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The Suicide of Vladimir Mayakovsky

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The Suicide of Vladimir Mayakovsky Fatal Futurist: The Suicide of Vladimir Mayakovsky Arguably one of the most talented and controversial poets in Russia’s history, Vladimir Mayakovsky gave birth to a literary style all his own, rising to prominence under the newly formed Soviet regime. Rushing to meet the revolution with zealous determination he found himself increasingly marginalized in the Soviet literary scene as a “fellow traveler”, only to be posthumously declared “the best and the most talented poet” of the Soviet epoch by none other than Stalin. Mayakovsky’s suicide has fascinated scholars for decades and the reasons for it are still debated today; initially some people speculated he had been playing Russian roulette, others suspected foul play. In this paper I investigate the possible motives behind Mayakovsky’s suicide, arguing that it was the failure of the revolution that drove him to kill himself. This investigation requires a brief analysis of his literary evolution to understand how Vladimir Mayakovsky rose to the heights of Soviet literary culture by breaking from ‘bourgeois’ tradition. For perspective, special attention will be paid to the societal and anthropological conventions of suicide. In the final part of this paper I will discuss how Mayakovsky’s legacy was appropriated by the Stalinist regime in order to create a symbol of Soviet cultural pride, resulting in a denial and misinterpretation of his works- Mayakovsky’s second death. Early Life Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born on July 7, 1893 in Baghdadi, Georgia (later renamed Mayakovsky in his honor). His father, Vladimir Konstantinovich was in the government service. Mayakovsky remained close to his mother, Aleksandra Alekseevna, throughout his life, in no doubt due to his father’s premature death from blood poisoning in 1906. In addition to the young Volodya, there were two older sisters, Olga and Lyudmila. Volodya matured quickly, both physically and mentally, and his 1 imposing frame and domineering appearance defined his appearance through childhood and adult life. At age six he taught himself to read, though in his early years his writing and math skills were not very good. A disinterested and unmotivated student in secondary school his grades were consistently poor. In the ferment of the Russo-Japanese War (having begun in January 1904) and the Revolution of 1905, Mayakovsky’s sister, Lyudmila, a student in Moscow, brought back political books and pamphlets. Exposed to revolutionary tracts at a young age, Volodya, now in the third grade, developed a love for mass meetings, demonstrations, and agitation amongst the workers. The family was plunged into poverty following the death of Mayakovsky’s father in 1906. With a lack of opportunities in the countryside, the family moved to Moscow in search of greater wealth. Mayakovsky’s childhood experience in Georgia seems to have left little indentation on his person. Though he spoke Georgian fluently, he never seems to have been concerned with Georgian poetry. The natural beauty of the Georgian countryside did not resonant with young Volodya; it would remain for the urban cityscape to capture Mayakovsky’s imagination. To make some extra money his mother took in tenants. Many of these tenants were radical students- socialists who introduced the overgrown Mayakovsky to Marxism. His personal exposure to radical politics took an active interest in secondary school. During this tumultuous period, it wasn’t unusual for maturing students to join clandestine political groups in touch with the revolutionary underground. A revolutionary before he became a poet, in 1908 Mayakovsky joined the Russian Social-Democratic party and before long he was elected to its Moscow committee. Victor Terras notes the young 2 Volodya’s rapid advancement in the party structure, for “local party membership in 1908 numbered in the dozens, and not in the hundreds or thousands.”1 On March 29, 1908 Mayakovsky was arrested for the first of his eventual three times. The police had arrived at a party cell of the Social Democratic party to seize an illegal printing press when Mayakovsky walked into the occurring arrest, carrying a stack of revolutionary tracts. His second arrest was on January 21, 1909 for suspected involvement with several members of the Socialist Revolutionary party. These individuals had been captured and found guilty for committing bank robberies throughout Moscow in order to fill the party’s coffers. Having had no part in these “expropriations” had with his innocence secured, Mayakovsky was released on February 27th. His third arrest held graver consequences. On July 1, 1909 Mayakovsky arrived at the apartment of the wife of I. I. Morchadze, a Georgian revolutionary. The day prior Morchadze had masterminded a jailbreak of political prisoners from the Moscow Prison for Women. Though he denied have any connection with the jailbreak or Morchadze’s trail of bank robberies, the young Mayakovsky was thrown in jail. He did not go willingly. His warden’s report, dated August 1909, reads: “Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky…incites other prisoners to disobedience…purporting to be the prisoners’ ‘spokesman’…”2 It seems that after his initial transfer the rowdy behavior did not cease, for Mayakovsky was transferred at least three times in his six months of incarceration before ending up in solitary confinement. Mayakovsky’s tour in prison marked a turning point in his early life. According to his own testimony, it was here that he wrote his first poetry. Doubting his ability to write 1 Victor Terras, Vladimir Mayakovsky (Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall & Company), 2. 2 Terras, 3. 3 poetry, Mayakovsky harnessed his painting ability and joined the studio of Petr Kelin. Kelin would prepare Mayakovsky for the entrance exam to the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, where he would eventually pass the exam, after an initial failure, in 1911. With a preoccupation with painting still holding sway, Mayakovsky’s first exposure to modernism was through painting rather than prose. It was David Burlyuk, Mayakovsky’s first fan and longtime friend, who was to introduce Mayakovsky to modernist poetry. A gifted organizer and shrewd judge of talent, Burlyuk was principal amongst the originators of the Russian Futurist movement. Mayakovsky later joined the Bolshevik party as a propagandist under the codename Comrade Constantin. After several arrests Mayakovsky was expelled from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture in 1914. Russian Futurism & Early Works Although the two groups shared the same title, the Russian Futurists were politically at odds with the authoritarian, militarist views of the spokesman of the Italian movement Filippo Marinetti. The Russian Futurists outlined their views in a literary manifesto published in 1912, in which they expressed their intention to free art from the suffocating conventions and taboos of society, attempting to discard all the culture of the past and replacing it with their own revolutionary art form. “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” advocated for “throwing Pushkin, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy overboard from the steamship of modernity.”3 Such nonconformity extended beyond the artistic realm into everyday life. The Futurists were known for their startling dress and use of masks, and Mayakovsky is fondly remembered as draped in a bright-yellow, garish shirt. 3 Janko Lavrin, From Pushkin to Mayakovsky: A Study in the Evolution of a Literature (London: Sylvan Press Ltd.) 282. 4 The Futurists saw themselves as the cultural counterpart to the political revolution. Futurism took art, literally, onto the street. The Futurists were unique amongst the avant-garde for their radical nihilism in relation to the cultural achievements of their forbearers repudiating all traditions, all authorities, and all established standards prevalent in society and culture. It was the ferocity with which Mayakovsky cast off the old world in favor of the new, a world in which he intended to as chief architect, that drew him into natural inclusion with the Russian Futurists. In “Man” (1916) Mayakovsky’s “rival and foe” is not the entrenched autocracy or world capitalism but philistinism. Mayakovsky summarized the creative destruction ideal that distinguished the Futurists from other avant-garde movements of the period when he said, “To destroy is to create, for in destroying we overcome our past.”4 Victor Erlich captures the total war of cultural iconoclasm as an precondition for unleashing the artists’ potential: “What is challenged here is not a definite social order but the very principle of order or stasis, everything that smacks of tradition, of habit, of routine, everything that sets limits to the Creator’s disheveled, colossal sensibility.”5 The Futurists, in the historic mission of the intelligentsia to serve the people, seemed unconcerned or unaware that their geometric cubist art, irregular syntax, and crafting of a new lexicology could possibly be incomprehensible to the largely semi-literate public. A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which contained the literary manifesto of the same name, was also notable for containing Mayakovsky’s first published poems— “Night” and “Morning”. In terms of form, his poetry was an unseen aberration in Russian 4 Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press) 124. 5 Victor Erlich, “The Dead Hand of the Future: The Predicament of Vladimir Mayakovsky “Slavic Review 21 (1962): 434. 5 literature. Vyacheslav Zavalishin describes the originality of Mayakovsky’s rhythmics through his use of the metrical pause. These rhythms, with the borrowed vocabulary and imagery from church ritual, come close to those of Orthodox religious chants.6 A popular convention of his, Mayakovsky’s staggered verse patterns gives his pieces a sense of speed: We were attacking With shells and mortars, The last White troops Were piling aboard. Written during his most “Futurist” phase, Mayakovsky’s first poem of considerable size, “A Cloud in Trousers” (1915) combines his frustrated feelings of love with the anarchist sentiments of his revolutionary side channeling his anger at the world- order.
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