ABSTRACT
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), Soviet poet, playwright, propagandist, screen-writer, born in Georgia, joined the Bolshevik Party at 14, leaving school to engage in political activities, for which he spent a month in prison. He went on to art studies, and in the 1910s became a leading futurist poet. Mysfery-Bouffe, his second play, was written for the anniversary celebrations of the revolution in 1918. He and his friend Kamensky had grandiose dreams of staging it in a gigantic arena before thousands of spectators, but this was not to be. It went on in the Music Drama Theatre in Petrograd, and, although directed by Meyerhold, was largely shunned by professional actors and had only a short run. It was not put on in Moscow till four years later (when the ‘second version’ was prepared). He finally succeeded in getting it published, but only in a theatre magazine, and was not paid for it until he applied pressure through the Moscow TUC legal department. All this suggests some wariness towards his work-akin to the wariness expressed by Trotsky towards futurism in his Literature and Revolution. Subsquently, the sharp satire on bureaucrats in his play The Bathhouse (1929) aroused the ire of the authorities, and gave his critics their opportunity; increasingly isolated in the darkening atmosphere of that time, Mayakovsky shot himself.
