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Biography

Born on July 19, 1893, in the Georgian village of Bagdadi in the Kutaisi Governorate of the Russian Empire, Vladimir Mayakovsky came from an impoverished noble family.
His father, Vladimir Konstantinovich Mayakovsky (1857–1906), served as a third-rank forester in the Erivan Governorate and, from 1889 onward, in the Bagdadi forestry district. The Mayakovsky family traced its lineage to the Zaporozhian Cossacks; the poet’s paternal great-grandfather had been a yesaul (regimental officer) of the Black Sea Cossack troops, which entitled him to noble status.
His mother, Alexandra Alekseyevna Pavlenko (née Afanasyeva, 1867–1954), came from a family of Kuban Cossacks; born in the Kuban settlement of Ternovskaya, she was half Russian and half Ukrainian. In his 1924 poem Vladikavkaz — Tiflis, Mayakovsky referred to himself as a “Georgian.” In a 1927 interview with the Prague newspaper Prager Presse, he said: “I was born in 1894 in the Caucasus. My father was a Cossack, my mother a Ukrainian. My first language was Georgian. One might say I stand between three cultures.” His paternal grandmother, Efrosinya Osipovna Danilevskaya, was a cousin of the historical novelist G. P. Danilevsky and also descended from Zaporozhian Cossacks. Mayakovsky had two sisters, Lyudmila (1884–1972) and Olga (1890–1949), and two brothers: Konstantin, who died at age three of scarlet fever, and Alexander, who died in infancy.

In July of the same year, Mayakovsky moved with his mother and sisters to Moscow, where he entered the 4th class of the 5th Classical Gymnasium (later Moscow School No. 91 on Povarskaya Street). He studied in the same class as Alexander, the brother of Boris Pasternak. The family lived in poverty. In March 1908, he was expelled from the 5th class for non-payment of tuition.

His first “semi-poem” was published in the illegal journal Poryv, issued by the Third Gymnasium.

In Moscow Mayakovsky became acquainted with revolutionary-minded students and developed an interest in Marxist literature. In 1908 he joined the RSDLP. He worked as a propagandist in the trade-industrial district and was arrested three times between 1908 and 1909 (in cases involving an underground printing press, suspected links to anarchist expropriators, and suspicion of aiding the escape of female political prisoners from Novinskaya prison). He was released in the first case under parental supervision as a minor who had acted “without full understanding,” and was freed in the second and third cases for lack of evidence.

In prison Mayakovsky caused scandals, frequently being transferred between facilities—Basmannaya, Meshchanskaya, Myasnitskaya, and finally Butyrka prison, where, according to his autobiography I Myself, he spent 11 months in solitary confinement, cell no. 103 (in reality about six months, from July 2, 1909, to January 9, 1910).

He was released in January 1910 after his third arrest and left the party. In 1918 he wrote in his autobiography: “Why am I not in the party? Communists were working at the fronts. In art and education they were still compromisers. They would have sent me to fish in Astrakhan.”

In 1911 Mayakovsky’s friend, the bohemian artist Yevgenia Lang, inspired him to take up painting.

He studied in the preparatory class of the Stroganov School and in the studios of painters S. Yu. Zhukovsky and P. I. Kelin. In 1911 he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture—the only place where he could be admitted without a certificate of political reliability. After meeting David Burlyuk, founder of the futurist group Hylaea, he joined the poetic circle and became part of the Cubo-Futurist movement. His first published poem, “Night” (1912), appeared in the futurist anthology A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.

In July 1915 he met Lilya and Osip Brik.
From 1915 to 1917, thanks to Maxim Gorky’s intervention, he served in Petrograd at the Military Automobile School. Soldiers were forbidden to publish, but Osip Brik purchased the poems Backbone Flute and A Cloud in Trousers for 50 kopecks per line and arranged their publication. His anti-war works—“Mother and the Evening Killed by the Germans,” “I and Napoleon,” and the poem War and Peace (1915)—appeared during this period. He also turned to satire. His collection Hymns appeared in New Satiricon (1915). His first major book, Simple as Mooing, was published in 1916. In 1917 came Revolution. A Poet’s Chronicle.

On December 17, 1918, he recited “Left March” publicly for the first time.
In March 1919 he moved to Moscow and began working intensively for ROSTA (1919–1921), designing agit-satirical posters (“ROSTA Windows”) as poet and artist. His first collected works—Everything Written by Vladimir Mayakovsky. 1909–1919—appeared in 1919. He wrote for the newspaper Art of the Commune. He promoted world revolution and a revolution of the spirit. In 1920 he completed the poem 150,000,000, devoted to the world revolution.

He considered the Civil War years the happiest of his life; his 1927 poem Good! revisits them nostalgically. Georgy Sviridov later composed the Pathetic Oratorio (1959) based on excerpts from Good!.

Between 1922 and 1924 Mayakovsky traveled abroad (Latvia, France, Germany). He wrote essays and poems about these impressions, including How Does the Democratic Republic Work? (1922) and Paris (Little Conversations with the Eiffel Tower) (1923).
In 1925 he embarked on his longest journey: a trip to America. He visited Havana, Mexico City, and numerous cities in the United States, giving readings and lectures for three months. He later wrote the cycle Spain — Ocean — Havana — Mexico — America and the book My Discovery of America. From 1925 to 1928 he traveled extensively across the Soviet Union, speaking in various venues. His works from these years include To Comrade Nette, the Steamer and the Man (1926), Across the Cities of the Union (1927), and The Story of Foundry Worker Ivan Kozyrev… (1928). In February 1926 he visited Baku, giving readings in opera and drama theaters and before oil workers in Balakhany.

In 1927 he revived the journal LEF under the title New LEF.
Twenty-four issues were published. In summer 1928 Mayakovsky became disillusioned with LEF and left both the organization and the journal. That same year he began writing his autobiography I Myself. From October 8 to December 8 he traveled abroad again (Berlin–Paris). In November, the first two volumes of his collected works appeared.

His satirical plays The Bedbug (1928) and The Bathhouse (1929) were staged by Meyerhold, but The Bathhouse provoked a fierce campaign against him from RAPP critics. In 1929 he organized the group REF, but left it in February 1930 to join RAPP.

Mayakovsky loved gambling and was an excellent billiards player. He disliked “cunning” professional techniques but also refused to play “empty” games without stakes.

For many years his muse was Lilya Brik.

They met in July 1915 at her parents’ dacha in Malakhovka. Brik’s sister Elsa Triolet introduced Mayakovsky to the Brik household in Petrograd, where he read A Cloud in Trousers aloud; after their enthusiastic reception he dedicated it to Lilya. He soon moved closer to their home, and the apartment became a bohemian salon frequented by futurists and major cultural figures such as M. Kuzmin, M. Gorky, V. Shklovsky, and Roman Jakobson.

In 1926 Mayakovsky received an apartment in Hendrikov Lane, where he lived with the Briks until 1930. Weekly LEF meetings were held there, and Lilya took an active (though unofficial) part in the journal’s creation.

Despite his long relationship with Brik, Mayakovsky had numerous other affairs, both in Russia and abroad (USA, France). In 1926 his daughter Helen-Patricia was born in New York to the émigré Elli Jones (Elizaveta Siebert). He saw the child only once, in Nice in 1928. Other romantic involvements included Sofia Shamarina and Natalya Bryukhnenko. Brik remained friendly with them all.
In Paris he fell in love with the émigrée Tatyana Yakovleva, to whom he dedicated two poems: Letter to Comrade Kostrov from Paris on the Nature of Love and Letter to Tatyana Yakovleva (published 26 years later). With Yakovleva, he chose a gift for Brik—a Renault car.

In 1930 Mayakovsky’s health deteriorated.
In February Lilya and Osip Brik left for Europe. Soviet newspapers dismissed him as a “fellow traveler” of Soviet power, while he saw himself as a proletarian writer. His long-awaited exhibition “20 Years of Work” was ignored by major writers and state officials. His plays The Bathhouse and The Bedbug failed.
In April, a tribute to him was removed from the journal Press and Revolution. Rumors spread that Mayakovsky had “written himself out.” He was denied a foreign visa. At a reading at the Polytechnic Institute two days before his suicide, he faced hostile heckling. His psychological state worsened.

Since 1919 he had maintained a small attic room in a communal apartment on Lubyanka (now the Mayakovsky State Museum), where he ultimately took his own life.

On the morning of April 14, Mayakovsky had an appointment with actress Veronika (Nora) Polonskaya, with whom he had been romantically involved for two years. According to her 1990 recollections, he locked her in, begged her not to leave for rehearsal, cried, and then let her go—giving her money for a taxi. As she reached the building entrance, she heard the gunshot. When she returned, he was still alive but dying.

His pre-written suicide note, drafted two days earlier, begins:
“In my death, do not blame anyone, and please do not gossip; the deceased could not stand gossip…”
He named Lilya Brik (and also Polonskaya), his mother, and his sisters as his family and requested that all his manuscripts and archives be given to the Briks.

A massive three-day public farewell was held at the House of Writers. Tens of thousands followed his iron coffin—designed by avant-garde sculptor Anton Lavinsky—to Donskoye Cemetery.

Mayakovsky was cremated at Moscow’s first crematorium near the Donskoy Monastery. His brain was removed for study by the Institute of the Brain. His ashes were later moved, through the joint efforts of Lilya Brik and his sister Lyudmila, and re-interred on May 22, 1952, at Novodevichy Cemetery (section 1).

 

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Commentaries

- Comment le poète Maïakovski a écrit un scénario pour un film français 2025, Fenêtre sur la Russie

- От Пушкина до Высоцкого: Великие русские поэты в исполнении наших звезд [De Pouchkine à Vysotski : Grands poètes russes interprétés par nos stars] Инесе ПОНЕЛИС, 2024, kinoreporter.ru

- Знаменитые поэты, которые засветились в кино [Poètes célèbres étant intervenus dans des films] 2021, nashe.ru

- Писатели и поэты в кино [Ecrivains et poètes dans le cinéma] 2021, Библиотека им. С. Есенина

- De poète à acteur: la carrière méconnue de Maïakovski star de cinéma Ioulia CHAMPOROVA, 2018, RUSSIA BEYOND

- Les origines du cinéma soviétique : un regard neuf , Myriam TSIKOUNAS, 1992, Cerf

- Маяковский и кино , Viktor SHKLOVSKY, 1985, Chapaev.media / Искусство, 1985.

- Хулиган по имени Лапа [Un hooligan nommé Lapa] Манана АНДРОНИКОВА, 1974, Chapaev.media

 

 

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