upon herself the role of a ' muse '. Her husband Osip Brik seemed not to mind and became the poet's close friend; later he published several books by Mayakovsky and used his entrepreneurial talents to support

11252-542: Was a Russian poet, playwright, artist, and actor. During his early, pre- Revolution period leading into 1917, Mayakovsky became renowned as a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement. He co-signed the Futurist manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1913), and wrote such poems as " A Cloud in Trousers " (1915) and " Backbone Flute " (1916). Mayakovsky produced a large and diverse body of work during

11368-419: Was a lawyer from Piedmont , and his mother was the daughter of a literary professor from Milan . They had come to Egypt in 1865, at the invitation of Khedive Isma'il Pasha , to act as legal advisers for foreign companies that were taking part in his modernization program. His love for literature developed during the school years. His mother was an avid reader of poetry, and introduced the young Marinetti to

11484-654: Was a major contributor. An advertisement promised Blast would cover "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and All Vital Forms of Modern Art”. Blast was published only twice, in 1914 and 1915. Writing to Monro, Marinetti said he was saddened by the reviews of Vorticism in the English press unfavorably comparing it with Futurism and would rather have worked in collaboration with the Vorticists. He and Pound later became friends, and in Canto LXXII , written in Italian, Pound meets

11600-543: 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

11716-400: Was cleared of all charges by an obscenity trial. That year, Marinetti discovered some allies in three young painters ( Umberto Boccioni , Carlo Carrà , Luigi Russolo ), who adopted the Futurist philosophy. Together with them (and with poets such as Aldo Palazzeschi ), Marinetti began a series of Futurist Evenings, theatrical spectacles in which Futurists declaimed their manifestos in front of

11832-497: Was creating the new, "democratic language of the streets". In 1914, his first large work, an avant-garde tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky came out. The fierce critique of the city life and capitalism in general was, at the same time, a paean to the modern industrial power, featuring the protagonist sacrificing himself for the sake of the people's happiness in the future. In September 1915, A Cloud in Trousers came out, Mayakovsky's first major poem of appreciable length; it depicted

11948-546: Was finished by 1916. The Ego-Futurists significantly influenced the Imaginists of the 1920s. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti ( Italian: [fiˈlippo tomˈmaːzo mariˈnetti] ; 22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary community Abbaye de Créteil between 1907 and 1908. Marinetti

12064-542: 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. Mayakovsky continued to profess his devotion to Lilya whom he considered a family member. It was Brik who in the mid-1930s famously addressed Stalin with a personal letter which made all the difference in the way the poet's legacy has been treated since in

12180-404: Was greatly anticipating. It was becoming evident that such experimental art was no longer welcomed by the regime, and that the country's most famous poet was increasingly losing favor with the higher echelons of the Party. Two of Mayakovsky's satirical plays, written specifically for Meyerkhold Theatre, The Bedbug (1929) and (in particular) The Bathhouse (1930) evoked stormy criticism from

12296-593: Was his advocacy of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot . Joyce was exposed to Futurism while living in Trieste . The movement's techniques are reflected in Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake , one section of which alludes to “crucial elements of Futurism." Futurism was an important influence upon Lewis's Vorticist philosophy. Vorticism, named by Pound, was founded with the publication of Blast , to which Pound

12412-579: Was involved with Osip Brik in discussions with the Viborg district party school of the Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks) (RKP(b)) to set up a Futurist organisation affiliated to the party. Named Komfut , the organisation was formally founded in January 1919, but was swiftly dissolved following the intervention of Anatoly Lunacharsky . In March 1919, Mayakovsky moved back to Moscow where Vladimir Mayakovsky's Collected Works 1909–1919

12528-412: Was nationalistic, rejecting foreign foods and food names. It was also militaristic, seeking to stimulate men to be fighters. Marinetti also sought to increase creativity. His attraction to whatever was new made scientific discoveries appealing to him, but his views on diet were not scientifically based. He was fascinated with the idea of processed food, predicting that someday pills would replace food as

12644-498: Was no such question… [That was] my Revolution," he wrote in I, Myself autobiography. In November 1917 he took part in the Communist Party's Central committee-sanctioned assembly of writers, painters and theatre directors who expressed their allegiance to the new political regime. In December that year "The Left March" ( Левый марш , 1918) premiered at the Navy Theater, with sailors as an audience. In 1918, Mayakovsky started

12760-507: 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. Mayakovsky's early poems established him as one of the more original poets to come out of the Russian Futurism, a movement rejecting the traditional poetry in favour of formal experimentation, and welcoming

12876-509: 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

12992-465: Was published in the Turin Gazzetta del Popolo on 28 December 1930. Arguing that "People think, dress[,] and act in accordance with what they drink and eat", Marinetti proposed wide-ranging changes to diet. He condemned pasta, blaming it for lassitude, pessimism, and lack of virility, — and promoted the eating of Italian-grown rice. In this, as in other ways, his proposed Futurist cooking

13108-404: Was read and debated all across Europe, but Marinetti's first 'Futurist' works were not as successful. In April, the opening night of his drama Le Roi bombance (The Feasting King), written in 1905, was interrupted by loud, derisive whistling by the audience and by Marinetti himself, who thus introduced another element of Futurism, "the desire to be heckled." Marinetti did, however, fight a duel with

13224-491: Was refused a visa for the first time, again, as many believed, due to Lilya's making full use of her numerous "connections". It became known that she "accidentally" read out a letter from Paris to Mayakovsky, alleging that Tatiana was getting married, even though, as it turned out soon, the latter's wedding was not on the agenda at that very moment. Lydia Chukovskaya insisted it was the "ever-powerful Yakov Agranov , another one of Lilya's lovers" who prevented Mayakovsky obtaining

13340-535: Was released. The same month he started working for the Russian State Telegraph Agency ( ROSTA ) creating—both graphic and text— satirical Agitprop posters, aimed mostly at informing the country's largely illiterate population of the current events. In the cultural climate of the early Soviet Union, his popularity grew rapidly, even if among the members of the first Bolshevik government, only Anatoly Lunacharsky supported him; others treated

13456-583: Was stylistically the closest to the Cubo-Futurists. By 1913, groups inspired by Ego-Futurism began to appear, for example the 'Mezzanine of Poetry', a group founded by Vadim Shershenevich . It was dissolved by 1914, and Shershenevich joined the Cubo-Futurists. From the beginning, there were several differences between the Cubo-Futurism and Ego-Futurism; for example, in their almanacs, they published Symbolist poetry alongside their own, whilst

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