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Russian Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky 1893 - 1930

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (Влади́мир Влади́мирович Маяко́вский) (July 19 1893 – April 14, 1930) was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.

Born July 19, 1893(1893-07-19)
Baghdati, Russian Empire
Died April 14, 1930(1930-04-14) (aged 36)
Moscow, USSR
Nationality Russian
Citizenship Russian Empire, Soviet
Alma mater Stroganov Moscow State University of Arts and Industry, Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture
Period 1912—1930
Literary movement Russian Futurism, Cubo-Futurism

He was born the last of three children in Baghdati, Russian Empire (now in Georgia) where his father worked as a forest ranger. His father was of Ukrainian Cossack descent and his mother was of Ukrainian descent. Although Mayakovsky spoke Georgian at school and with friends, his family spoke primarily Russian at home. At the age of 14 Mayakovsky took part in socialist demonstrations at the town of Kutaisi, where he attended the local grammar school. After the sudden and premature death of his father in 1906, the family — Mayakovsky, his mother, and his two sisters — moved to Moscow, where he attended School No. 5.

In Moscow, Mayakovsky developed a passion for Marxist literature and took part in numerous activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party; he was to later become an RSDLP (Bolshevik) member. In 1908, he was dismissed from the grammar school because his mother was no longer able to afford the tuition fees.

Around this time, Mayakovsky was imprisoned on three occasions for subversive political activities but, being underage, he avoided transportation. During a period of solitary confinement in Butyrka prison in 1909, he began to write poetry, but his poems were confiscated. On his release from prison, he continued working within the socialist movement, and in 1911 he joined the Moscow Art School where he became acquainted with members of the Russian Futurist movement. He became a leading spokesman for the group Gileas (Гилея), and a close friend of David Burlyuk, whom he saw as his mentor.

Literary life

The 1912 Futurist publication A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Пощёчина общественному вкусу) contained Mayakovsky's first published poems: Night (Ночь) and Morning (Утро). Because of their political activities, Burlyuk and Mayakovsky were expelled from the Moscow Art School in 1914.

Image from Mayakovsky's Как делать стихи ("How to Make Poems").

His work continued in the Futurist vein until 1914. His artistic development then shifted increasingly in the direction of narrative and it was this work, published during the period immediately preceding the Russian Revolution, which was to establish his reputation as a poet in Russia and abroad.

A Cloud in Trousers (1915) was Mayakovsky's first major poem of appreciable length and it depicted the heated 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 romanticised notions of poetry and poets.

Mayakovsky's home in Moscow
Your thoughts,

dreaming on a softened brain,
like an over-fed lackey on a greasy settee,
with my heart's bloody tatters I'll mock again;
impudent and caustic, I'll jeer to superfluity.

Of Grandfatherly gentleness I'm devoid,
there's not a single grey hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
I go by – handsome,
twenty-two-year-old.

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.

(From the prologue of A Cloud in Trousers.)

In the summer of 1915, Mayakovsky fell in love with a married woman, Lilya Brik, and it is to her that the poem "The Backbone Flute" (1916) was dedicated; she was the wife of his publisher, Osip Brik. The love affair, as well as his impressions of war and revolution, strongly influenced his works of these years. The poem "War and the World" (1916) addressed the horrors of World War I and "Man" (1917) is a poem dealing with the anguish of love.

Mayakovsky was rejected as a volunteer at the beginning of World War I, and during 1915-1917 worked at the Petrograd Military Automobile School as a draftsman. At the onset of the Russian Revolution, Mayakovsky was in Smolny, Petrograd. There he witnessed the October Revolution. He started reciting poems such as "Left March! For the Red Marines: 1918" (Левый марш (Матросам), 1918) at naval theatres, with sailors as an audience.

Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lilya Brik.

His satirical play Mystery-Bouffe was staged in 1918, and again, more successfully, in 1921.

Agitprop poster by Mayakovsky

After moving back to Moscow, Mayakovsky worked for the Russian State Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) creating — both graphic and text — satirical Agitprop posters. In 1919, he published his first collection of poems Collected Works 1909-1919 (Все сочиненное Владимиром Маяковским). In the cultural climate of the early Soviet Union, his popularity grew rapidly. From 1922 to 1928, Mayakovsky was a prominent member of the Left Art Front and went on to define his work as 'Communist futurism' (комфут). He edited, along with Sergei Tretyakov and Osip Brik, the journal LEF.

As one of the few Soviet writers who were allowed to travel freely, his voyages to Latvia, Britain, Germany, the United States, Mexico and Cuba influenced works like My Discovery of America (Мое открытие Америки, 1925). He also travelled extensively throughout the Soviet Union.

On a lecture tour in the United States, Mayakovsky met Elli Jones, who later gave birth to his daughter, an event which Mayakovsky only came to know in 1929, when the couple met clandestinely in the south of France, as the relationship was kept secret. In the late 1920s, Mayakovsky fell in love with Tatiana Yakovleva and to her he dedicated the poem "A Letter to Tatiana Yakovleva" (Письмо Татьяне Яковлевой, 1928).

The relevance of Mayakovsky's influence cannot be limited to Soviet poetry. While for years he was considered the Soviet poet par excellence, he also changed the perceptions of poetry in wider 20th century culture. His political activism as a propagandistic agitator was rarely understood and often looked upon unfavourably by contemporaries, even close friends like Boris Pasternak. Near the end of the 1920s, Mayakovsky became increasingly disillusioned with the course the Soviet Union was taking under Joseph Stalin: his satirical plays The Bedbug (Клоп, 1929) and The Bathhouse (Баня, 1930), which deal with the Soviet philistinism and bureaucracy, illustrate this development.

On the evening of April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself. 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 was interred at the Moscow Novodevichy Cemetery.

Legacy

In 1930, his birthplace of Bagdadi in Georgia was renamed Mayakovsky in his honour. After his death, Mayakovsky was attacked in the Soviet press as a "formalist" and a "fellow-traveller" (попутчик) (as opposed to officially recognised "proletarian poets", such as Demyan Bedny). When, in 1935, Lilya Brik wrote to Stalin to complain about the attacks, Stalin wrote a comment on Brik's letter:

"Comrade Yezhov, please take charge of Brik's letter. Mayakovsky is still the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime. Brik's complaints are, in my opinion, justified..."

These words became a cliché and officially canonized Mayakovsky but, as Boris Pasternak noted, they "dealt him the second death" in some circles.

In 1938 the Mayakovskaya Metro Station was opened to the public, demonstrating various innovations in architecture and design, among them the display of ceiling mosaics that resemble a "fish-eye" view from the underground to the Moscow sky.

Mayakovsky's grave at Novodevichy

Yevgeny Yevtushenko once said, "As a poet, I wanted to mix something from Mayakovsky and Yesenin." Mayakovsky was the most influential futurist in Lithuania and his poetry helped to form the Four Winds movement there. He was also an influence on the writer Valentin Kataev. Andrey Voznesensky called Mayakovsky a teacher and favorite poet and dedicated a poem to him entitled Маяковский в Париже (Mayakovsky in Paris). In 1967 the Taganka Theater staged the poetical performance Послушайте!, based on Mayakovsky's works. The role of the poet was played by Vladimir Vysotsky, who also was inspired by Mayakovsky's poetry.

In 1974 a Russian State Museum of Mayakovsky was opened in the center of Moscow in the building where Mayakovsky resided from 1919 to 1930. Vladimir Mayakovsky and his works were a major influence on the work of Italian actor, film director and screenwriter Carmelo Bene, who interpreted Mayakovsky on the stages of theatres in Italy and on TV from the early 1970s until his death in 2002. Frank O'Hara wrote a poem named after him, "Mayakovsky" in which the speaker is standing in a bathtub, a probable reference to his play "The Bathhouse". O'Hara also mentions Mayakovsky in his poem "A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island," which is modeled after Mayakovsky's "An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky in a Summer Cottage." In 1981 Brazilian singer Gal Costa recorded "O Amor" a Portuguese version of one of Mayakovsky's latter poems in her album Fantasia. In 1986 English singer and songwriter Billy Bragg recorded the album Talking with the Taxman about Poetry, named after a namesake Mayakovsky's poem. In 1991, City Lights published Listen! Early Poems, a collection translated by Maria Enzensberger. The well-known phrase "Lenin lives, lived and will live" comes from his elegy "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin".

In 2005 the north exit of the Mayakovskaya Metro Station was opened, referencing the architecture of the underground station with ample sculpturing of marble, stainless steel and another group of ceiling mosaic works, accompanied by the artist's poems. In 2009, Italian alternative rock band, Il Teatro Degli Orrori, released a song entitled "Majakowskij". The lyrics of the song are the Italian translation of his 1916 poem To His Beloved Self, the Author Dedicates these Lines (Себе любимому посвещает эти строки автор). In 2010, in collaboration with Found Reality Theatre, students at the University of Glamorgan staged a physical theatre piece entitled The Mayakovsky Project in the Atrium, Cardiff. Using Mayakovsky's life as template, the performance posed the question, "Why do they kill the artists?"

In 2007 Craig Volk's stage bio-drama "Mayakovsky Takes The Stage" (based on his screenplay "At The Top Of My Voice") won the PEN-USA award for Best Stage Drama

US Poet Alice Moore Dunbar Nelson 1875 - 1935

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson (July 19, 1875 - September 18, 1935) was an American poet, journalist and political activist. Among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War, she was one of the prominent African Americans involved in the artistic flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance. Her first husband was the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar; she then married physician Henry A. Callis; and last married Robert J. Nelson, a poet and civil rights activist.

Born Alice Ruth Moore
July 19, 1875(1875-07-19)
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Died September 18, 1935(1935-09-18) (aged 60)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Nationality American
Alma mater Straight University (now Dillard University)
Occupation poet, journalist, political activist
Spouse

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1898-1906)

Henry A. Callis (1910-191_)
Robert J. Nelson (1916-1935)


Alice Ruth Moore was born in New Orleans to middle-class parents Patricia Wright, a seamstress and former slave, and Joseph Moore, a merchant marine, who were people of color and part of the traditional multiracial Creole community of the city. At a time when fewer than 99% of any people went to college, Moore graduated from Straight University (now Dillard University) in 1892 and started work as a teacher in the public school system of New Orleans.

In 1895 her first collection of short stories and poems, Violets and Other Tales, was published by The Monthly Review. About that time, Moore moved to New York. She co-founded and taught at the White Rose Mission (White Rose Home for Girls) in Brooklyn. Beginning a correspondence with the poet and publisher Paul Dunbar, she ended up moving to Washington, DC to join him when they married in 1898.

She and Paul Dunbar separated in 1902 but were never divorced. He was reported to have been disturbed by her lesbian affairs. Paul Dunbar died in 1906.

Alice Dunbar then moved to Wilmington, Delaware and taught at Howard High School for more than a decade. In 1910 she married Henry A. Callis, a prominent physician and professor at Howard University, but this marriage ended in divorce.

From 1913 to 1914, Dunbar was coeditor and writer for the A.M.E. Review, an influential church publication produced by the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME Church). In 1916 she married the poet and civil rights activist Robert J. Nelson. She joined him in becoming active in politics in Wilmington and the region. They stayed together for the rest of their lives. From 1920, she coedited the Wilmington Advocate, a progressive black newspaper. She also published The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, a literary anthology for a black audience.

Alice Dunbar Nelson was an activist for African Americans' and women's rights, especially during the 1920s and 1930s. While she continued to write stories and poetry, she became more politically active in Wilmington, and put more effort into numerous articles and journalism on leading topics. In 1915 she was field organizer for the Middle Atlantic states for the woman's suffrage movement. In 1918 she was field representative for the Woman's Committee of the Council of Defense. In 1924 Dunbar-Nelson campaigned for the passage of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, but the Southern Democratic block in Congress defeated it.

From about 1920 on, she made a commitment to journalism and was a highly successful columnist, with articles, essays and reviews appearing as well in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. She was a popular speaker and had an active schedule of lectures through these years. Her journalism career originally began with a rocky start. During the late nineteenth century, it was still unusual for women to work outside of the home, let alone an African American woman, and the journalism business was a hostile, male-dominated field. In her diary, she spoke about the tribulations associated with the professional of journalism – "Damn bad luck I have with my pen. Some fate has decreed I shall never make money by it" (Diary 366). She discusses being denied pay for her articles and issues she had with receiving proper recognition for her work.

She moved from Delaware to Philadelphia in 1932, when her husband joined the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission. During this time her health was in decline and she died from a heart ailment on September 18, 1935, at the age of sixty. She is interred at the Wilmington and Brandywine Cemetery in Wilmington, Delaware.

She was made an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. Her papers were collected by the University of Delaware.

Her diary was published in 1984 and detailed her life during the years 1921 and 1926 to 1931 (“Alice Dunbar-Nelson”). As one of only two journals of nineteenth century African American women, Dunbar-Nelson's diary provided useful insight into the lives of black women during this time. It "summarizes her position in an era during which law and custom limited access, expectations, and opportunities for black women" (“Alice Dunbar-Nelson”). Her diary addressed issues such as family, friendship, sexuality, health, professional problems, travels, and often financial difficulties.

Works
  • Violets and Other Tales, Boston: Monthly Review , 1895. Short stories and poems, including "Titée", "A Carnival Jangle", and "Little Miss Sophie". Digital Schomburg.
  • The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, 1899, including "Titée" (revised), "Little Miss Sophie", and "A Carnival Jangle".
  • "Wordsworth's Use of Milton's Description of Pandemonium", 1909. in Modern Language Notes.
  • Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence, 1914.
  • "People of Color in Louisiana", 1917, Journal of Negro History
  • Mine Eyes Have Seen, 1918, one-act play, in The Crisis
  • Poems were published in Crisis, Ebony and Topaz, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
  • Poems were published in Opportunity, the journal of the Urban League.
  • Caroling Dusk - a collection of African-American poets, 1927, including "I Sit and I Sew"
  • "Snow in October", and "Sonnet", 1927
  • "The Colored United States", 1924, The Messenger, literary and political magazine in NY
  • "From a Woman's Point of View" ("Une Femme Dit"), 1926, column for the Pittsburgh Courier.
  • "As in a Looking Glass", 1926–1930, column for the Washington Eagle newspaper
  • "So It Seems to Alice Dunbar-Nelson", 1930, column for the Pittsburgh Courier
  • Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. ed. Gloria T. Hull, New York: Norton, 1984.
  • "About Alice Dunbar-Nelson", Department of English, College of LAS, University of Illinois, 1988.

In the Country - William Henry Davies


This life is sweetest; in this wood
I hear no children cry for food;
I see no woman, white with care;
No man, with muscled wasting here.

No doubt it is a selfish thing
To fly from human suffering;
No doubt he is a selfish man,
Who shuns poor creatures, sad and wan.

But 'tis a wretched life to face
Hunger in almost every place;
Cursed with a hand that's empty, when
The heart is full to help all men.

Can I admire the statue great,
When living men starve at its feet!
Can I admire the park's green tree,
A roof for homeless misery!


William Henry Davies